Well I've been back from Drupalcon Szeged for a few days now, although I'm still experiencing a bit of jet lag (asleep by 10pm awake by 7am) which actually isn't all that bad... might try to keep the schedule.  At any rate, Drupalcon was, as always, amazing.  Many new insights to great new features in the pipeline for Drupal, and existing features as well.  I'll touch on just a few that we found while we were there this time.

"You just close your eyes and hit enter." -- Dries Buytaert

There are some moments in history you know you'll look back on and remember.  Drupal 6 is a great product, but SOOO much effort is going into making Drupal 7 the best it can be that I was very stoked to be present at the first commit of our new branch maintainer, Angie "Webchick" Byron.  The patch happens to be the tests for our new database engine that's all based on php's PDO and it will give us a lot of extra flexibility with other flavors of sql and even database systems like Oracle.

The first day of Drupalcon Szeged is underway, and what a day it's been.  We've already heard from Dries Buytaert about the current State of Drupal, and the future of Drupal, and now I have the pleasure of listening to Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of the PHP programming language.  It's opportunities like these that really make Drupalcon (and Drupal in general) such an amazing experience that would simply be impossible with a closed source solution.

Well, it's that time again, when all the Drupal developers do their best to get together in one location and discuss the future of the platform and the web surrounding it.  This time we'll be gathering in semi-rural Hungary... the city of Szeged.  I've not had the pleasure of visiting ANY portion of Europe yet, so the wife and I will be taking some extra time both before the convention and afterwards to see the sites of Budapest and Vienna.  I'm very excited.

Well, not really, but we're getting closer!  Flash is a great technology, and like any great technology it has been abused and misused for quite some time.  That doesn't mean there isn't a good use case for flash.  There are several fantastic instances where flash really shines, but more often then not flash is over used in situations where plain text would have sufficed, not just for the end user's needs, but also for the customers needs.  In fact, more often than not, the customer is almost always better served by plain text than they are flash.

Well, it's official, The Worx Company is going to be at Drupalcon Hungary!  I personally am incredibly stoked to be going (if you can't tell by the exclamation point) and best of all, my wife is coming to expand her Drupal knowledge as well.  As a Drupal-centric shop, we deal with the software every single day, but Drupal is expansive, so any chance we have to learn more we always try to jump at.

Well, yesterday officially marked the first alpha release of imagefield_gallery 2.0.  This is a signficant upgrade in terms of administration UI, and I've got some new features in the pipe for this one as well.  Unfortunately I made the mistake of leaving out some css/js files for the first alpha release and I've been fighting with CVS a bit to try to fix the issue.  I'm hoping my most recent release will handle this problem.

A quick jaunt over the pacific and back, has given me some new perspective on what exactly  is going on in the rest of the world as far as web development is concerned.  Having just gotten back from Korea, I find I see it through a different colored lens this time.  This was my second trip to that wonderful country and the trip, overall, was MUCH more enjoyable than my first, but I noticed many things that I found quite startling.  In that regard it's amazing to see a country so thoroughly drinking the Microsoft Coolaid.  There is NO Firefox in that country, all the major website providers are creating activeX based products, and as such, the default assumption is that everyone is using Windows and everyone is using Internet Explorer... we (the Drupal community) have GOT to figure out how to change this (not just for Korea, but any major country in this same situation) and I think the first real step (from our end) has to be a Korean translation for Drupal.  I'm working on it with some Koreans, but I don't speak it natively, so it's slow work and I'm sure there are others better qualified than myself.

I've been spending quite a bit of time rethinking the layout of the imagefield gallery administration system and what I'd like to do for Drupal 6.  That's still a ways out but I've already started on the new administration interface and wanted to share some of my thoughts on its design and where it's going.

Oklahoma is a pretty small environment in which to run a Web Design & Development shop. Having been around in some form for the last 25 years gives us an edge in that department as we have lots of history, and track record to fall back upon, but that doesn't mean that some of our competitors don't do equally well. The difference, I think, is how we go about keeping our customers.