Links: DrupalCon 2009 / Drew's Keynote: DrupalRocks! / Wikipedia: Social Network Theory / Phase 2 Technology (conference host) /

At this year's DC DrupalCon I got to meet a lot of Drupal developers and devotees, while coming up to speed on this powerful content management system built on some very deep information theory. Drupal doesn't just get Web 2.0, it allows developers (and users) to create whole new ways of sharing, retrieving, and even storing information. And in the best spirit of sharing ideas, it's free. DrupalCon 2009 sold out early, so you may have missed out on the seminars during the day and the parties during the evening. Fortunately, the seminars were recorded and can be found online at the con's website. As for the party, you'll just have to create you own...maybe by setting up a Drupal site to create a community...

Drupal doesn't hide its nature as a social connector. Articles aren't called articles, they're called "nodes", which delivers the clear message that Drupal is based on network and communications theory first, and content a distant second.

Does that mean that it's not good at content management? Quite the opposite, but the approach contends that everyone else has their priorities backwards, and in a Web 2.0 world, it has a point.

Drupalists might content that is not socially enabled is dead and might as well be in a book that no one ever reads. Content only really matters when its in play, being talked about, modifies, used and challenged by a community of interested people. "People" in this regard includes artificial intelligences, like those being developed by Thompson Renters to "tag" content with terms that connect each article (node) with others and to make them visible to searches and ultimately interested partied.(Semantic Web Tagging Made Easy)

This reversal of the cart and horse was nowhere more evident than in a seminar on using Drupal in a university setting. The presenter, Kyle Mathews, opened his talk (Building Advanced Social Networks at a Large U.S. University) by saying that he loved learning, but hated school, and that he found content centric learning fairly useless, while group interaction was great. Content, he explained, had utility as a social object around which conversations were held. The value of content shouldn't be ordained by experts but derived from the amount of communication devoted to it.

Its an interesting argument, and not without considerable merit.

If a book falls in the middle of a library and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Sure it does, but if it's not read does it make any impact? Only through its propagation by those who have read it, or heard of it or have some reason to talk about it. Still, the problem with traffic as the sole metric for the value of information is that it makes all value ephemeral. While that may be true of a TV series, it's not necessarily true of scientific or historical knowledge, which may lie fallow for a time only to find a new lease on life when conditions change.

When that time comes though, the meta-information associated with the information will bring it back to the fore...and into the conversation.

Drupal isn't just deep, it's tough as well. When was the last time you worried about the scalability of your WordPress site? If you caught Scaling Drupal using Amazon Web Services, with Frank Febbraro and Eric Johnson, you'd know that not only is Drupal tough enough for large scale applications, but that you can create servers on the fly to deal with the load dynamically, which I found pretty impressive. If that's your thing, you'll also want to catch, Scaling Drupal: Not IF…HOW, Thomas Wysocki's seminar earlier the same day. (see the videos)

We'll be doing more Drupal coverage in the near future, including a review of the free content management system for online publications developed by Phase 2 Technologies (Guess what we're going to test it on.).

In the meantime, if you missed the con, you can still catch the sessions online. As they pointed out on the con site a few days after the last drop fell, "So far 90 sessions that were recorded at DrupalCon DC are online and ready to watch." The first sessions were posted before the con was over, and the bulk of the content was up by the weekend. So, fire up a browser, grab some friends, put on your pick from the open source DrupalCon T shirt design contest, and create your own open source, idea sharing, social object oriented community.