Drupal Gardens makes setting up a Drupal site rediculously easy. You can't do any fancy theme overriding and stuff like that, but for designers, who like to use wordpress this will kick it's wordpressy ass. It makes it super fun and super fast with all the power of drupal 7.

There are so many little words all over the place! Drupal does not have one way of dealing with all those little things, but they fall into 3 categories.

1. The user interface

2. strings that were created by the admin

3. content submitted by users, usually nodes

Core: locale, content translation

Contrib: i18n, localization client

admin/settings/languages

Browser settings

Drupal user preferences

Path prefix: the language prefix appears in url

Domain name: you can use sub domains to switch

Angie Byron, lead maintainer of Drupal 7 gave a nice talk on the upcoming features in Drupal 7. She started off the talk by making it very clear that things will break. "We'll break your code, not your data," is the motto.

Features:

During installation, you can choose minimal or standard installations. Minimal gets rid of the annoying admin modules that come with Drupal 7.

Fields can be translated and there is a new translation interface

Database Abstraction Layer. It now supports any PDO supported database, not just Mysql.

I just got out of Dries Beytaert's keynote presentation at DrupalCon 2010 in San Francisco. I can tell Dries is a realist. In many ways I think he downplayed the exponential growth that will probably take place with Drupal in the coming year. He was very modest about it, but I think it is clear to Dries as well as everyone else here that there is going to be a lot of Drupal adoption going on very soon.

I now totally understand why they are focusing so much on user experience updates in Drupal 7

Sometimes, when building a drupal site, you are required to allow administrators to create posts with teaser images that only display a small portion of a larger image.

Sure, they could use photoshop, they could crop the image, they could upload that...right? Probably not...not all drupal users are that savvy. Experienced bloggers are used to this sort of thing, but "blogs" are not just for bloggers anymore and it's very common for marketing managers, CEOs, small business operators etc. to ask for use basic blog functionality on their web sites.

So...with this new year, I've decided to start a web log. I've always avoided this predicament. I've never seen myself as having enough whitty, pithy, interesting things to say as to necessitate an actual web log, but I needed a new website, and all the cool kids are doing it...so, here we are.

That...and...I work at an interactive marketing agency where day in and day out I'm either building or consulting folks on building these silly things so it only makes sense, I get into it myself.

Most importantly, it's a place for me to upload pictures of my family. Why not.