Reflections on DrupalCon Copenhagen

Last week, I attended DrupalCon in Copenhagen. Being relatively new to Drupal, but by no means a "newbie," I was hoping to both confirm that we're using Drupal well and to learn some tips, tricks and other insider info on how we can use it even better. I'm happy to report that it seems we are using Drupal "well" in that many sessions confirmed this - I was saying lots of "yep, know that module" and "yep, we're doing that with that module" to myself. It was all quite reassuring.

There were, of course, many new concepts, modules, configuration options, etc. that I learned about during the excellent DrupalCon last week. Some highlights...

Security

I attended an excellent session by Ben Jeavons on Drupal Security. Learning about the Security Review module was almost worth the trip to Copenhagen alone. Some other modules and links they mentioned:

• drupalsecurityreport.org
• Paranoia module
• Security on drupal.org
• Security Advisories
• Another presentation on security here Peter Wolanin from Acquia

SEO and Drupal

I attended a session on SEO for Drupal 6 and 7 by Ben Finklea from Volacci and Ivo Radulovski from Segments. And, I won a prize! A free auditing and consulting of one of the sites I manage from Segments :-)

A defininition of SEO: communicating to Google and site visitors what your site is about and that you are important.

4 Keys of SEO:

• On-page optimization
• Content Strategy (sub-set of IA)
• Reputation building
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

SEO areas

• Target group
• Content
• Semantic
• Word effectivity
• Site structure
• Page title
• Headlines
• Meta-tags
• Links
• Alt text-images

Modues

• Glossify
• Open Calais
• Google website optimizer
• Google news sitemap generator
• XML site map
• SEO Compliance checker
• SEO Checklist
• SEO Friend
• SEO Watcher

Other higlights included a session on Translation Management and an excellent session called "Don't design websites, design web systems!" by the Four Kitchens folks. In addition, the keynote presentation from Dries, founder of Drupal, and the one by Jeremy Keith on HTML 5 for Web Designers were quite interesting and, in some cases, inspiring - Drupal now powers more than 1% of the web, according to Dries - wow.

This was my first DrupalCon, and I'm happy to report that I plan to attend another one in the future, geography permitting. So, good job DrupalCon Copenhagen organizers on such a successful DrupalCon!

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