DrupalWest - Drupal Refresh

I was at DrupalWest this past weekend, where I presented on theming Drupal using Zen and jQuery. It was well received, with lots of great questions. I discussed the benefits of using Zen as a base-theme and creating sub-themes to work off of. This has a lot of benefits, including taking advantage of updates that the Zen theme has applied to it over at Drupal.org, cross-browser compatibility, and minimising the amount of files that need to be edited (only files that you need to change are overridden).

I learned lots too, picked up some more tips, and I am revitalised to go back to using Git for my development. I use Drupal practically every day of the week, and I try to keep up to date with all the developments, I subscribe to Drupal.org feeds and some of the groups, but the community has grown so large that it is not possible to research all the new modules. I think everyone at the camp came away with new knowledge on Drupal, regardless of how long they had been using it. What it made me do was install Drush on my local development machine: I can't believe I didn't have this tool before, already I find it invaluable as an administrative tool.

The plans are already in development for the next Drupal event in Ireland, several venues have been suggested, and if one of them is nearby here I have already volunteered to help organise it, if it's further afield I can help remotely too. Either way, I'll volunteer to present too.