We began another full day of Drupal immersion with an eloquent keynote from Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker. Blue Tent has been involved with Drupal so long, we can easily take its open source nature for granted. Its distinguishing features of being community supported, peer reviewed, merit based, and permission-free use, are echoed across the entire internet. It’s assuring to see an organization as large as Mozilla stay true to open source ideals, yet still remain profitable.
One of the benefits of the open source community is that anyone is free to contribute and participate, this freedom to share your talent and knowledge is what makes the Internet itself so compelling. One of the ways we can extend this freedom to our clients is by continuing to refine our websites to make them easier to use so that everyone can be a content editor without special training or experience. As Drupal grows, more and more energy is put into making content creation natural and easy.
As you may have read in the Day 1 summary, this year’s focus is all about expanding the web onto more devices. The shift in how people consume content on the web is only accelerating and the definition of “mobile” continues to evolve. The notion of a “web page” may be dead sooner than you think, but compelling content isn’t going anywhere. We are looking forward to meeting the challenge of giving users the content they want as efficiently as possible no matter the device or screen size. For our vacation rental and real estate clients, this means rethinking the goals of your site depending on how the user accesses the site. Creating a touch screeen optimized property search, beautiful widescreen desktop display and a phone display that showscases local contact info and maps is an exciting challenge.
No matter how much the devices we use to access the web evolve, we will continue working to optimize some information-age old problems. Not many people get excited when confronted with filling out a form, but with new usability info and some CSS3 know-how, we can design forms that seem to read the user’s mind.
Drupalcon has been an exercise in immersion and I’m genuinely excited to be around so many people who are shaping the future of the web. We’re seeing the cutting edge in design, security, usability, stability and content creation.