This year I was extremely fortunate to be given the opportunity of attending the 2011 European Drupal Con in London. The five day conference was held in and around Fairfield Halls in East Croydon and involved talks and discussions amongst the Drupal community about the future of Drupal, best practices and showing new innovations which could contribute to delivering better solutions.
The talks were aimed at all the different stakeholders of the Drupal community from developers and designers to sales people and directors – all aimed at improving the way we understand and use Drupal to get the best out of it.
One of the most useful talks was Why Drupal Projects Fail: Breaking Down Barriers to Successful Drupal Adoption, which broke down each role in the process of pitching, selling, planning, developing, managing and supporting Drupal projects and how each member of this process can better understand Drupal and their role providing the client with the best solution.
It was very reassuring to see that many of the issues brought up were ones that we’d already identified and are in the process of addressing and this just gave further us impetus in setting up procedures which ensure the client ends up with the product they want.
Because of the structure of the conference there are many talks going on at once which sadly means you're always going to miss a talk that could be interesting or important to how you build Drupal projects. Thankfully the vast majority were recorded meaning you can go back and check out anything you may have missed the first time round. Some talks I went to which I recommend are: This Code Stinks! which explains the most common coding mistakes in Drupal and how to avoid them, Building and Maintaining a Distribution in Drupal 7 with Features on how to create some packaged solutions to help speed up the early development process, Damn Quick Drupal: How to Make Drupal Perform and Scale Like a Rockstar! which tackles some of the speed issues with large Drupal sites and Adaptive, Responsive, Mobile First and Drupal Theming for the Future with HTML5, CSS3 and Omega - an excellent solution to responsive theming of Drupal sites.
There are many more excellent talks which I'd urge you to check out. Over the coming week's I'll be working my way back through the talks I missed, but if there are any I've missed out in this post please let me know and I'll check them out!
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