This being a ‘recap’ I probably don’t have to mention that the 3rd day of Drupalcon 2008 just ended (No, your timezone doesn’t count) and the poor people who were too lazy to come along are lustfully lurking on my blog trying to get a glimpse of the recent happenings. Don’t worry, I’m totally fine with that.

Drupal, databases and semantics

Today’s lectures, sessions and BoF’s were actually quite focused on technicalities, for example creating and managing state-of-the-art ORM’s for PHP, kuddos to Larry Garfield and David Strauss for that one, followed by in-depth (some more, some less) discussions about the Drupal Core and most of its main components.

Still, one of the primary underground subjects was still RDF and its integration and implementation into Drupal and other systems, most of the sessions were actually “preparing the field” for post-conference discussions of various aspects and problems concerning RDF(a) and in-depth semantics while creating and distributing content.

Strauss also tried to get a group of everyone who’s interested in RDF implementation together, but due to some misunderstandings concerning the conference room and the fact that he was in some kind of arbitrary hurry, it basically ended up being random rambling bouncing off ideas. Surprisingly, this was actually quite fun and inspiring — but come on David, you can do better than that. Personally, I’m expecting some hardcore RDF brainstorming next year. There might be a sudden twist on Sunday’s code sprint, but I’m sadly unable to attend it, more on that later.

Also, there was a 3-part jQuery run-down which was being dragged along during the course of day and I’m saying ‘dragged along’ because they didn’t really manage to tell anything innovative, new or constructive to anyone who has used jQuery for more than 4 hours, I would even go as far as mentioning that it was boring to the extent that I won’t bother checking who was actually running it. Oh, not to forget:

Ubercart

I have to admit that I wasn’t that much up-to-date with the moduling scene on drupal before the conference, so it was quite a surprise to see so many fans, users, clients, followers, etc. on the Ubercart session. For those still in the dark, Ubercart is an E-Commerce checkout system for Drupal with great functionality, quite impressive extensibility and a great development crew.

I spent most dinners on the past couple of evening with these people and the amount of energy and emotion they’re putting into the whole project is very impressing and inspiring.

Final remarks

With that being said and done, I’ll be leaving the wonderful city of Szeged in a couple of hours, I sadly won’t be able to attend a couple of interesting RDF lectures on saturday and the code-sprint on sunday due to transportation (and deadline-*cough*) issues, so I’m basically taking a spiritual leave from the whole conference and the atendees with this addendum. Everyone, it was fun, it was great and it was very informative.

Personally, I’m very much looking forward to the next-year’s Drupalcon which apparently is going to be hosted somewhere in the US.

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