Drupalcon Szeged Day 1 : sessions all over the place

Dries' Keynote
The famous starting keynote of DrupalCon!
After an official introduction by Gábor and Kristof (Thank you for noticing the 7% rule has been improved to 10%! see image) we came to know that Belgium attendees are represented with 3% of the whole conference! It's not much but I expect it to grow! After this it was time to get a short look on the Drupal development project and get information about where it is heading.

The keynote of Dries Buytaert was extremely interesting material that sometimes revealed the painful truth that a beginner experiences when he starts with Drupal. Almost all the things he showed that were not user friendly (like the difference between Page and Story, WYSIWIG not build into core, Menu issues, ...) I could recognize from my experience so far. I have a clearer idea now where he wants to go to with Drupal 7 so it's a good start for me.

A summary of the difference between 6 and 5 should give a better view on why people should start upgrading. More features, more usability, easier theming en developing should put Drupal 6 in a comforting position in the area of open source CMS's. Plus the fact that Drupal 7 will only be released when it's time to be released. And that's a good thing, don't release untested, unfinished material! Testing, testing, testing is of big importance and I support this fully!

If you want to read in detail what Dries had to say I recommend you read Dries his presentation

Introduction to coding
On the the next one! A gentle introduction to coding in drupal by Addison Berry. I liked the initiative but it was a bit too basic for me. Good for a refresh of what drupal actually is doing with hooks, nodes, functions and theming!

Rasmus' Keynote
Continuing in the sessions atmosphere we viewed the keynote of Rasmus lerdorf. He adressed heavy content about Drupal. Interesting history about PHP, and interesting inside views on the performance of frameworks (like Cake, Prado, Zend, CodeIgniter and ofcourse Drupal). Drupal didn't come out as the best but it's internal structure is good organised compared to others. Also, Drupal is not profiled as a framework solution so comparing was difficult. The thing I remembered the most is that PHP isn't used currently as it was meant to be used.

Programming everything in a interpreted language is performance wise not so clever. Drupal could be much much faster if some of the back-end code was programmed in C++ or comparable libraries. Thinking about the environment, it should help kill less kittens!

Introduction into testing
To close the sessions in the afternoon I did some introduction into testing and also a summary about the usability studies that have been done by reputated universities. Check drupalcon website for slides soon!

Welcome drink
And to close the day there was a fantastic welcome drink organised where I met alot of people that know Drupal inside out, hobbyist and professionals.

On to Day 2 then! Testing party, first hands on with tests and probably I will help writing some tests and earn those chocolates!