Media in Drupal 7 – presenting it in Drupal Camp Israel 2013

I attended Drupal Camp Israel – 2013 last week, and presented there about Drupal 7 Media, which is very much the title of my recently published book by Packt Publishing.

The conference organization was overall good, lectures flew smoothly, there were camera men video-taping the whole event so that’s a nice plus to watch the offline lectures for people who couldn’t attend the event. It was organized this year by Roy Segall and Anat Kahana. The conference started out with an opening panel, followed by Jonathan Sacksick from Commerce Guys, who attempted to break the language barrier and explain about E-Commerce in Drupal 7 and Commerce Kickstart in general.

My lecture was following that of Jonathan’s, and started early in the morning at around 10am. I’m not much of a talker so presenting isn’t what rocks my world, but the knowledge sharing and spreading the world is important and good for everyone. The “Media in Drupal 7″ presentation was mostly to discuss about some selected chapters from the book, namely introducing the 7.x-2.x branch of the Media module, and following up with the Canvas Field module which in my opinion not many users know about or even make use of. It’s still released as development version but it’s quite functional and I was even contributing a small patch to it while in the process of writing the book. The presentation concluded with the Google Charts API module which is a great little integration module with Google Charts (duh). It binds to Views, which allows for easy charts creation and manipulation based solely on Views UI administration, as well as exposing an API for programmers to make use of, which is really nice if you want to pull more heavy weight than what Views provides.

My slides: Drupal 7 Media – DrupalCamp Israel – 2013 by Liran Tal

And there’s even a recorded video session from the conference:

And the rest of the videos are available through the YouTube channel or the conference page in drupal.org.il:

To continue with the rest of the day… The rest of the presentations were rather nice. Idan Cohen and Ran Bar Zik, whom are both colleagues of mine, presented excellently and most of all – funny and vivid lectures on Responsive Design and Selenium/Phantom JS testing. Next there were like 3 follow-up presentations about CSS and SaaS from 3 different speakers so there was much overlapping there and that was quite annoying and boring at some point (definitely a good point for future conference organizers to make take into consideration). Amitai Burstein from Gizra had an interesting, yet somewhat marketing oriented presentation about Gizra and how they are doing development. At least we got to hear that they’re really doing a lot to contribute back to the community in their day to day development practice, so that’s always nice to hear. Closing the presentations was Lior Kesos from Linnovate with his lecture about integrating Drupal and the Mean.io stack, which stands for Mongo, Express, Angular and Node.JS, being basically the new “LAMP” kid on the block, JavaScript-wise.The closing panel of the conference also held a lottery for 3 free copies of Drupal 7 Media, courtesy of Packt Publishing. A bit of embarrassing status for me to hand out the books with some pictures, as I’m used to being the “background guy” but oh well, that went rather ok so congratulations for the new owners of the book!