Millwood Online

This weekend saw the first Drupalcamp UK, which was held at the BBC offices in Manchester. Over the two days the BBC was taken over by around 80 Drupal geeks who attended 29 sessions split between two tracks. All of the session were held by UK based developers, apart from a few by Robert Douglass of Acquia who came over from Germany for the event.

To do my bit I held two sessions. The first was entitled 'My First Module' where I discuss what a module was, why you should write one, how to write one, and gave an example of a simple module using hook_block() and hook_menu(). The second was entitled 'Using CCK & Views' and gave a very broad overview of what the CCK and views modules are, what they can do, and why to use them.

You'll find attached to this post the slides (in pdf format) and the example module from the 'My Fist Module' session. For more information on all the hooks and functions used within the session goto http://api.drupal.org.

There were no slides or examples from the 'Using CCK & Views' session, but these are the most used Drupal modules so the documentation linked to from their project pages http://www.drupal.org/project/cck and http://www.drupal.org/project/views is very good. One question I was asked (and an example I couldn't get working ) was regarding Views relationships, there is a very good video on http://drewish.com/node/127 explaining this in an easy to understand way.

Overall I was very surprised with the turn out at Drupalcamp UK, and how much of an interest in Drupal there is in the UK. We also started discussing the idea of Drupalcon UK 2010, I think this is a great idea and will work to try and make this happen. If you are in the UK and interested in Drupal please make sure you head over to #drupaluk on IRC Freenode, if you're not sure what this means there is a Drupal IRC widget that will help, just login and start chatting.

Thanks to Dan Smith (Galooph), James Panton (mcjim) and everyone else for doing a great job setting up and running Drupalcamp UK.