Last Friday Microsoft played host to the Drupal 7 Release Party in London. More than 200 Drupal fans descended onto Microsoft’s London offices at Cardinal Place to see some of the top UK Drupal folks talk about the new release and its features. In fact, some were saying that this was the biggest Drupal get together in the UK so far! We’re hoping this bodes well for DrupalCon later in the year.
After being welcomed by Mark Baker from Devnest and Will Coleman from Microsoft, Peter Brownell kicked off proceedings with The Evolution of the Node. Nodes are extremely important when it comes to creating content in Drupal, and it was fascinating to see the way they’ve evolved in Drupal 7.
Second up was Ryan Adams from ConSol Partners, a Drupal recruitment specialist, talking about the Drupal Marketplace. Drupal currently accounts for 1% of websites globally (which is in line with other big CMSs like Joomla!, as we discovered at Joomla! Day) and Web CMS is going to be a £14 billion market by 2014. This means that there are now people like Ryan who are dedicated to placing Drupal specialists, which is pretty amazing for an open source CMS.
After Ryan’s short talk, Mark Birbeck took us through the incredibly sexy topic of RDFas in Drupal 7. While I was skeptical at first on the sexiness of such a topic I have to say I was quickly won over. The power of RDFa tags are quite impressive and will be the focus of an upcoming Ubelly blog post. One of the sexiest things about RDFa tags are that they are now incorporated into the core of Drupal 7.
Finally, Jakub Suchy took us through the various security improvements to Drupal 7.
What really shone through at the event was that the Drupal community are going from strength to strength. Since Drupal’s beginnings in 2001, the community has built and support the CMS to the level where it is now a serious contender in the commercial CMS game, with major websites like MTV and the New York Senate using Drupal.
If the Drupal 7 Release Party was anything to go by, we’re really looking forward to DrupalCon London!
Find out how to get started with Drupal on Microsoft/web, and find out about WebMatrix and Drupal 7 by tuning into the online stream at CodeMash on January 13th.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Robert Castelo. Robert Castelo said: RT @ubelly: Ubelly covers the Drupal 7 Release Party in London… http://bit.ly/fWO1P4 #d7rp_london [...]
[...] the Drupal 7 Release Party just over a week ago, Mark Birbeck gave a presentation on RDFa and the Semantic Web, as Drupal 7 [...]
[...] now that people have finally recovered from the many Drupal release parties around the world (like in London), we, at Microsoft, want to formally welcome this new version. From our point of view, Drupal [...]
[...] now that people have finally recovered from the many Drupal release parties around the world (like in London), we, at Microsoft, want to formally welcome this new version. From our point of view, Drupal [...]