Well - It took us 10 hours longer than it should have done to get to the US - but the first day of the OSCMS (Open Source Content Management System) Summit 2007 sponsored by Yahoo! is over. What a day its been!
The Disaster Flight
It took considerably longer for us (me and Nikos) to get here than it should have done. First up, there was a system failure at London Gatwick leading to an extended boarding time causing a delay to the arrival of the flight in the US. Combine that with what I can only describe as tortuously slow US customs, we missed the connecting flight from Minneapolis to San Jose - bye bye arriving at 7:30pm!
The kind lady at Minneapolis booked us onto the next flight to Phoenix where we would get another flight to San Jose so we checked our bags in for that domestic flight, however that flight was then delayed due to bad weather which meant we would have missed the connection from Phoenix. Bye bye 11pm arrival AND our baggage (which was already well into the system for getting on the Phoenix flight). A different lady at Minneapolis informed us that the next flight from Phoenix was at 7am however she could book us onto a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas and then onto San Jose. We accepted this option.
Fortunately, that flight went surprisingly well and we ended up in San Jose at 1:38am (PST) and at our hotel and in bed by 2:30am (alarm set for 6:30am!)
The summit
So, after eventually getting some sleep and a taxo to the conference (feeling surprisingly awake) we ended up seeing some fantastic talks. Wherever possible, Nikos and I tried to go to different talks to get the most out of the conference (and so far, we have).
I attended the Rasmus Lerdorf talk on PHP security which was fascinating, if a touch scary. Plenty of food for thought! Next up (for me) was the talk on the OpenID scheme and how it can be used (and where its going). The whole concept of the OpenID system is brilliant and, if executed properly (ie, hands off Microsoft) then it should save hours of people's time. The last talk before lunch was on the new Menu System which is going into Drupal 6.0. This was more of a public announcement talk for me as I'd already seen the makings of this in the Brussels Conference back in September. There is some genius work going on in the background, but the main jist of it is that we're going to get more functionality from the menu system at a better speed with relatively minor changes to the modules that implement the hook_menu.
After lunch there was a double session on Design by Steven Wittens - the guy who created the Drupal 5 theme (Garland). Unfortunately, the second half of this clashed with another talk on the Search 'stuff' in Drupal by Rob Douglass. From what I got from the first half of Stevens talk, I learned a lot about design which I will hopefully bring to this site soon (there are some niggley things I don't like). Rob's talk was intriguing and inspiring (which I have come to expect from Rob's talks) and its opened my eyes into how Drupal handles search. I personally will probably stick with the Google Adsense for Search now my site is indexed, however its useful to know that for sites which wont be indexed so well, we can easily setup the Drupal search to be effective.
The last set of talks only really had 1 I was interested in, however Nikos was already in on it - so I spent that time writing up this blog summary + speaking with some other guys who weren't in talks.