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.
First let me mention that by "we" I mean myself and my wife Ju young. Ju came with me this year and was really instrumental in finding a couple of useful new features in the pipeline I wouldn't have found without her. Primarily amongst them was the booking api. This is a SOC project that is nearly completed and will allow us to define content types and nodes, and then schedule the use of a particular node at a particular time. Imagine if you had say... 3 conference rooms and you needed to have a scheduling product that would allow people to schedule the use of that room at a particular time, booking api would allow you to do that. Or at least that's my understanding. I've not had the chance to install and play with it yet, but it looks very promising.
The second (and third) great features that I came across at Drupalcon were the modules Domain Access, and Spaces. Both of these modules are incredibly complex, but they sort of share a little bit of the same space. Domain Access' purpose is to create multiple Drupal sites from a single Drupal installation (and database). Again no time to play with this yet, but it could potentially be very useful. Spaces plays in the same sandbox, but comes at it from a bit of a different angle. The Spaces developers have focused on the product primarily as a way of making incredibly robust intranet applications that easily separate users and groups from each other. This is, as you might have guessed, based on he Organic Groups module. That increases its complexity a bit, but I intend on installing it shortly and having a go with it. It looked very powerful, and will hopefully enable me to do a few things in Drupal that I've had difficulty doing in the past.
With Drupalcon over, the wife and I took a few extra days to pursue other interests, primarily seeing more of Hungary, and so we booked ourselves into a hotel in Budapest. We had stayed in Budapest a couple days before the con so that we could get adjusted to the time change and get the most out of Drupalcon that we possibly could. On the other side however we wanted to get a real chance to look around the city, and see it.
There are wonderful baths in Budapest (where we ran into some other Drupalers) and many amazing things to see. If you're ever in Budapest for a few days, definitely make time to see Saint Stephen's Basilica. It was amazing. There were so many other things to see in Budapest I could write a small novel on it. All in all, I expected to enjoy the trip, but it far exceeded my expectations, and Drupalcon itself was very well executed and managed. Hats off to Gabor, and Kristof on what was really a job well done.
See you at the next Drupalcon.
