DrupalCon 2010

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Below are my notes from sessions I attended at DrupalCon this year. Video recordings of all the sessions are being made available at the Internet Archive.

Here are the most important take-home lessons for my clients:

  • Hosted services like Drupal Gardens and Buzzr will make it quicker and easier to get a small site up and running.
  • People with disabilities represent a larger part of the market (25%) than users of Internet Explorer 6 (10%), so the development focus should be on using standards-compliant code that is accessible.
  • CSS 3 allows fancy theming (fonts, shadows, rounded corners, transparency, gradients) without relying as much on images.
  • Drupal 7 will be dramatically more user-friendly, especially for site administrators.  Many of the improvements are already available for Drupal 6.  Other improvements will not be fully realized until modules are redesigned to take advantage of them.
  • Drupal 7 will offer a unified, consistent way to deal with images, videos, and other media.  Unfortunately this is not the case in Drupal 6.
  • RDF provides the potential for sites to gather ("mash-up") information on demand from one or more other sites.  How this potential will be used in practice remains to be seen.
  • Many presenters recommended the Context module.  I'll have to give it a spin!
  • Ubercart will continue to be supported for Drupal 7, but it will just be a port of the Drupal 6 modules, without taking advantage of D7's new features.  For that, we'll want to make the leap to the new Drupal Commerce project, which looks to be an improvement in every way!