BADCamp 2009 was a complete success! Wow! Almost 300 people walked through the door, to find out what this Drupal thing is all about, to answer questions, to share knowledge, to contribute to the Drupal project, to build community, and to much some vegan donuts.

Thanks to all the speakers, volunteers, sponsors, and everyone that showed up!

Slides and presentation are available at: http://badcamp.net/badcamp-2009-wrapup

Here the slides from my Welcome to BADCamp kickoff:

Here is the code from module I used as the working example in my "Intro to Module Development" presentation at BADCamp today. This is just a quick example of how to modify a Drupal form. It adds buttons at the top of your node edit form. I also showed off my Input Format Manger module, available at: http://drupal.org/project/format_manager

top_buttons.info

top_buttons.module

Sometimes Drupal is the best thing since sliced bread, sometimes it is a pain in the keister. The most painful moments are when you are trying to do something that you are sure will be simple, but ends up taking hours of trial and error. My latest example was setting up a site with a Wysiwyg front-end with simple image uploading and manipulation. I have done this lots of times over the years, and wasn't expecting much trouble, but man.

I just gave a presentation at this month's Berkeley Drupal Users Group on Drupal and the plague that is Blog Spam (http://groups.drupal.org/node/26730). My slides are embedded below:

Registration is now open for BADCamp 2009 - http://badcamp.net/register

This is the third annual Bay Area Drupal Camp held at UC Berkeley. Each year has been a huge success, and a little bigger than the year before. We'll see how many people show up this time. The San Francisco Bay Area is an super-exciting place to be working on Drupal right now. When I started the Berkeley users group, it was the only regular Drupal group in the area. Now there are active groups in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley and Sacramento, and DrupalCon is coming to SF in 2010! The buzz is palpable.

One of the great things about Drupal is how quickly you can crank one out for a special purpose, like an upcoming event. However, you are then faced with the dilemma of what to do with that site after the event has passed. Often you want to keep the site up for historical reasons, but if it stays a Drupal site, you really should keep up with security updates, which means eventually you'll need to update to the next version of Drupal. Or you can save yourself the bother by converting your site into a static archive.

In a classic case of the cobblers’ kids having no shoes, until yesterday starbowconsulting.com was still running on Drupal 5. With the Drupal 7 code freeze just days away, I figured it was time. Some of my hesitation stemmed from bitter memories. My website has been around since the Drupal 4.6 days, and the upgrades to 4.7 and 5 were unpleasant. Turns out I should have done it months ago. Upgrading 5 to 6 has easily been the most straightforward upgrade yet. It has taken me a fair bit of time, but that is mostly playing with all the new capabilities and having fun retweaking my workflow.

Here is a stream-of-consciousness report of the process.

Just a short note to heap praise on ronan and the Backup and Migrate module. For those of you who have not already discovered this aptly popular module, it allows you to easily backup your Drupal database, from inside of your Drupal site itself. Now, you might be thinking “so what, I already use the phpMyAdmin export”, but IMHO there are two big advantages of B&M.

• Out of the box, B&M is configured to exclude the data from the caches, watchdog, and other huge but non-critical tables.

Drupal 5 Views Recipes is an odd book. It had been published almost two years after the last stable version of Views for Drupal 5 (aka Views 1) was released, and more than eight months after the first stable version of Views 2 was released for Drupal 6 (to much fanfare). And yet the book still feels rushed.