walkah: 2007

It's mid-October which means it's nearly time for one of Toronto's best run tech conferences again: Seneca's Free Software and Open Source Symposium happens next week, October 25-26. I had the pleasure of being asked to speak last year, and even managed to get asked back this year. Naturally, I'll be talking about Drupal... twice:

Drupal Hands-on will be a workshop-style crash course in building sites with Drupal. I really dig doing these things, it's amazing how much you can do with Drupal in a few hours.

Drupal under the hood is my "formal" presentation. Essentially, I'm going to give a brief hour-long overview of Drupal's internal architecture and hopefully inspire some hackers in the audience to dive in.

Some might say that alone is reason enough to attend, but if you're not convinced check out the rest of the awesome speakers. I can't say it enough, I think this is a really well done event and there's still room so register now!.

I'm all checked in, got my tshirt - let the games begin. The 2007 OSCMS Summit is just about to kick off. I'm excited for what promises to be an action-packed couple of days here in Sunnyvale. More soon, I'm off to find coffee...

Every year about this time the Drupal community posts predictions for the year ahead. I started a list of things I think will happen, but quickly realized it was really just a personal battle plan. Here's what I plan to blow up (apologies in advance):

• Full OpenID 2.0 support in Drupal. I've been loosely working with Rowan Kerr on this over in Bryght's dev repository. I'd like, ultimately, to see this in core for Drupal 6 and plan to help make sure that Drupal an important tool in the "Identity 2.0" world.
• Increased work on Jabber integration for Drupal as well as helping to grow the ties between the Drupal and Jabber communities. Boris and I have been lending Peter a hand with the xmpp.net site, Boris is on the JSF - things have started. I'd like to help that grow this year.
• Get revamped file handling code in core. Darrell has done some great work with fileapi so far. But, aside from sharing ideas, etc. I've not been as involved on this push as I'd wanted. Let's aim for Drupal 6.
• Abstracted XML parsing / generation. I've mumbled about an 'xml.inc' for a while for core. Code is gold. Time to get this done.
• Help organize and grow the Toronto user group. We're already discussing DrupalCampToronto 2.0...

There's of course a million other issues, bug fixes, smaller features, speaking engagements, training sessions, etc i've got planned for 2007, but that's a pretty good list for now. All in a day's work for drupal-world-domination.com. Go team :)