DrupalCon wrapup. Or: How I spent my Drupal vacation

From April 19-21, approximately 3,000 Drupalers descended upon San Francisco for DrupalCon. My attending was a semi- last-minute decision since I was already committed to SXSW and Educause this year. As luck would have it, talking to fellow Drupal developers at SXSW convinced me I should really be at DrupalCon the following month.

We've worked with Drupal for the past year and a half at Duke. While it is the most flexible CMS we support and has allowed us to do some really cool stuff, we're beginning to face scaling challenges as our number of Drupal sites has grown. Most of our sites are standalone instances (with the occasional multisite), which makes updates a little unwieldy. Also, we find ourselves installing many of the same modules on every site, so this process can be a little redundant as well. I've had a feeling for a while that our setup really isn't as efficient as it could be, but had a hard time finding decent documentation or case studies on managing several Drupal sites in-house. So this is primarily what I was hoping to learn at DrupalCon: best practices for streamlining our development and maintenance efforts in an enterprise environment.

DrupalCon exceeded my expectations by a long shot. In fact, it just might be the best conference I have ever attended. The sessions were a great mix of general "how we did X" case studies and how-to's for specific tasks. I can honestly say that I learned something valuable in every session. I discussed some of my favorite sessions in this blog post. However, I also had some really great conversations with folks informally as well. 

Arizona State University and Johns Hopkins shared their experiences of implementing Drupal in academia. Following their session, about fifty of us met for a higher education "birds of a feather" gathering. It was really interesting how Drupal is being implemented at other schools -- from centralized multisite installs, to one-off standalone sites similar to our current environment at Duke. Although some setups sound more effective than others, it doesn't sound like there is any one "right" way to implement Drupal on campus. We also talked a lot about getting Drupal buy-in on campus. Many suggestions reinforced those mentioned in ASU's presentation: offer Drupal support, build community, supply common templates or other tools.

However, another method also emerged, one that seemed popular on many campuses: sneak Drupal in the back door. In other words, rather than launching with fanfare and switching the campus to Drupal all at once, try it out on a few sites. As users become familiar with it, word will spread and Drupal usage will grow organically. I feel that this is what is happening at Duke; lately, we've had more clients come to us explicitly asking for Drupal for their projects (it's our practice, however, to select the CMS -- either Drupal, WordPress or Cascade Server -- only after establishing the functional requirements).

Personally, I didn't feel like we faced any push-back from our senior leadership when we launched the new Duke.edu homepage in Drupal. But at the birds of  feather meetup, it sounded like a lot of colleges and universities did; particularly from executive level leaders who did not have confidence that an open source CMS could be robust enough for large-scale or high stakes projects. At one point during the session, one person from an ivy league university mentioned that they had a lot of trouble getting Drupal buy-in on campus, until Duke launched its homepage last fall. Since then, that school's senior leadership has embraced Drupal. So that made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

There was a core group of eight of us or so working in higher education who met up the first evening, before the conference even officially kicked off. Over the course of the next several days, we joined for dinners and the official parties and talked about how we were using Drupal at our respective schools. We represented a variety of institutions -- San Francisco State University, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Guelph in Canada to name a few. Besides Drupal, we also talked about other aspects of university web development: pricing models for services, how our web departments are set up, and what services we support. 

There's exciting things coming down the pipeline for Drupal in Higher Education. Some good resources are: Drupal in Education on groups.drupal.org, the higher ed subgroup on GDO, and the Drupal Edu Initiative.

DrupalCon was a wonderful experience. I loved the variety of the sessions, as well as the camaraderie I found in fellow Drupal developers, especially those in higher education. I gleaned a lot of useful information about how we can streamline the rollout and maintenance of our sites at Duke. We can make a lot more use of multisite installations instead of so many standalone sites as we manage now. We also should further investigate the use of Drush, a series of scripts that allow site administrators to run installs, updates, and other processes from the command line. DrupalCon SF 2010 concluded a month ago, but I'm still fired up about all the cool things I learned and great people I met.