Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Three weeks ago I attended DrupalCamp Copenhagen and it was a blast. There are rumours of a new event at some point in the spring and if you have even the slightest interest in Drupal you should show up. No doubt about it.

As an experienced Drupal developer I arrived mostly for the run down of the Apache Solr Drupal integration and other more advanced sessions, but what struck me as the real value was the work done to teach those who were just getting started with Drupal.

These days I do Drupal all day, every day and I work with some extremely talented people. It's easy to forget that we were all beginners at one point and DrupalCamp reminded me. There was a very large group of Drupal newcomers and they were all attentive, interested and before all motivated to learn how this thing we call Drupal works.

The organizers had done a good job assembling a track for beginners. There were general intros (a session called "Don't hack core" - matching one of the tshirts), intro to theming and I did an intro to Views 2 and CCK 2. However my favourite session was "How do I?" by Camilla and Thomas from Peytz. I have worked with both of them extensively and they're Drupal rockstars, but for this session they held back. After a quick demonstration of how to make a tennis club website they started to take questions fro the participants.

Many of the people in the session were in the process of making their first Drupal website and they all had questions. How do I upgrade my modules, how do I modify themes downloaded from drupal.org and so on. There were a handful of more experienced Drupal developers and themers in the room who sat down and helped the rest. There was a great vibe in the room and it gave me energy to see all these people so motivated about learning how to do Drupal.

The photo above is Thomas during the "How do I?" session. I've put up a few more photos, but I didn't take many since I only brought a bulky film SLR with me.