Drupal meetup, Ireland - a big success

Today's Drupal meetup in Ireland was, in my opinion, a huge success with a turnout of 70+ Drupalers with varying levels of Drupal experience. Surprisingly, almost half of the people who attended were complete newcomers, many of whom had never even installed Drupal!

From my point of view though, as a fairly advanced user, the event was less of a learning experience, and more of a chance to finally get to meet some of the people who I have been speaking to on various Drupal sites, forums and irc rooms over the past couple of years. It was a great chance to make my name known, and possibly drum up some new work for 2009.

Whilst the morning was perhaps a little shaky and may have left some of the newcomers a little overwhelmed, the afternoon was much more of a success after the decision to split the group in to two streams (beginner & advanced).

The advanced session saw an interesting presentation on the 'semantic web' or, web 3.0 if you like, and what it will/may mean for Drupal in the future. Equally interesting, was Menus' & Blocks Dan Smith's talk about Drupal workflow, which raised an issue which I have long been waiting for an answer, and which unfortunately, even a room full of Drupal experts was unable to provide the solution! That was, the problem of managing Drupal database schema changes across a dev/stage/live environment. Also covered was a beginners guide to drupal module development, which I think was handled very well, and I hope it will encourage those who haven't yet taken the dive into module development to give it a try.

Perhaps I was hoping for a little more in depth technical stuff, but none the less, the day was eventful and fun. I imagine some very positive things should come out of this for all who attended and the community as a whole, and I'm looking forward to the next Drupal get-together in Ireland.

A big thanks goes ot to Heather and Stella for organising the event.

If you are a Drupal developer based in Ireland and you haven't already, hop over to the Drupal, Ireland group and sign up now!