We're jamming, jamming, and I hope you like jamming too.

We're jamming
I wanna jam it with you,
We're jamming jamming
and I hope you like jamming too.
Ain't no rules ain't no vow we can do it anyhow
and I Jah know will see you through,
'Cos every day we pay the price with a loving sacrifice
jamming till the jam is through.
Marley Bob - Jamming

Jamming at drupalJam...

Last Friday, Boris, a friendly Dutch guy who took refuge in Brussels, came to pick me up to go to Elst, The Nederlands. We were going on a trip to drupalJam, second edition!

DrupalJam was a one day event organized by Erik Stielstra, Willem Peters and Erik Langhout. The goal: to bring together all kinds of drupal enthusiast to exchange ideas and basically, hang around together. To my surprise a lot of people showed up (I've never seen so many drupal users/developers in one room, but hey, I'm new to the game!-).

They managed to get a nice building, filled it with cool people, put some projectors in it and... started talking drupal!

The sessions...

The day kick-started with a brief "get-to-know" session. Followed by a talk about Panels 2 (a drupal module).

For me, it started to get interesting when Jo Wouters shared some insights about a project they just finished. Jo works for Krimson , some Belgian drupal architects. They just released the new site of NRC Handelsblad dedicated to book reviews: NRC boeken. Besides the fact that Jo is an excellent presenter, I loved the session because it gives you some insights about how they approach building advanced websites. Drupal is a huge, flexible framework, and it's always good to know which modules and functionalities are used to get to a desired result.

The day ended with an interesting talk about drupal vs joomla. Like drupal, joomla is an open source content management system, very popular in The Netherlands. Since I never laid my eye on it, it was cool to see what 'the competition' is doing. I must say, joomla has some strong point, especially concerning usability. But I think it's quite limited. So if you want to go 'the extra mile', or add more functionality to your site, Drupal is the way to go (this is me, trying to be objective). It was a cool presentation, especially 'cause it left me with the feeling that I made the right choice (that is, specializing in drupal!-)

To round things up...

So to round things up... drupalJam was a very interesting and entertaining event! I learned new stuff about drupal, got to know the faces behind the community names (Hi, Xano!) and... brought me together with others who love this thing.

The event was definitely worth the ride! Hope the third edition will arrive soon!

So, we're jamming... hope you love jamming too!

Picture of drupalJam taken by Bert Boerland.