DCC - Second Camp in Two Weeks!

Wow, another drupal camp in just two weeks. Between the Boston d4d camp and now Drupal Camp Colorado I've been heavily drupalled. It's a great feeling! The real highlight for these last two camps overall is the incredible jump in my knowledge, but perhaps more importantly some of the awesome people I met (or reconnected with).

Here are my subjective highlights from Drupal Camp Colorado

• Matt's (ultimateboy) presentation on pre-process and its proper usage. This was something that I've read a lot about and kind of understood, but the examples used in Matt's presentation really moved me from the "I get it" to the "I can use it" level of knowledge. This was one of two presentations I attended where I felt the presenter did a great job of getting to the demos quickly and had solid demos ready to build understanding. Pretty awesome instructional skills from one so young (and this coming from someone who made his living as a technical trainer for many years).
• My own personal demo of Form Builder from eaton in the BOF room. I just got lucky on that one! Fortunate for me as if I recall this directly conflicted with the preprocess session so I got the best of both worlds. Anyway, form builder looks awesome. If it can come to fruition as a form builder for all content types/forms (instead of its current implementation only in Webform 3.0) then many budding site builders will be able to do what they need without having to dig around in hook_form_alter. There are a few others trying to do the same thing. Will be interesting to see who comes out on "top".
• Lunch on day one. It wasn't provided! So everyone scattered to the various fine locations in the neighborhood. Turned out to be a great opportunity to meet some new folks over an excellent lunch. I ended up with alexua, the guys from A Mountain Top, and a fellow "Drupal for Fun" traveller Jes, and Carl - one of the organizers. Good food and good times.
• Mark's (attheshow) presentation on hook_form_alter was also excellent for me. Another of those presentations that moved me from "I know it" to "I can do it". And again it was because of a well crafted progression of examples. Note to future presenters - get to the demo fast, and make sure your demos are instructive to someone new to the topic! I will say a couple of audience members chimed in in ways that almost derailed the presentation. Matt handled it well. Ultimately the audience was able to add some value towards the end with a segway into #ahah and dynamic form elements (a presentation that I was not able to attend, but rfay posted his excellent examples to his website so I'll definitely be following that.
• The "Are Panels and Skinr the future of Point and Click theming" presentation by the good folks of Top Notch Themes was a fun eye opener. I was one of the lucky ones at D4D Boston when skinr and studio theme took the conference by storm. This presentation developed the skinr concept further for me as well as demonstrating its integration with panel, blocks, etc. It was also a nice opportunity to see a really exciting new product that Top Notch Themes will soon be launching. The future of Drupal theming looks both powerful AND accessible. Can't say I'm totally convinced about Panels becoming a standard to the same extent as Earl Miles' Views, but with Earl building it you know Panels 3 is going to be strong. The TNT presenters clearly demonstrated that).
• Studio base theme. Third time was the charm for me on this one. I had seen this presentation twice in Boston (if you count their jumping in to the skinr presentation). I could tell that they were on to something. The fact that similar concepts were even at that time already being applied to and discussed in Drupal 7 core surely helped. There was so much excitement in Boston in fact that ultimateboy put in an all nighter preparing a presentation on studio to deliver at a late entry presentation on Sunday. So seeing this presentation once more at DCC really helped me to get that last bit of understanding of their base theme concept. Like all excellent ideas it is simple! (Hey it only too me three sittings to get it! :) ).

There were more great presentations to be sure. Certainly don't mean to slight anyone. UBERCART - how could I forget that it was Ubercamp! I had decided before coming that I wanted to get a running start on Ubercart, but mid day one decided that since my need for ubercart is probably in the future I focused on more immediate concerns instead. Hopefully that won't come back to bite me! Greggles on security too (and launching his new book Cracking Drupal). Lots of good stuff.

Some other quick thoughts...

• Colorado is very pretty. Definitely hope to come back and spend more time here
• Party on Saturday night at Hotel VQ was fine - nice view.
• Awesome sponsors! Nice venue, open bar at party etc.
• Weird networking problems. Internet access awesome and fast. But couldn't get to drupal.org! Or irc! At least twitter worked. Strange times.
• Most unawesome delay coming on Friday night (5 hours!). Getting to Denver in the middle of the night = not fun.
• Most awesome flight home. Beautiful weather, everything on time
• Chris (from Gravitek), I hear you had bigger plane problems than me! Sorry you couldn't make it. Stephthegeek and TNT definitely rocked it though - go skinr.

So what's next for me? Well total withdrawal for awhile I think. It will be a whole month(!) till the next drupal camp in Philly. Time to push myself I think. The drupal community has really given me a huge push - time for me to make my own progress now.

I was an Individual Sponsor - yeah me!