Good work takes time!?! Finally, I finished my review of the DrupalCamp:

About three weeks ago I have been to the DrupalCamp in Cologne. This was my first Drupal-Community meeting (without taking into account all those local user group meetings) and I really enjoyed getting to know some Drupal people in real life. Apart from that I also took part in several interesting sessions, which I'm going to review here:

Saturday:

• 11:00 Automated Content Enrichment and Autonomous Cross Content Communication
  _ben from Zeit Online spoke about his vision of Drupal content (i.e. nodes) being able to learn from each other and from other content in the web. His idea is that every time a node is viewed it starts looking for similar content inside the same Drupal website but also tries to find related content on Wikipedia, Flickr, Last.fm and what have you. Some of this functionality could be accomplished by using Open Calais, which I already use in this blog. Open Calais is a webservice which you send your content to and get appropriate tags back. Unfortunately they don't support German content, yet.
  However, the idea of semantic blog networks and automated content enrichment both sound like really interesting ideas to me. This session was a really good and visionary start into what Drupal might be able to accomplish in the future.
  See ben's blog for a very detailed description of his vision.

• 12:00 Fields in Core
  Talking about future Drupal goodies (especially the more technical part of it) one has to mention the upcoming Version 7 of Drupal. Core Developers have started planning, coding and testing a Field API for Drupal 7. Using this API it will be possible to attach fields to every Drupal content you could imagine, including nodes of course (as you know it from CCK), but also users (thus reinventing the profile module) and comments etc. Attending this session was huge fun because you were able to experience some long-time Drupal developers and get to know about their most recent work.
  Edit: While I was writing this blog post this feature got commited to Drupal 7. Yeah!

• 14:00 Security and Drupal
  This session included a perfect overview of security related topics in Drupal. I learned quite a lot about Cross Site Scripting (XSS), SQL Injection and so on. As I have started coding custom Drupal modules some month ago, this was a really interesting and informative session. It made me even more aware of security than I was before.

• 15:00 Client side validation in Forms API
  Well, I know about Javascript, though I'm definitely no expert. Thus, I thought this session might give me some hands-on insight into existing functionality of Drupal, especially how to enhance usability by validating forms with javascript. Unfortunately this session appeared to be a brainstorming of what might be possible and I was somehow overwhelmed by almost 90 minutes of extremely advanced jscript discussion. Nice to see that there's still a lot to learn! Oh and by the way, there's a small result of this session available: a javascript snippet "Live warning for required fields".

• 16:00 Rules - new opportunities for site builders!
  Wolfgang Ziegler, a Drupal developer from Vienna, presented his new Rules module which is planed to be the successor of worflow-ng. Rules is a powerful and flexible way of reacting on almost every event triggered by user activity on your website. It is integrated with several other modules (such as CCK, Organic Groups, Content Profile etc.) and thus able to react on actions invoked by those modules. Using Rules you can display messages to the user, redirect users to another part of your site, schedule actions that should be called at a certain time (as "in 4 weeks" or on "24th December 2010"). And all this comes bundled with a very intuitive user interface, token support and a very well documented API. This is just great!
  Ressources: Video part 1, Video part 2, slides

• 17:00 Dries Buytaert talks Drupal
  The Drupal-messiah Dries Buytaert gave one of his typical sermons to the crowd. Business as usual! But everybody loves it and thus the entrance hall was stuffed with people. Communities live by their leaders and I think that Dries is a very passionate one who works hard for taking the Drupal Project forward step-by-step.

Sunday:

• 09:00 Integrating your own module with CCK and Views
  I missed almost half of this session but the code and slides are avaible at the speaker's blog (Mikkel Høgh, DK).

• 10:00 How ApacheSolr search can change the way you build websites
  People don't always know what exactly they're searching for. That's why most commercial websites offer you to filter your search results by suggested categories (for example eBay search or Amazon search). With ApacheSolr you can use such this "faceted search" technology on your Drupal website. ApacheSolr is an open source search server that has to be installed on a Webserver that supports Java (such as Tomcat). The corresponding Drupal module is still in beta, but already used on some very huge websites (one of them has 250K+ nodes and over 4,000 taxonomy terms). Finally, Robert Douglass, the speaker of this session announced that Acquia will be offering a Hosted Solr site search.

• 11:00 ZEIT ONLINE and Drupal (ZEIT ONLINE und Drupal)
  Die Zeit is one of the leading German daily newspapers and they use Drupal for the community-related part of their webseite, i.e. http://kommentare.zeit.de. This session revealed some interesting facts and figures about how they actually use Drupal and what strength and weaknesses Drupal has from their point of view. To summarize: this was a very informative and motivating session. Good to see that large media companies have trust in Drupal.

• 12:00 JavaScript-Development in Drupal (JavaScript-Entwicklung in Drupal)
  This session was a quick and comprehensive guide for first steps with javascript in Drupal. Konstantin Käfer, a Drupal developer and webkrauts member, spoke about the way .js files are added into Drupal, jQuery, the use of AJAX-Callbacks and JSON, typical Drupal functions (such as t() or format_plural()) in javascript, theming via javascript and a little bit about using Firebug to debug javascript code. From my point of view this session should have had a more prominent focus on debugging and some more advanced capabilities of jQuery in Drupal.
  Ressources: Slides

• 14:00 Intro to SimpleTest
  As far as I know Drupal is the only open source CMS that heavily relies on tests to ensure the stability and durability of it's code. With Simpletest you can write automated tests for your custom Drupal modules, other contributed modules, Drupal core modules or even your personal Drupal website. By writing tests and running them you ensure that updates don't kill functionality that has been there before.
  Ressources: Video Part 1, Video Part 2, Slides (?)

My final resumée of the DrupalCamp 2009 in Cologne is quite simple: That was a great fun and I'm really looking forward to future future DrupalCons and DrupalCamps. Hopefully this is going to make even more people aware of Drupal, especially inside and outside the German Drupal Community.