OpenSourcery

One of the greatest aspects of Drupal is the outstanding community of Drupal users and supporters that constantly work to not only make the software function better, but to make your overall experience using it better. With Drupal, that experience has many opportunities to extend beyond the electronic world and into the real world by way of DrupalCon and regional Drupal meetups. Prior to moving to Portland, Oregon, I had the privilege of coordinating the Denver Drupal meetups and have been able to visit other meetups. While all regional meetups have their own local flavor, they are all share a welcoming atmosphere... and the Portland meetup is no exception.

April's Portland Drupal meetup kicked off with Voodoo Doughnuts (courtesy of the Drupal Association), followed by reports from DrupalCon Denver. Some of the highlights that Portlanders mentioned include:

• Drupal 8 is being built upon Symfony! Symfony is an open source PHP framework that will replace some of Drupal's low level code with stable, optimized code and allow for better and faster Drupal development. One analogy presented at DrupalCon was: Symfony is to PHP as jQuery is to JavaScript.
• Drush 5 was released during DrupalCon. Did you know that you can now install, configure and run Drupal (including the web server) with just one command?
• The Education Unconference was a huge success, not only as a one day pre-conference event, but continuing discussions and BoFs throughout the entire week. The overwhelming positive feedback has prompted discussions about more education inclusion for next year's DrupalCon Portland.
• DrupalCon is coming to Portland! Just in case anyone hadn't already heard, we had to mention it again.

Following the highlights, Jacob, Neil and Stephanie talked about what DrupalCon Portland means to the local community, how Portlanders can get involved and a bit about the process of hosting DrupalCon. It's a lot of work (even with the incredible support provided by the Drupal Association), but the Portland community is excited to jump in and make DrupalCon Portland the best one yet. If you'd like to get involved, fill out the volunteer form.

With the air still buzzing with DrupalCon talk, we headed over to The Lucky Lab Beer Hall for food, drinks and continued discussions. For information about future Portland area meetups, visit the Portland Drupal Groups page.