Interdependent Web

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March 4-6, I attended DrupalCon in Washington, DC.  I've posted my notes from each session here in my blog, so you (clients, potential clients, and partners) can see and share what I learned about, and so I will have them to refer to later. See the bottom of this page for links to my notes from all the sessions I attended.  I took a handful of photos as well.

The full conference schedule is at http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/schedule -- follow the links to each session for details and videos! 

Executive summary for Interdependent Web clients

Here's what I learned this week that affects you:

Drupal 7 will be significantly more user-friendly than 5 or 6.  However, it won't go beta until September and won't be officially released until some time after that, and modules will become available over the following year.  So we can relax: Drupal 6 is where it's at for 2009.

However, Drupal 5 will become unsupported in September 2009, when Drupal 7 goes beta.  That means that there will be no more security updates and bug fixes for Drupal 5 after that time.  So in the interests of security, we will want to upgrade all Drupal 5 sites (PSDUUA, Smartphone magazine, Smartphone magazine's cart, and iPhone Life magazine's cart) to Drupal 6 before September.  The few remaining rough spots in the upgrade path are in Ubercart, and many of them may be resolved at tomorrow's code sprint... in any case, data should be secure; it's only the site-specific customizations that will need to be redone.

Major publications that have moved to Drupal (New York Observer, Mother Jones, Miami.com) agree that it is vital to reverse the work flow so that content is written for the Web site first, then edit the content online and finally send it to print.  This shift is in progress but not yet accomplished at iPhone Life magazine.

Barriers to commenting -- including logging in and being required to preview first -- drastically reduce public participation in Web sites (Smartphone and iPhone Life magazines).  Recommendation: install the Mollom and Flag modules to control spam, and open up comments to anonymous users.

The Organic Groups module comes highly recommended as a way to keep committees organized online (PSDUUA).  Not only can an online directory be easily maintained and displayed once set up in Organic Groups, but each committee gets its own forums, blogs, etc. without stepping on other committees' toes.

Apparently Google Maps have some serious drawbacks, mainly related to data privacy.  Nothing too scary, but there are better options.  So I'll be retooling my Google Map-enabled sites (PSDUUA) with Mapstraction in order to use maps with less strings attached.

"Cloud computing" (CDN) is the future of Web hosting, and it is already available -- a hosting account can now span multiple servers around the world, and Drupal 7 will be designed to take advantage of this.  However, until the price comes down, there are still many things that can be done to optimize performance on a private server (Smartphone & iPhone Life magazines), and small sites (PSDUUA, Edgewood Descendents, AdProfessional) will continue to perform well in inexpensive shared hosting accounts.

The Semantic Web is finally here, and Drupal is on the cutting edge.  Modules are now available to automatically mark up an existing D6 site with semantic tags that will improve search rankings and enable new ways of sharing information with other sites.  This functionality will be included in Drupal 7, so that in a year's time the content of tens of thousands of Drupal sites will networked as never before.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer a voodoo science.  Now that most XHTML is written by machine, search engines are able to use sensible ways to analyze pages, which means that site builders are now rewarded for responsible, standards-compliant coding instead of sneakiness.  I am a convert to this new breed of SEO strategies and will strive to implement them on my sites.  But first the servers need to be optimized so they can handle the increased traffic!

The way that I conduct training sessions needs some work!  I've learned some good tips and tricks and look forward to putting them into practice.

(more to come)