Drupal Open Days Ireland 2014 - A Review
This year, in an effort to encourage as wide an audience as possible, the Drupal Association of Ireland rebranded Drupal Camp Dublin as Drupal Open Days Ireland. We wanted to give a sense that it was a multi-day event, an event for the whole of Ireland, and that, true to the open source philosophy, it was open to all. Judging by the number of people and energy present, we think this was a good move.
Some things I don't need to mention – good company, good conversations, good socialising; these are things that come natural to Drupal meet ups. Let's instead focus on the presentations.
Friday
First keynote presentation was by James Sweeney and Mihai Bilauca from Limerick City and County Council (LCCC), whom Annertech work with in a consultancy capacity giving advice about Drupal, server administration, and version control systems. James and Mihai discussed why LCCC decided to move to open source and why specifically they chose Drupal for their CMS, using the newly launched Limerick.ie as a reference site. Reasons: speed of development, ease of using the system, not being tied to proprietary licences, and more.
Following from that, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) presented a keynote on their uses of Drupal and how they are moving all sites within GMIT to Drupal (with the help of Annertech). Martin from GMIT went into a lot of detail about the highs and lows of adopting new technology and the benefits that open source can bring.
After the keynotes, it was the turn of Mike King, one of Ireland's foremost Agile project managers, whom Annertech are delighted to have on board. Mike discussed “The (web) Project Life Cycle” - in a nutshell: plan >> do >> review (wash, rinse, repeat). And then Sile Gullane from Fluid Edge gave some very interesting thoughts and slides on creating a video resource library using Drupal, with attendant tips on using Vimeo to only allow videos be posted on specified websites. Cue lots of “oooh, I didn't know that” from the audience.
Post-lunch, Gary Hammond from Iterate talked about setting up your own business. He let us know what it entailed, how scary it was, how brave you need to be, and, importantly, how well you must treat your employees. We then set up an “Open Q&A” for anyone to ask any question of our expert panel, with questions ranging from “how do I get started in Drupal?” to “what's the worst thing about working with Drupal?”. That particular session was very good for general audience participation. Lastly on Friday, Tim O'Driscoll from EIL gave a presentation detailing social media and Google Analytics tips and tricks, especially with regard to how they can integrate with Drupal.
Saturday
Saturday began a little later than expected. No one knows why!
First talk of the day was Annertech's Anthony Lindsay, discussing how to create the “Wow Factor” on a Drupal website. We were all suitably “wowed”. Hot on his heels, we listened to Jochan Illich from Freistilbox tell us what DevOps was not and what DevOps was – don't advertise for someone with “devops” was one lesson. And then we had Karen Reilly give a very lively talk about using user research so as “not to commit crimes against humanity”. And then some much needed coffee.
Coffee ingested, Gavin Hughes from Annertech demonstrated what happens when you use test-driven development, previewing some of the recent work we have been doing with Behat. Suffice to say, people were impressed. Not to be outdone, Luis Rodriguez gave an equally impressive preview of what to expect in multi-lingual setups in Drupal 8. And then some lunch, to get ready for ...
After lunch we had the pleasure of Tommy Lynge Jorgenson's expert knowledge of Apache Solr and Drupal Search API – complete with graphs and data and cool geeky stuff. We're privileged to have Tommy as part of the Annertech team. To complete the day, Bharat Sharma from Monsoon Consulting gave a very passionate delivery on “How to Sell Drupal”, and who is the competition.
So, was it a success? You bet. Did everyone learn something? I'd be surprised if they didn't. Where is the next event? Here.
