FrOSCon 2007 Open Source Software Conference - Sankt Augustin, Germany

This weekend sees the FrOSCon conference for Open Source software in Sankt Augustin near Bonn in Germany.

The 2-day event allows developers and users of a multitude of open source software products to meet, exchange ideas and learn from each other.  Exhibitors include Debian, OpenOffice, Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation of Europe, among many others.

A number of selected projects also have developer rooms provided, which allow developers the oppurtunity to meet in person and work together, which is often preferable to the normal means of collaboration - internet chat and email - but not so often possible, given the distances between developers. In return for the space and infrastructure, these projects provide presentations, talks on topics relating to their respective projects.  The guest projects include Drupal, PHP, Zope, ArchLinux, KDE, GeekLog, Typo3, in addition to one room where Linux Professional Institue examinations are being conducted.

I am spending most of my time in the Drupal lecture room, where developers of the open source Content Management System (CMS) Drupal are presenting talks on various topics.  For those of you who don't know and are interested that should narrow it down a bit), Drupal is the platform on which NowPublic runs.

NowPublic's own JavaScript (among other things) wizard Konstantin Käfer (kkaefer) presented twice already on the first day, firstly on how to set up and use Drupal, and secondly how one can effectively use JavaScript (and specifically the JQuery library) within Drupal.  NowPublic genius-in-resident chx (the artist otherwise known as nk) is presenting on the second day on the latest new developments in the heart of the Drupal system - the menu system - which has been rearchitected for the upcoming version 6 release. This will be the first time some if this material has ever been made public. Gag of the day: "Drupal 6" in German sounds like "drupal sex"

Another name familiar with NowPublic old-timers, Robert Douglass was responsible for most of the organisation of the Drupal section of the conference, and also presented on the first day a showcase of this year's Drupal Google Summer of Code projects (of which Rob has also been main organiser for several years), which contain many exciting new developments, a full list of which can be found on drupal.org

Other talks in the Drupal room included:

• An example of an educational workshop in open source software using Drupal (Marco Rademacher)
• Some examples of recent practical applications of Drupal (Jutta Horstmann)
• The infrastructure of drupal.org and the Drupal Association (Gerhard Killesreiter)
• Drupal as a graphics platform by Summer of Code student Balazs Dianiska
• Caching strategies (Robert Douglass)
• Human Language support from Drupal 5 to 6 by Summer of Code student Gabor Hojtsy
• Implementing flexible page layouts (Olav Schettler)

A video of everything that went on in the Drupal room should be available soon on erdfisch.de