Drupal

This was my third Drupalcon, after San Francisco in 2010 and Chicago last year. Despite my slow and snowy drive from Durango, the weather in Denver was beautiful - and much warmer than either San Francisco or Chicago. The Denver Drupal community deserves a huge congratulations and thank you - this event was outstanding, and I am thoroughly impressed! The venue was great, the sponsors and parties were super fun, the food was probably as good as we'll get when feeding 3,000+ people, and as icing on the cake, the wireless worked great for me!

The Pratt Center for Community Development in New York City is one of DTEK's oldest and best clients, and has been running on Drupal 6 for two and a half years (Andy migrated them from a custom php site in 2009). This will be a pretty tech-heavy post about how we planned and executed the major upgrade of their site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. The major question in any Drupal upgrade is whether to follow the core "upgrade" path - as defined in UPGRADE.txt - or to re-build from scratch and then do a data migration.

A version control system is essential to keep track of code changes, and provide a repeatable, reversible process for applying those changes to development, staging and production websites. At DTEK, we used Subversion (svn) for years, but recently made the change to Git. I won't get too deep into the reasons why, but the main win for us is the fast and simple branching; our workflow seems to be less "work" and more "flow" now that we're using git. ;-)

From March 5-11, I was in Chicago, representing DTEK at DrupalCon - the semi-annual gathering of the wonderfully diverse and vibrant Drupal community. The event brings together all types of Drupal users, and offers formal tracks and sessions on widely varied topics, from design and user interface, to ecommerce and core development. It's also a chance for many informal conversations about anything Drupal related, with the nearly 3,000 attendees from all over the world.