DrupalCon Paris has begun in earnest, with Dries' state of Drupal talk this morning followed by a lot about Drupal 7. As I've not been closely involved in D7 it's been a real eye-opener. From our clients' perspectives, the most important parts---D7UX and IA changes---are still not settled, but as a developer I'm excited by so much of what's been updated or improved (or, in some cases, removed entirely). Also interesting was Dries' emphasis on "production-ready" being some time after D7's release: it's a very pragmatic viewpoint, to accept that the release of a new full version core is not what makes Drupal truly ready for big websites.
Much of the changes do actually impact on clients: they help to bring in things like content delivery networks (e.g. Amazon S3) more easily, and improve permissions systems to the point where there's less custom work required to get things to do what you want to do. In short, now that webchick's talk has convinced me that D7's going to be pretty exciting, it's time for us at Torchbox to convince our clients. Or at any rate get ourselves more familiar with D7, to try to ensure smoother transitions of our development teams to the new ways of working.
I've been trying to keep up the live blogging of the event, although webchick's lightning-fast delivery nearly killed me. Props to Baris Wanschers for also live-blogging and hopefully filling in the gaps I've left.
Last night we all went to the Rue de Cannettes for various food and drink: crêpes and cider, beer, wine. There's photos on the Flickr DrupalCon pool among other places. Tonight is the Drupal UK meetup at the Le Financier pub (and then moving elsewhere, if I have anything to do with it.)
I'm also hoping to help out with the Saturday code sprint. Tuesday's sprint faltered a bit at the start (although it was fun when we had some raw issue numbers to work on and it all started moving) so I hope to help out in making Saturday's a bit smoother. The starting point could be Dries' "ten carefully crafted exceptions" so as soon as Bryan sticks the photo of that particular slide up then I'll make a start on that.
All in all, I'm having great fun. It only takes a few dozen developers to reach critical mass on enjoying yourself within the context of a project: Drupal has 800+ enthusiastic attendees at this conference, and you can feel the energy in the air. Or maybe that's the smell from the university kitchens.... Anyone want the rest of my boiled courgettes? I was thinking of becoming a freegan anyway.
