Drupal Gains Steam at DrupalCon Munich 2012 #Drupalcon

My travels from Austin to Munich all in the name of DrupalCon did not disappoint! Once again, it was filled with incredible speakers and collaboration. While there, the Drupal community saw another significant merger of leaders in Drupal, new products and proof that the community is just beginning to hit its stride.

Drupal E-Commerce Gets a Boost

Drupal for commerce made another breakthrough with a big announcement from Paris and Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Commerce Guys. The company kicked it up a notch with the launch of their Commerce Kickstart 2.0 — an accelerated launch pad for the open-source e-Commerce framework Drupal Commerce.

Mike O’Connor, president of Commerce Guys North America had this to say about it, “The new Kickstart is all about creating enterprise-level Drupal Commerce sites. It’s designed to provide a multifaceted, out-of-the-box baseline of functionality as a starting point for e-Commerce sites. It’s a great advancement for Drupal and our team.”

Dev Cloud Free for All

Acquia did not disappoint to bring more to the community at Munich. They announced a new pricing structure, if you call free a pricing structure! Acquia says their Dev Cloud will be permanently free for developing sites. The developer accounts will include all the great features of Acquia Cloud: automated developer workflow, separate development, staging and production environments as well as backups, SSH access, Drush integration, Cloud API and Cloud Hooks for continuous integration and more.

Women in Drupal

The Drupal project keeps its promise with diversity. To enhance networking and build a community of women Drupal experts, the Women in Drupal Facebook page launched at the Con with over 100 members in the first couple of days!

To boot, during Munich, the number of Drupal developers crossed the 20,000 mark.

It was another great Con — Auf Wiedersehen!

Editor's Note: Another article by Ben Finklea from DrupalCon:

Enterprise Drupal Takes Big Step Foward with Four-Day Merger #DrupalCon
 

About the Author

Ben Finklea is the CEO of Volacci, the leader in Internet marketing for Drupal-based Web strategies, and the chair of the Drupal Branding and Marketing Committee for Drupal Association. He is a serial tech entrepreneur, author and SEO thought leader.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Enterprise Drupal Takes Big Step Forward with Four-Way Merger: #DrupalCon

Perhaps the biggest news at DrupalCon was a four-way merger of leading European Drupal shops to form Wunderkraut. NodeOne, Krimson, Mearra and Wunderkraut joined forces under the Wunderkraut name to create an international team of Drupal service providers.

With over 140 Drupal professionals, offices in 10 countries and some big time European clients, this is another big step in Drupal’s enterprise saga. As more businesses looking to enhance their Web presence turn to Drupal for its incredible flexibility and lack of proprietary fees, the ecosystem of Drupal development companies is thriving. Wunderkraut is making a splash at DrupalCon this week recruiting additional staff and sharing its vision with the community.

The formation of a new, large-scale Drupal company in Europe is another event exemplifying the maturity of the Drupal business community.

About the Author

Ben Finklea is the CEO of Volacci, the leader in Internet marketing for Drupal-based Web strategies, and the chair of the Drupal Branding and Marketing Committee for Drupal Association. He is a serial tech entrepreneur, author and SEO thought leader.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

News from the Front: Simpler, Mobile Drupal 8 Previewed #DrupalCon

For those in the Drupal community, DrupalCon is simply DrupalCon. For the rest of you: DrupalCon is a bi-annual Drupal conference put on by the Drupal Association. It’s a world-class tech conference, it is THE place for Drupal news and it’s happening this week in Munich, Germany. 

Lowering the Learning Curve with Drupal 8

Drupal is considered one of the most powerful Web CMSs available, but one of the biggest complaints about the open-source Web infrastructure is its overwhelming complexity. This is especially heard from non-technical users like copywriters, designers and marketers. In an effort to address this, the project founder and lead Dries Buytaert announced earlier this year that Drupal will be adopting the open-source PHP framework Symfony into its next major release, Drupal 8.

Initially, this announcement left many wondering why such a dramatic shift was necessary or what benefit it would bring to Drupal users. Since then, the Drupal core programmers have been busy and at Drupalcon Munich, a series of significant usability and feature upgrades in the works for Drupal 8 have been demonstrated. These improvements are sure to please CMOs and CTOs alike.

Content creation in Drupal 8 will be greatly simplified for less technical users. Drupal 8 will provide easier layout control and facilitate gorgeous designs with practically no coding. All of these features will greatly lower the learning curve for new developers.

Mobile and Beyond

Drupal’s next core iteration is poised to conquer mobile. With a friendlier admin in mind, a new and simplified pullout menu will leverage one toolbar that works on all devices enabling complete mobile Web administration. Drupal 8 is going to implement responsive design out of the box, even differentiating between phones and tablets. A responsive layout builder was showcased and it’s pretty revolutionary. Entirely new layouts can be created with drag and drop.

Authoring improvements were also on display. The form looked cleaner with most options moved to a sidebar. Inline editing with True Wysiwyg will eliminate the separation of focus between editing and preview modes. And staying in-sync with the responsive/mobile motif, viewport previews will allow you to see what your page will look like on different devices.

Drupal 8 is currently in early development and is expected to ship in 2013. There are more exciting new features planned for than can fit in one post. The key takeaway from Dries at Drupalcon Munich is that Drupal is gearing up to be more accessible and to address the Internet’s latest and greatest challenges. As the Web continues to evolve, Drupal is taking major steps to ensure its place as a leading CMS today and in the future.
 

About the Author

Ben Finklea is the CEO of Volacci, the leader in Internet marketing for Drupal-based Web strategies, and the chair of the Drupal Branding and Marketing Committee for Drupal Association. He is a serial tech entrepreneur, author and SEO thought leader.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com