ShvetsGroup

DrupalConf was held in Moscow on April 23. Our team of 4 people also attended the event, so I want to share my experience.

The conference took place in the VDNKh. This was my first time in Moscow, so I was tremendously impressed by the surrounding buildings and monuments:

The event itself was held in the "Electrification" pavilion:

We were a bit late and arrived in the middle of the report by Andrey Postnikov (andypost). Andrey spoke about the features of Drupal 7, as well as the plans for Drupal 8:

We were extremely surprised by the jam-packed room, nobody, including the organizers, expected this many people:

Vyacheslav Kasikhin was next, speaking about creating online stores on Ubercart:

After that, Alexander Dubovskoy told about the technique of building low cost sites on Drupal. His company Radon was able to optimize the development process to the extent enabling a team of 4 people to develop 60 new sites every month. An important factor is the familiar system and the availability of a distribution, that is easily cloned for a set of new sites.

A further report from Aleksey Kostin lasted for about an hour and a half, however, many liked it because of its depth.

Right at that moment I was talking to Martin Mayer, an active member of Drupal community and the organizer of the monthly drupaller meetings in Munich (Germany ). Martin described how their meetings look like and promised to come to DrupalCamp Kyiv.

After that, the whole company went to dinner and had delicious shashlik:

Meanwhile, there was a Fast Lane Ventures display lottery. In addition, we managed to miss Anna Fedoruk’s report on the organization of a Drupal team development and Anton Zhitarev’s report on document management systems.

We returned to hear the excellent reports by Taras Savchuk and Roman Arkharov about the organization of the Forbes.ru wesbite, its infrastructure and the performance optimization they carried out to make the site load-proof.

Finally, the highlight of the evening, the sex symbol of the Russian Drupal, smart and beautiful Klera Vilenskaya came out with her report:

After that, our valiant Vlad demonstrated live how to create a website in 15 minutes using Drupal Gardens (in the meantime, everyone teased Dubovskoy about how he can make 480 sites a month now):

Finally I did a report about the distributions of Drupal. Obviously, this topic was completely new for everyone, because the questions were only about the estimated costs. Nevertheless, I had a chance to discuss this topic later with those interested.

After that the formal part of the conference was over. We started looking for a place for sort of an after-party and in about an hour and a half, 30 people managed to get into Yolki-palki in VDNKh. Beer fueled the debate on Drupal issues, everyone seemed to have fun.

Conclusions

It was a great trip and experience. Personally for me the most important factor was to finally see and meet everyone I’ve known for so long from drupal.ru and mutual work.

So here are my general impressions from the trip to DrupalConf:

• Moscow and Russia have the money and a great demand for Open Source and Drupal ... but the supply is insufficient.
• There is a demand for training new drupallers in Moscow.
• There is a demand for frequent meetings of drupallers and those interested.

During the conference the potential time of the next event in Moscow was announced - October this year. Well then, see you in October, Moscow!