DrupalCon DC: Summary So Far

I've been at the business-end of the DrupalCon firehose for 3 full days now, so I thought it would be a good time to share some of the cool stuff I've learned. As you've no doubt heard by now, this DrupalCon is over 50% larger than last year's event - with 1400 people and 6-tracks of sessions. It's been a chore not to get overwhelmed with all the options.

Here's a quick summary of some of the sessions I attended:

Drupal and the Geospatial Web, presented by Andrew Turner and Jeff Miccolis are both geospatial gurus who demonstrated a slew of methods for dealing with geospatial data - almost all of them not having to do with Google Maps and the GMap module. The Mapstraction module is a vendor-independent way to access the various display APIs. They talked about CloudMade, which allows to you generate custom maps - allowing you to select colors and features of the maps you create. They spent a fair amount of time talking about Mapnik, a free toolkit for developing mapping applications - it helps you to create custom static maps from GIS data.

The OpenCalias project by Thomson Reuters is toolkit that allows content providers to leverage the power of the semantic web by providing automated tag generation and a variety of other metadata. Version 3 of the Calias module has Views integration, GIS features, and provides your site with data and links related to your content. The OpenPublish installation profile is a quick way to check it out.

Building a Frankenmonster & How to Avoid It was a fun session by the King of Parties, morten.dk. As a designer/themer, he outlined the process he goes thorough to build a theme that is able to grow, but with rules to keep it from going out of control. The 3 things I took from his talk were:

1. Create a base theme that handles all the basic parts of your theme as well as a sub-theme that handles all the "special cases".
2. Periodically review all the code added to the sub-theme to either clean it up, move it into the base theme, or get rid of it.
3. Use the StyleStripper module to disable any stylesheets that are getting in your way.

Allie Micka really opened my eyes to the most excellent Geo and GeoCode modules in her Drupal as a Geo-CMS session. The other presenters weren't able to make it, but I'm pretty sure it didn't matter to most people, as the stuff that Allie demonstrated filled the entire session nicely. The Geo module provides DB storage points, lines, and polygons using the spatial extensions for MySql and PostgreSQL. It uses CCK formatters to output the data, allowing for custom display based on the application. The unfortunately-named Geocode module is not strictly for geocoding - it actually supplies a rich API for converting information to-and-from geographic information.

I'll be posting more from other sessions in the next few days.