develOOp another fine develOOpment

Middle of day TWO.

Drupal stuff first

My third encounter with http://drupal.org/user/9446 alias chx. After the 2 previous talks i was totally prepared for him. In case you never saw chx in action during a talk. He is clever, very clever, spends lot's of hours coding Drupal, but he tends to loose himself in technical details during his talks which makes them rather hard to follow for a non-core drupal developer. So this time i was prepared, i had read up on the new menu-system and was interested in hearing how it evolved and what would be it's roadmap. But alas, after exactly 14 minutes he lost me. I tried to pick up several times by investigating even more about the menu's on api.drupal.org etc.. but it was too hard for me. After a delicious mail in the Yahoo! garden i went back in to see Steven Wittens doing it's best asking for more beauty from us developers and spend some time on learning to create a great design. He did a very thorough presentation on all aspects of design including typography, colors, graphics, placing of elements, typesetting,.. For me as a absolute noob it was a good introduction into this special world of design and he really got me passionate enough to learn how to create a better design for my own website because the standard Garland theme is not a good representation of the 'emotion' that should be evoqued on my visitors ;) As a belgian guy (3 official languages) i was highly interested in the status of the i18n module. The demo showed some good stuff which will definitely make it into Drupal 6.0 and will make it a lot easier to alllow multi-langues sites. Just like on last drupalCon in Brussels it was arised that no other OS CMS is doing a good job in internationlisation, and Drupal will set the standard on how these things should be done in the future. Having decent i18n into core will make Drupal really stand out from the other OS (and even commercial) CMS'es. Dries also explained that i18n in Belgian really comes down to some legal issues. Some content on federal websites cannot be published unless the content is available in all 3 languages. The workflow can be really hard, and in my opinion Drupal should not re-invent the wheel as it comes to providing an UI to do online translations. Most translators use their specific software to help them translate large blobs of text, and Drupal should be able to integrate (through an API or through import/export) with those software tools (which aparantely use some standard XML format).

Personal stuff

At the end of the day we got a ride from i nice girl working together with Development Seed for some Non-profit websites, towards the Sheraton Hotel for a get-together with other conference visitors around the pool. Had some interesting talks with people from development seed, bright and other smaller companies about the power of Drupal. Afterwards went to grab lunch in downtown Sunnyvale. I ordered a giant hamburger and got detailed instructions from some local guys on how i should eat it :)