This is the feedback on Day 1 of the sessions I attended at DrupalCon Denver this year...with links to the video presentations:
Dries' keynote speech
http://denver2012.drupal.org/keynote/dries-buytaert
Of course, this is definitely worth watching. Major announcements are:
- Integration with Symfony 2 - looks like there will be more use of Symfony than first imagined in Drupal 8
- Mobile experience - for Drupal 8, there will be a much greater emphasis on building a great mobile experience
- Content authoring - improvements need to be considered regarding inline-editing, mobile and localisation
- Drupal 8 release - Feature freeze: December 1st; Code Freeze: February 1st; Proposed release date: August 2013 (DrupalCon Europe)
The Ultimate Drupal Developer Experience - Power Tools for Power Users
http://denver2012.drupal.org/content/ultimate-drupal-developer-experienc...
In one sense, this was a sales pitch for Acquia resources and services. Probably the most significant announcement, though, was that Dev Cloud will be permanently free for developers from April
The demo of how simple releases can be with their tools was quite exciting though - releasing code, databases or files between dev/stage/production is a simple case of drag and drop!
Acquia Network...and particular Acquia Insight is a paid-for service (e.g. $2500 a year), but offers some good site management tools such as code review, performance monitoring, and easy drag-and-drop deployment of code, databases and files.
OG7 - Pride and Prejudice
http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/og7-pride-and-prejudice
Amitaibu was his usual humorous self! This was one of the most revealing and useful sessions of the conference. There are a number of major changes in the new version of Organic Groups (note, though, that it's not production-ready yet). These include:
- More fine control over permissions (e.g. per node type), including, for the first time, restriction of Create permissions per group
- Use of the Entity Reference module, and the ability to have more than one group audience field
- Restriction of the groups (by entity bundle) that can be associated with an entity - this nice feature avoids the need for long list of groups, if the groups are divided into different group content types, for example)
Services Inside and Out
http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/services-inside-and-out
I probably wouldn't recommend watching this session if you want to gain an understanding of Services. Just stick to the online documentation on the Services module (even though that is not as complete as it could be).