Drupalcon DC 2009

We are really excited about the next four days. Five Mile is in Washington DC for the first DrupalCon of 2009 which officially kicks off tomorrow. The schedule is finalised, packed full of sessions that will likely clash with one another so that Dom and I can flip quarters for which one we get to go to. Plus there is plenty of twittering about work that will get done on the Drupal redesign over the next four days, something we really want to get involved in.

When I attended the DrupalCon 2008 conference in Szeged last August, I was blown away with the pace of the event. Despite it's remote location around 600 Drupalers turned up from all over the world and the four days of the conference were literally jam packed with session after session of learning and presentation without much time to take a break. At the end of the conference Drupalers were invited to contribute their thoughts on the event and I was impressed by one attendee who stood and told us about the various Microsoft conferences he had attended where there was never anything like the feeling of co-operation and excitement for achieving common goals like there was around the conference and bettering the Drupal project.

For DrupalCon DC there is set to be around an amazing 1300 attendees and 3 days of back-to-back sessions - now that is jam packed! I wonder what the atmosphere will be like for so much of a bigger event. Inspiring? Probably so. There is the Drupal redesign project going on and Mark Boulton is in attendance. Add to that the amazing pace at which Drupal is getting chosen for use on all sorts of high profile websites, plus the various and regular awards and I suspect there will be an opportunity to really enjoy the hubbub of success surrounding the Drupal project.

But then...

But then there are two session titles that have really caught my eye, 'Limitations of the Drupal Theme Layer' by Young Hahn and 'Why I Hate Drupal' by James Walker. These sessions really have my attention. It is impressive to see that behind the ongoing success of the Drupal project there are contributors that have their feet firmly planted on the ground. Contributors that don't want to loose sight of the aim of chipping away at building a great piece of software. Contributors that continue to work really hard to remember the end users, whether developers or not.

This got me thinking - what is the exact mission of the Drupal project? From all the chatter and hard work going on in the community over podcasts, forums, Skype, IRC and conferences I have always come away with an underlying reassurance about how driven the developers are to build something great. And so routing out the mission page on Drupal.org site I can see that the original goals continue to be achieved:

To develop a leading edge open-source content management system that implements the latest thinking and best practices in community publishing, knowledge management, and software design.

We value:

• Flexibility, simplicity, and utility in our product;
• Teamwork, innovation, and openness in our community;
• Modularity, extensibility and maintainability in our code.

We are looking very forward to learning and getting more involved.