I spent this beautiful autumn weekend with fellow Web geeks at the 2011 Montreal Drupal Camp. Three days of talks about nodes, fields and other intimidating codewords. Although I consider myself a beginner, I still managed to follow to a certain degree a few intermediate level presentations and some of them I really enjoyed.
Since we were in Montreal, for obvious reasons, many presentations were dealing with current, or upcoming internationalization features of Drupal. I found especially interesting Gábor Hojtsy‘s presentation about the future of i18n in Drupal 8, a project on witch he’s working on with a bunch of other developers. I’m happy to see that the interface is going to be cleaned up, a lot of junk will go away and there will be a lot of effort put into making the Configuration translatable.
He also held another great presentation about Drupal security, where he basically went trough the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks for 2010 and talked about how to use Drupal to avoid these problems. If any of you want to learn more about Drupal security, according to Gábor, Greg Knaddison’s Cracking Drupal: A Drop in the Bucket is a must read.
I also attended Jake Strawn’s presentation about responsive design. He’s the guy who developed the popular Drupal theme, Omega. He’s main messages was that design should be done with mobile in mind first, and only once that is sorted out to think about larger screens. There were a few case studies presenting different approaches and techniques to achieve a responsive layout.
Overall it was a great conference and as always, attending the presentations was just as fun as the breaks, when I could meet really interesting people. I found the presentations of only 45 minutes to be too short, often there was not enough time for questions. Maybe next time the presenters should cut down on their slides and leave more time for Q&A.
It was my first time at a Drupal Camp and if I would compare it the Wordcamp we had back in July, I was surprised to see so few participants. I met with people who came down from Ottawa and they were really happy to be here, so I don’t know where were all the other Montreal Drupalists? For sure I’m looking forward to Drupal Camp Montreal 2012.