Just finished at Drupal South in Melbourne. I did a presentation on integrating Drupal with other web platforms using Shibboleth SSO (slides are here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1H6qI2oyNthV_wjrttpVmHilRelRnFEobmcGfdxj69Rs/edit?usp=sharing).
The conference itself was an amazing event, really well organised, great venue, great food and world class presentations. Attendance was around 300 delegates (with a really good gender mix).
Drupal is ramping up for a major release (Drupal 8), and many things are changing - some of the most impressive features include:
- built-in config management in core, allowing you to easily migrate config updates between different environments
- I8N built-in (traditionally it's been a bit of a pig to set up)
- All themes are responsive
- New templating engine (Twig), designed to better separate business logic and presentation
- Views is now in core (and is used everywhere)
Really friendly community and lots of expertise in the Australia/New Zealand region - Drupal is being used extensively by the Australian Government resulting is a large growth of Drupal expertise in the Canberra region (including previousnext, acquia, technocrat and Komosion).
The code sprints on Saturday were done very well - making it accessible to newbies as well as the more experienced developer crowd - with a very well planned tutorial roadmap (and achievement system) and an awesome environment called Acquia Devtools that makes getting started with Drupal development easy.
Although I am not a PHP developer or Drupal module contributor - I left feeling that I could actually do it.
Special thanks to Christopher Skene, Donna Benjamin, Jessica Taylor and Ben Dechrai for allowing me to present and organising such a great conference!