Jody and I arrived in Hungary on Monday to attend and take part in this year's European DrupalCon, which is taking place in the lovely little city Szeged, near Hungary's southern border. We had a bumpy ride here, mostly due to the chaos that is Rome's airport, and we were a bit hampered by jet lag and a serious case of internet withdrawal on our way to Szeged. But things are going a lot better now that the conference has begun and our wireless cards are no longer starved for access. We've already drank two bars out of beer (with a lot of help from other thirsty Drupalers) and connected with a lot of friends we haven't seen in a while.

We're not only attending the conference though, we're taking part in a few ways. As I write this Jody is presenting on Node Templates in Drupal (pictured), and early Friday morning I'm scheduled to present John Snow's awesome new Embed Widgets module at the Google Summer of Code showcase. On Thursday night I am presenting a proposal (created in collaboration with Rock River Star) to the Drupal Association in an attempt to bring the next US DrupalCon (in Winter 2009) to Philadelphia.

On a logistical note: if you need to contact either Jody (until Sept 2nd) or myself (until Sept 8th) please either shoot us an e-mail or give me a call on my pre-paid Hungarian cell phone at 06 20 515 9286.

Yesterday, Jody and I had the privilege of presenting at the first Higher Education Web Symposium, held at the University of Pennsylvania. Below you can find the slides from the first part of the session, which was part of our intro to Drupal and a showcase of some of the educational institutions that run Drupal sites. For the second part Jody did a live demonstration of some of the basics of setting up and running a Drupal site, which we were not able to record.

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Throughout Jody's presentation the conference participants jumped in with questions, which covered a big spectrum of topics. One of the really interesting things to me, though I guess it really shouldn't be surprising, was how many of the questions were the same ones raised during the two recent usability tests. Not only did those tests help prepare me for addressing these issues when they arose, but it gave me one more motivational push to give a hand at the usability sprint at DrupalCon Szeged!

One last thing I'd like to note, for anybody who was at the session or who wants some more arguments in favor of using Drupal in a University setting, I highly recommend reading the following post, watching the video within it, and reading the comments: Dries Buytaert: Many universities use Drupal

This short video from "UNICEF Television" features the workspace that we built (along with a few of UNICEF's internal developers, who are part of the Division of Communication's Youth Team) for UNICEF's annual Junior 8 Summit.

We created a bunch of custom modules for the site--including a MediaWiki integration module, a custom video player to work with mDialog (who are hosting all of the videos for the conference), and a highly customized photo gallery-- as well as a bunch of custom functionalities to make the workspace as intuitive and easy to use as possible. Unfortunately, as with many of the sites we've built for UNICEF, access is limited to employees and participants in the program, though you can check out a version of the video player on the main Junior 8 site.

Seeing these youth from all over the world using the tools we spent so much time creating really does make me feel great about the work we did, and it's yet another insistence of Drupal's ability to connect people from all over the world and enable them to work together in a meaningful way.

I just stumbled upon a great TED talk by Professor Yochai Benkler, on the transformative power of open-source and networks on societies and economies. His view of the future of economics bodes well for Drupal and the people & shops (like this one) that build sites using it.

I'm not sure how I've never heard of Benkler, but I just ordered his book (which is open source, of course)!

This week Jody and I registered to attend DrupalCon Szeged 2008. It's been a few years since I've been to Europe, and I've never been to Hungary, so I'm looking forward to an interesting and exciting trip. The last DrupalCon was a great experience for us-- Jody and I agreed to partner while we were there, I got to see a lot of friends and colleagues I hadn't seen in a long time, and I got to meet a ton of amazing people. If you're in the Drupal business but you're on the fence and wondering whether it's worth the expense (Luckily, we bought our plane tickets right before the big price increases!), trust me, it is!

I also am taking the opportunity to take a little vacation with the wife to see a bit more of the country. Everyone who I know who has visited Hungary raves about it, so I can't wait to see what the fuss is all about!

See you in Szeged!