Drupal musings 19: DrupalCamp Edinburgh, Panels, another prize book! and a 'mu'.

DrupalCamp Edinburgh was just one day, but a Drupal drenched day. So, camping can be fun even when it rains - community spirit and ethos, tips and things you never knew.

The first session on PHP namespaces with Jonathan was on the technical side, but this is a topic to watch for Drupal 8.

Up RPC - upgrading was also technical in the sense of being for people with sites to upgrade. Joachim went through the process from Drupal 5 to 6.

Drush - the DRUpal SHell (Mac) was presented by snufkin and with the frequency Drush crops up at Drupal events, inc. NW England it's a mu - must use.

A question was raised around multimedia in Drupal, this centred upon images.

The afternoon was built around Chris Muktar's session on WikiJob. Chris described the site's birth, growth and move to Drupal. Wikijob utilises the PressFlow distribution of Drupal optomised for performance and scalability. What was fascinating here were the insights into the use of Pantheon and Amazon Web Services. The good news for Chris and WikiJob is that hosting costs are dropping month-on-month while the lessons: you need to know what you're doing and AWS is self-service.

Providing for mobile users came up and here I was actually able to contribute (well sort of) with my notes from Copenhagen and Martin Joergensen's session.

At the end there was a prize draw. I won another book! Drupal 6 Panels Cookbook, Bhawin (Vin) Patel, Packt. Having read this there's no doubt that combining Views and Panels packs some punch, especially as in Chapter 10 a travel website is created and the recipe uses the PressFlow distribution. This chapter also uses the Location and GMap modules, which I am currently looking at. Since first hearing there were modules called Panels, Views and Context I've automatically attributed h2cm related functionality to them. The care domains are 'panels'. Organic Groups, another example has proved quite different to what I thought and I only learned that this summer (that's why using really is learning). What the book brings home - without picking up the shovel - is the way these modules leverage each other.

At 10am when everyone first met with two sessions scheduled with the rest of the 10-5 day a blank I worried: 200 miles! (I didn't attend, but the morning also saw Addison Berry of Lullabot running a "Beginners Track"). My faith deserted me only for a moment. Great job Duncan and all.