The Drupal project has become explosively popular and risen as a top choice in web content management and social publishing. The community has propelled this growth through organic events organized around the world. There are now over 150 local groups and an estimated 800 Drupal learning events scheduled to happen in 2008. How did this happen, and what are the trends in this social activity?

Acquia's Drupal community adventure guide, Kieran Lal, will present the Acquia open source distribution of Drupal, the support offerings, and demonstrate how the Acquia network helps site developers and site owners to manage their Drupal site.

Kieran will review Acquia's business and how it works with the Drupal community to help grow the Drupal project's adoption with organizations who need commercial support for Drupal. He will also review Acquia's contributions back Drupal 6 and the provide examples of how Acquia works with contributed module maintainers.

The Facebook Platform allows anyone to create applications which tightly integrate with the Facebook.com website. These Applications can write content to a Facebook user's Profile, News Feed, and also Canvas Pages. This content can be as rich and complex as any website, so Drupal is a natural choice for developing on this platform.

I recently launched youMashTube, which lets you drag and drop 118 million YouTube videos into a playlist and save it as a webpage. youMashTube would not have been feasible for me to do if not for the advanced features made possible in Drupal 6, such as:

• Integration with the new jQuery
• An elegent system for internationalization
• Menu callbacks and the node system
• Javascript and CSS aggregation

Drupal is an amazingly flexible content management platform. Which is both great and occasionally frustrating when you set out on a "simple" task, like setting up a wiki. In this session we will go over the various steps needed to configure Drupal 6 to act like Wikipedia, including:

Evaluating and Installing Modules
Creating Content Types
Setting up Views
Configuring Input Filters
Assigning User Roles
Evaluation customization needs
And more

An introduction to the Slot Machine module, which was recently released in beta for Drupal 5. Slot Machine offers a multi-featured scheduling/publication system, especially useful on sites with a constant stream of incoming content and a regular publication schedule.

I will walk through the process of pulling images from Flickr and theming them using jQuery. Flickr can be a great tool for community websites to make photo sharing easy and accessible to everyone. By automatically importing those images to Drupal the photos can be themed in a variety of ways to build just about any type of photo gallery imaginable.

Drupal is an amazing framework. Complicated websites and web applications can be created by combining configurations of Modules, Content Types (CCK,) Views, Panels, Menus, Blocks, Categories, Roles & Permissions.

Much of this site setup and configuration process can be very time consuming and repetitive, submitting form after form after form.

This process can and should be automated!

The site configuration should also be stored in a format that is easy to read, modify, manage, share and collaborate on.

Perhaps your library is considering Drupal as a CMS, or perhaps your library is already using Drupal and you want to get better integration with your integrated library system or other resources.

Join librarians and others in an open discussion.

You've heard all the hype about cloud computing, now learn how to use it. We'll show some examples of cloud hosting providers, cloud management tools, and other cloud related services. Using Amazon EC2 as an example, we'll talk about special considerations for running Drupal on cloud providers and talk about autoscaling, self-healing clusters, and high availability. Finally, we'll demonstrate how to install Drupal on Amazon EC2 using Amazon's new persistent storage engine, Elastic Block Store.