Drupal 7 Camp Wrap Up

Over the weekend I attended Drupal 7 Camp UK in Leeds. I wanted to post a brief wrap up of some of my experiences of the event, so here it is!

The event was scheduled at the same time as Drupal Camp Edinburgh so the UK Drupal community was split over 2 events. I personally would have preferred the events to be on different weekends, as I really wanted to attend both events! I missed out on many talks from Balazs Dianiska (snufkin) who currently works for Freestyle Systems.

Personal Highlights

Here are some of my personal highlights of the Drupal 7 Camp event in Leeds:

Presentations and workshops

Simon Poulston and I presented on Drupal's Render API. We wrote the presentation on the day so the slides are quite rough.

I led a workshop with help from James Panton and Simon Poulston on Git Basics.

I gave an impromptu talk about the Drupal TextMate Bundle, including hook and theme function completion and snippets, FAPI element and property snippets, menu item snippets, debugging snippets, automatically converting views template filename into preprocess function, and various other snippets/commands.

Morten did a live Skype announcement on the big screen for Drupal Design Camp Berlin which takes place on 25-26th of June. I really hope I can make it!

Community

I talked with various people about the Drupal TextMate Bundle, which makes TextMate into a powerful Drupal coder's IDE; bash_kit, which is a bundle of shell user configurations and tools specifically designed to make life on the command line easier for Drupal developers; oh-my-zsh, which is a user configuration for zsh - my new favourite shell; webflo's wonderful drush completion, which provides command line completion for drush commands and options; Alfred, which is a Mac OS X application for launching applications, doing web searches, and so on; the benefits of git vs others; and generally evangelising my favourite CMS.

As always with these events I met a lot of cool new people and got the chance to catch up with some old friends from the UK Drupal community. I took along my copy of Linux Mag and Drupal Watchdog for people who hadn't had chance to read them to do so.

We drank locally brewed real ale at the Brewery Tap on Saturday night. Thanks to Matt Fielding and Steve Cowie for picking such a fine venue.