Drupal hits Belfast!

Less than a month after DrupalCon Paris and I'm back from an awesome Drupal Camp in Belfast. It was a jammed pack couple of days with two presentation tracks, along with break out rooms, a documentation sprint and usability testing. Oh and a very successful Drupal Surgery too. Over 50 people attended and came from all over Ireland, as well as from Scotland and England.

We were honoured to once again have Addison Berry (add1sun) from Lullabot in attendance. She kicked off the event on Saturday with a keynote presentation and also ran a documentation sprint over the course of the two days.

The first day was geared more towards new Drupal users, with site showcases (Trócaire, Community NI), introductions to CCK and Views, WYSIWYG basics and theming for beginners. Sunday saw more advanced topics such as using Drush, migrating your website to Drupal and a great double session on creating Drupal theme from a PSD file.

While all the presentations were on, there was also a documentation sprint headed by Add1sun, and usability testing with Heather James. There was also a highly successful Drupal Surgery where people could go ask questions and get their Drupal problems solved. If a question wasn't easily answered, the guys in the surgery would go track down someone who could provide more insight, and ensure the person got their answer later in the day. It worked really well and I would highly recommend other camps to run something similar.

The top notch venue and hot lunches on both days were provided for free by NICVA (Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action). NICVA is a great organisation which is an umbrella group, seeking to represent the interests of voluntary and community organisations throughout Northern Ireland. So major thanks to NICVA for making this event possible.

Also a major thank you to Stephen Gray, Feargal O'Kane and the rest of the organisers for such a great event. They really raised the bar for all future Drupal Ireland events, with a dedicated website, hot food, decent wifi and a really great venue. I know how much effort goes into organising and running one of these things, and they did an outstanding job, so thank you!

More details on the even can be found out about the event on our new Drupal Camp Ireland website, and there is a podcast available at Code Mongrel (though I'm not sure I'd really classify myself as a core developer! :) ).

We'll have the next Drupal Camp Ireland in about 6 months time. The location has yet to be decided, so if you want to host one in your area, please let us know!