Austin - June 2 - The Drupal Association, the nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the Drupal open source CMS project flourish, is kicking off DrupalCon 2014 today in Austin, Texas, at the Austin Convention Center. More than 3,400 people are expected to attend the event, which offers educational and networking opportunities for the mix of developers, designers, IT managers, agencies and Fortune 500 companies that make up the Drupal community.
“This is North America’s largest gathering of Drupal experts and users, and it allows our community members to bond in person while driving substantial progress for the project,” said Holly Ross, Executive Director of the Drupal Association, which produces and hosts annual DrupalCon events around the world. “It’s also a fantastic networking opportunity, and provides people involved with Drupal a number of great opportunities to expand their knowledge.”
In keeping with tradition, DrupalCon Austin will kick off with a keynote address from Dries Buytaert, the founder of the Drupal project. The address will be followed by three days of keynotes, technical sessions, training and networking events. Speakers include renowned open source expert Erynn Petersen and the SXSW Interactive Festival Director, Hugh Forrest.
DrupalCon Austin comes in the midst of a very exciting time for the community. There are now well over 1,000,000 documented Drupal websites live on the web, and a large share of them are large, complex, high traffic sites. Additionally, Drupal-based businesses have recently experienced unprecedented interest from investors. DrupalCon North America is also a forum for the community to work together on Drupal 8, the powerful upcoming release of Drupal.
Drupal 8 Technical Sessions
DrupalCon Austin will feature a long list of technical sessions focused on the highly anticipated upcoming Drupal 8 release. Drupal 8 will include several new features and capabilities including improved support for HTML5, Web services and mobile support with responsive design capabilities out of the box. Drupal 8 sessions will cover a variety of topics including the new field API, upgrading modules to Drupal 8, improved multilingual capabilities, and the new unified plugin system. DrupalCon Austin will also feature tracks specifically devoted to Symfony, which has several components included in Drupal 8 core.
About the Drupal Association
The Drupal Association is dedicated to helping the open source Drupal CMS project flourish. Drupal powers millions of websites and software applications, from personal blogs to the largest enterprises, media publishers, universities and government agencies, including The Economist, Examiner.com and White House websites. Drupal is constantly being improved by a community of people in 228 countries, speaking 181 languages. The Drupal Association provides the support, infrastructure and funding to grow the Drupal community, help with online collaboration at http://drupal.org, and produces and hosts DrupalCon events and other events around the world. Funds to support these programs come from memberships, sponsorships and donations. To learn more about the Drupal Association, the Drupal Project, and how to get involved and contribute, visit https://association.drupal.org/.
