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Drupal provides exciting new software that allows web designers to build websites that users can maintain themselves. The European DrupalCon took place this year in Szeged, Hungary from August 27th to the 31st and featured a fantastic assortment of sessions for both programmers and end users.
The most useful insight of the conference was to see how and where the future of Drupal is going. Its popularity has been increasing steadily since its inception and while we are currently working with Drupal version 6 it looks like 7 will answer various issues that should make Drupal much more accessible to a wider range of users. For example, there is the editor known as "WYSIWYG" (What you see is what you get), a Content Construction Kit (CCK) and much more all available in Core (Drupal's basic programme).
Rasmus Leydorf (the creator of PHP) presented a keynote talk focussing on intelligent coding of PHP and its effect on page performance. This provided good food for thought for all the developers and later on in the week we had a chance to hear from the creators of Ubercart - a module that the team at Andalucia Web Solutions has had the pleasure of using on a number of our clients e-commerce sites. Support for Ubercart is strong within the web design community and conference participants discussed new "theming" features, which should help to ease the stress on the skinning of the module for the front end. Meanwhile the general growth of the community of Drupal users means a good standard of support and new features are all becoming available.
Overall the feeling of the conference was one of a warm hearted community committed to developing Drupal while upholding the good standards of programming that allow the open source project to continue and grow.