I’ve been on a little trip to Copenhagen. Usually when I go to Denmark, it’s for Reboot but alas, there is no Reboot this year. Instead, I was there for Drupalcon.
I have to admit, it was quite a surprise to be asked to speak at a Drupal event. After all, I don’t use the Drupal framework. To be fair, I don’t use any framework—though I did dabble with Django once. Clearleft is a backend-agnostic company: we do UX, IA, front-end, but we’ve deliberately avoided committing to one particular server-side solution.
Anyway, I was kinda nervous about addressing a large group of programmers devoted to a PHP framework that I’m not that familiar with. I needn’t have worried. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and I got a very warm reception.
I had been asked along to speak about HTML5 but rather than just run through a whole bunch of features in the spec, I thought it would be more interesting to talk about why features have been added to HTML5. So I concentrated on the design principles driving the development of the specification.
I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. The whole thing was streamed live and it’s all been recorded and posted online.
The Drupal community is clearly very vibrant: the 1000+ people gathered in Copenhagen were very enthusiastic about their chosen platform. That said, I did sense some frustration from the theming community—it isn’t always the easiest to change the markup and CSS that’s output by Drupal. This is something that Dries acknowledged in his keynote and people like Jen Simmons are fighting the good fight to improve Drupal’s front-end output.
The Drupal community also know how to party. This was the first conference I’ve been to that had its own beer; the rather excellent Awesomesauce from the world-renowned Mikkeller.
All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. And I had enough time before my flight back to Blighty to nip across to Malmö in Sweden, where Emil showed me the sights.
Then it was time to catch a ludicrously comfy train across a remarkable bridge, past a stunning wind farm to the snazilly-designed airport to catch my flight home.