DrupalCamp Ohio 2012

This past Saturday I made the drive down to Columbus for DrupalCamp Ohio. It was a well-attended and well-managed conference. Despite being on the OSU campus, attendees were bright and interesting people. The highlight was the keynote by Angie Byron (webchick), and I attended these great sessions:

The State of Mapping and the GeoSpatial CMS in Drupal 7
by Brandon Morrison

This presentation was an overview and demo of the Geofield module, and how it works with related modules like Geocoder, OpenLayers and Leaflet. This system seems like a more flexible and modular approach to what the Location module does on Drupal 6. I'm really excited about this. I just need a client who needs some maps. 

Hacking Open Atrium: adding Features within the Contexts of your Spaces
by Steve Mokris

Most of this presentation was an overview of the Features, Context and Spaces modules. I use Features and Context regularly, but Spaces is a module I haven't tried yet. After seeing how quickly you can build and export Open Atrium "features" with Spaces, it's definitely something I have to try. I don't use Atrium, but Steve says most of what he showed will work in a more generic Organic Groups environment. 

Drupal as a CRM Platform
by  Michael Haggerty

This session was an overview and demo of the CRM Core suite of modules. While it's not fully featured at this time, it's a very impressive beginning. The initial release only support storing information about Individuals, Organizations, Households and Activities. Noticably absent are membership and event tracking. But, everything is built using Drupal 7 entities, avaiable in Views and exportable by Features. Depending on the needs of an organization, it might be easier to build a membership/event ticketing system on top of this than try to customize CiviCRM or another more fully featured solution. One other missing piece is the lack of an emailing subsystem. However, I agree with the presenter that bulk email is probably best done with MailChimp or Constant Contact, rather than from your web server. 

The main headwind for this suite seems to be competition from other CRM on Drupal projects like Drop CRM and RedHen CRM. CRM Core looks like it will be the first one with a release, though. So, that should give it an advantage. I asked if Trellon, who are behind this, would be helping to coordinate activities of coders trying to work in the CRM Core ecosystem building additional modules. Unfortunately, I didn't get a straight answer, so my guess is no. A missed opportunity, I think.

Responsive Design is Easy
by Rajeev Singh

An overview of what Responsive Design is and how you can achieve it with Drupal. I knew what it was, having used the Omega base theme before, but I did not realize just how simple it was to make it work in your own themes from scratch. I will definitely be trying this out soon.

Overall, I had a great time and will definitely attend next year. I hope that we can coordinate DrupalCamps a bit better next time so that DrupalCamp Michigan isn't on the same day.