Drupal Camp Cork 2013 - A Retrospective

Wow - what a weekend we had! All the great and good of the Irish Drupal community descended upon The People's Republic of Cork last weekend for Drupal Camp.

The camp started off with Gary Hammond (@manonmir) from iterate talking about adopting Drupal as a business, with some advice that started a great discussion about "defending Drupal" - the need to promote Drupal as a platform but also to defend the attacks that are levelled against it from proprietory vendors and others. Following this, Alan Burke (@alanjosephburke) from Annertech gave an overview of their work on the Oxfam Website, work which resulted in a large increase of site activity and also revenue for Oxfam. Lastly for this morning session, Daniel Alb (@danielalbro) from Monsoon Consulting extolled the benefits of Responsive Web Design (RWD) over unresponsive and/or mobile web design. This latter presentation gave me reason to demo a small animation I created using breakpoints. See here (on desktop, then resize the browser).

After coffee, we were treated to a talk on CoffeeScript by Mark Horgan. If I ever become a Javascript guru, I'll look into that a bit more - for this weekend, I was happy to learn as much as I did and get introduced to Grunt at the same time. Heather James (@learningdrupal) from Acquia took the podium to give us a preview blow us away with a preview of Drupal 8 - responsive images, configuration in code, in-place editing, and more, more, more. We needed lunch after that.

Mapping with Drupal - the topic I most wanted to hear about - was presented by Feargal O'Kane (@gul) from BT48. Best presentation of the weekend - Open Layers, changing map settings/layouts, layers - need I say more? Well, to host a complex mapping website, you might need the help of our next presenter - Jochen Lillich (@geewiz) from FreistilBox, who spoke about building high performance hosting stacks for Drupal. Jochen was followed by Peter Woalanin from Acquia with an in-depth look at the hook and plugin system for Drupal 8. Now, time for more coffee and sandwiches, and then on to ...

... Alan Burke to give an overview of configuration in code for Drupal 8, assisted by Conor Cahill (@conorc) from Fluid Edge who took the reins as a trusty sidekick. Suffice to say, everyone was impressed.

On Saturday we spent the morning engaged in round table discussions about various topics such as Twig, CSS animations, Grunt and Phing, and more, before moving on to our AGM in the afternoon. Ah, the AGM and our voting structures - le's just say, we all know a bit more about "single transferrable votes" now (and coin tossing!).

No need to mention the social aspects, the chats, the drinks, the food, the shuttleboard, the (nearly) dancing in a late bar, "jacketgate" in a hotel toilet, and - ultimately - the fun of yet another successful Drupal Camp. Thanks to Ruairi (@Snakedog_101) for organising.