First written Oct. 4, 2010: I think the highlight of the Summit for me was the DrupalChix BOF (Birds of Feather) held on Sunday afternon. About 12 women who work with Drupal met together for small group informal discussion. It was interesting to listen to each person’s intro as they told how they got started with Drupal.One lady shared how she was teaching a web development course at Western Washington University and she squeezed in a term on Drupal and learned along with her class. A lady from Victoria used to operate a Bulletin Board with over 5000 users. She now has several test sites in Drupal but none in production yet. And Katherine Senzee shared how she received an email from somone claiming to be Dries asking her if she wanted to work at Acquia. She laughed when she saw the email and thought for sure that someone had spoofed Dries’ email address. Upon further investigation, she did confirm that the email was from the real Dries. Katherine now works at Acquia helping build Drupal Gardens, a hosted Drupal website service that’s “better than Wordpress” :-)
I met VJ at DrupalCamp Victoria in 2009. She used to work as a librarian and now works at a radio station whose Drupal website is in serious need of improvement. She hopes to start work on it soon.
Angie said how she recently moved to the Vancouver area and hadn’t had time to get to know her new city. Apart from her neighborhood, she knew the airport very well since she does a lot of travelling for her job with Lullabot.com as consultant and Drupal Trainer.
Of the course the biggest question of the day is When do you think/hope Drupal 7 will be ready to be released? Angie said she hoped it would be ready by December 1. She was looking forward to getting her life back. A big thank you to Angie and the other developers that are working hard to get the remaining 13 critical bugs fixed. After Drupal 7 is released, will we need to wait 3-4 months for many contributed modules to be ready to work with Drupal 7? Maybe not. Many module maintainers have promised to have their modules ready for Drupal 7 on the day it is released.
Katherine Senzee reminded us that we can go to DrupalGardens.com and build a website with Drupal 7. It’s a hosted service where you can design a website and be online in 15 minutes. If you want to add your own custom themes and contributed modules, you can export your Drupal Garden website to your desktop or other web host. The Acquia developers are working hard to ensure that when Drupal 7 is released, you will be able to upgrade your Drupal Gardens site like a regular Drupal website. And the Calendar module will be added soon to DrupalGardens.com
Update: Drupal 7 beta was released on Oct. 22. You can download it and test it here:
http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-beta2 
Comments
Many module maintainers have