This year, Unleashed Technologies sent me, Mike, and Ryan to DrupalCon 2011 in Chicago, Illinois. At the conference, just about every aspect of Drupal was covered in some way, be it the new release of Drupal 7, the upgrade path from Drupal 6 to 7, newly contributed modules, core updates, and the opening of the development branch for Drupal 8.

At DrupalCon I had three main goals:

• Gain information about the changes in Drupal 7 (D7) to determine the best course of action for creating new sites on D7 and upgrading Drupal 6 (D6) sites
• Learn more about the inner workings of Drupal, as well as contributed modules
• Identify ways in which Unleashed Technologies can contribute to the Drupal community

The wealth of information available through the sessions at DrupalCon was tremendous. From the training on Monday through the last sessions on Thursday, it’s clear that Drupal is supported and used by very smart people. I’ll go into depth on my favorite sessions a little later this week, but the most useful session for Unleashed Technologies was the Monday training session that dealt with upgrading D6 to D7.

Team members from across the country did a great job outlining the differences between Drupal 6 (D6) and Drupal 7 (D7) and describing their experiences in the upgrade process. It really filled in the gaps and gave us a good underlying knowledge in D7, what it can do, and what a significant upgrade path may look like for enterprise clients.

While learning about D7 was very important, a fair amount of our sites still rest on D6. Therefore, it was important for us to gain as much knowledge on D6 as possible to allow us to make continuing improvements to all of our websites. Sessions on ApacheSOLR, Drupal security, and automated testing provided a foundation for immediate improvements on our site. The most important part of these and all of the development sessions throughout the conference was the level of detail that each session provided. These sessions were clearly directed at developers and contained sample code and examples that could immediately be used.

All of this knowledge will greatly benefit the Unleashed Technologies team with our third goal: Learning about how we can contribute to Drupal core. As a quickly growing company, most if not all of our development focus is spent on improving product and services to client. This will continue to be our major goal and driving force behind the development team. However, with Drupal being one of our two core offerings, we can achieve this goal in a more indirect route by contributing to the Drupal community and assisting to make the solution better. That being said, we are in the process of formulating the best plan to contribute to Drupal, and look to make this a reality in the very near future.

DrupalCon was extremely valuable from a technical perspective, especially in obtaining a much better understanding of Drupal 7. The technicality of the sessions will impact our company and clients in a great way by allowing us to continue to improve our quality and coding techniques.

It provided me with a knowledge base with which to better facilitate our transition to Drupal 7. There are so many great new features in D7, such as improved theming with the Render API, better performance, and the new Entity and Field APIs that remove differences in nodes, users, and terms that plagued development in D6. The information gathered from DrupalCon has confirmed that it’s time to jump on the D7 wagon with a full head of steam.