DrupalCON Day 3..I think

By admin
22 March, 2012
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Yesterday was another great day of learning – meeting interesting, smart people and taking notes on those things my brain could not retain.

Keynote – Mitchell Baker – I felt very privileged to listen to this keynote, for many reasons : a leader in technology, from Mozilla, who also happens to be a woman. A positive image after the previous day’s news of sexism in a Boston API Hackjam . I follow and participate where I can with many Mozilla projects, but I learned a bit more about Boot to Gecko , yet another project I wish I had time to contribute to – and can’t wait to play with. She also talked a bit about Browser ID (now Mozilla Persona) for single sign-on. We’ve been using this at Mozilla, (Reps planet etc) and I love it. I would also love to see it adopted in Drupal, and after a twitter call out from webchick to create a module – it looks like that will happen. Again, I would love to write that module but I’m saving what time I have left for whatever happens with Drupal Education (LMS) direction & Open Badges. Oh and Hacksaurus. Too many good things to work on!

Drupal Commerce: eCommerce Any Way You Need It

There were SO MANY good sessions in the next time slot. I chose to go to the ecommerce one (although now I have to find video/recordings of : The Drupal Contribution Ladder: A Gift and a Challenge to You from Boston and Drupal Distribution Case Studies: Leveraging Open Source Solutions . I heard a lot about those sessions as well.

Anyway, we haven’t done a lot with ecommerce & Open Source at the University but I did work with Ubercart back in 2006, and I know the Commerce Guys (who maintain Drupal Commerce) just had a huge amount of funding for this project (formerly Ubercart) and I was interested to learn more about it. Ryan Szrama was an inspiring speaker and it was an honour to hear him speak . Aside from the project itself, Ryan’s passion for his project, Drupal and the positive influence it has on the world around him was compelling. I also look forward to working with Drupal Commerce.

DrupalChix

Again – conflicted!! I really wanted to go to Drupal 8 Meets Symfony2 , but I figured meeting up with other DrupalChix was something I couldn’t do later on line (like I can with Symfony). The room was packed and women from all over – it took about 40 min for everyone to introduce themselves, 4 of us were from Vancouver/Vancouver Isle and as usual a LOT of universities were represented. Made some great connections.

Learning Management Systems

Another education B0F. An emerging trend from Education sessions & BoFs is the need for a Drupal LMS – and to say it mildy the current LMS , especially Moodle & Blackboard. Especially the crumbling communities that support them. Especially Moodle. I would love to see a Drupal solution to Moodle emerge from all of this and we’re all meeting again today (Thur) and as a result as a community online moving towards this goal. I’ll write more on that later but – I’m really excited about it.

Drupal in Higher Education

Right after LMS session a PACKED room of university reps, sharing similar issues . Some things I was interested to learn was that *most* were using Drupal 7 now, just like RRU – campus maps, responsive design are a priority. I feel we have some leadership to offer in these areas. I’m not a designer, and so it was with some pride that I realized the work around me in this area at the University is really something to be proud of.

Ok that was yesterday – at the keynote for Thursday and need to listen now.