I didn't get to contribute much to Drupal 6 before it happened.  I was still learning how to use the toolset the Drupal community uses for these things, and after one successful attempt to contribute to core, I decided to focus my attention on contrib for a while.  It's been more than a year since that time (probably closer to two) and I'm much more comfortable and familiar with these tools, as well as having a much better idea of what it is that Drupal is "all about".

The Worx Company is a Silver Sponsor at Drupalcon DC!  We are excited to be sponsoring what looks to be a fantastic Drupalcon.  Of course, with the sponsorship, our attendance at Drupalcon has been confirmed - I will be attending, along with Kris, Kurt (President of our company), and maybe Sue (CEO).

What was it Dries said at Drupalcon? Top two "most difficult things" for both novice and expert Drupal users were 1. finding skilled Drupal designers and 2. finding skilled Drupal developers. We have noticed that as our company grows, we are running into similar issues. Especially #2 - finding skilled Drupal developers has been difficult - in the Oklahoma web industry, Drupal isn't a common platform. Most people have never even heard of Drupal, so we have put much of our efforts into "evangelizing" Drupal in the community.

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, 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.

After more than two years of using Drupal rather extensively internally, we've finally managed to create and commit back to the community our first full fledged module: the Imagefield Gallery module.  Development on the module is continuing today even though the first major release of it was over a month ago, such is the way with modules in many cases, there's always something new to add to the "to do" list.

Drupalcon:

Well Drupalcon was absolutely amazing. This being my first Drupalcon I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but getting together with "digital friends" is something I've done before so it wasn't entirely foreign. We learned about some amazing new technologies, not the least of which is RDF, but more on that later.

The Worx Company Presence: