Barcelona Drupal Developer Days 2012 Review

The Drupal Developer Days was supposed to be a small event intended for Drupal european developers that wanted to just meet sharing coding ideas.

But when you see:

then you start to think that this maybe is not so small. And my opinion is that this kind of events will consolidate as a very good alternative to the ever price increasing, overcrowded and more marketing oriented event that has become Drupalcon. And the perfect weather and great nightlife of Barcelona this time of the year made it the best european Drupal event I have attended since quite some time.

Bluespark Labs was one of the sponsors of the event, and team members Ronald Ashri, Andrea Poidomani, Pablo Cerda and myself (Pedro Lozano) attended.

Views in Drupal Core sprint

Views in Drupal Core sprinters
I hadn't planned to attend any of the code sprints but I learned about this new initiative called Views in Drupal Core (VDC) that the main Views maintainer Earl Miles announced recently, and somehow I got involved and spent a few hours sending some patches. Contributing to it is a very good way to learn about the internals workings of Views, Ctools and Drupal core all at the same time, so it is a very interesting project.

Thanks to Daniel Wehner (@da_wehner), who lead the sprint, I got introduced to some of the changes required to port views' testing unit tests to the new PSR-0 standard that is been introduced in Drupal 8 for class namespacing and autoloading.

You can find the list of VDC related tickets in this list of issues. There is also an irc channel #drupal-vdc on freenode for developers to coordinate, and where you can get in touch with Views maintainers (listed in the blog post above) to help you get started if you want to contribute.

Saturday list of session (I attended)

Greg Dunlap about to present CMI

Sunday list of sessions

Ronald Ashri talking about architecting Drupal modules

  • Drupal 8: What you need to know - Angela Byron

    Actually I couldn't attend this one but it is worth a mention since Angie is one of the most important contributors that Drupal has ever had and her presence in this event has been very appreciated.

    So if you wanted to know what is coming up in the Drupal core word, this is the one session to be on.

  • drupal and nodejs - beyond chat - Fredrik Lassen

    If you try to learn about Drupal and Nodejs you will probably find a lot of chat related examples. So the question this session addresses is what more can this technology be used for. And we learned a few examples: private downloads without loading apache, irc bots, request pipelining, etc.

  • Displaying external data on the fly with Views and CTools - Bálint Kléri

    This is a very interesting topic for me since I have had to integrate a long list of external services and data streams during the years that I've working on drupal projects and this provides a new approach to me, where you can use views to display in your website data that is not stored in your database or even your own server. Creating views of data coming from an external web services or even from another website html code is possible just by writing a views query plugin.

Other activities

The list of Drupal code sprints was at the level of any Drupalcon:

Conclusion

Barcelona view
All of the above plus the official parties, the crowded Barcelona streets, the spanish summer weather and the many mojitos made this a very nice and productive event that I'll be looking forward to attend more in the future and we recommend you to do so.

Pictures

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