Also available, are travel and lodging tips. We’ve secured a conference block in the nearby Doubletree, so be sure to check out the details on the camp wiki (Thanks to Amanda Etches-Johnson for setting it up). Be sure to put your name down for a lightning talk or birds of a feather session if you’re so inclined. We have three distinct spaces available for the camp–an auditorium, a conference room, and a technology center and we’re planning a combination of lightning talks, group discussion, and workshop-ing throughout the day. We’ll also provide several tours for those who want to spend a little time getting to know our new building.

If you’re not going to make it in person but still want to join in on the event, we will plan on Ustreaming at least two of the rooms all day and keeping the chat rooms and twitter up for questions and back-channel discussion (#drupal4lib).

See you on the 27th!

Here is the official announcement:

Darien Library will be hosting a “Drupal4Lib Camp” on  Friday, February 27, 2009 from 9 am to 4 pm.

The camp will be an  opportunity for libraries who are working with Drupal, or interested in  implementing Drupal, to get together, share experiences, solve problems, and  collaborate. This unconference will be a combination of a series of 10 min  lightning talks given by Drupal veterans in the morning followed by break-out  sessions in the afternoon.

Audio and video from Drupal4Lib Camp  sessions will also be streamed lived online.

There is no registration  fee. However, participation is limited to 70.  Please register for the  Drupal4Lib Camp at http://drupalib.interoperating.info/node/167

Many thanks (and fond farewell) to Leslie Burger, who initiated and sponsored the Transformation Track sessions. I didn’t go to three of them so, alas, no T-shirt for me. I felt that the technology session (I co-chaired with Alan Gray) was very good, but how could it not be with speakers like Lori Ayer, Roy Tennant, and Casey Bisson? Incidentally, if your library is looking to retain the services of a first-class library consultant, consider getting in touch with Lori. She has made her presentation available online. Casey has also posted his presentation with commentary. Thanks to these three for a fine program.

Also, Eli Neiburger was kind enough to join me and be the spokesperson for AADL at my “Building the Next Generation Public Library Websites with Drupal” talk. My slides are now available and can always be found on my files page.

Sunday was a crazy day for me, I had about 15 minutes to grab a quick snack and head over the the Top Tech Trends panel. Kudos to LITA, who already has audio online. I really enjoyed participating in the discussion.

OCLC hosted the Sunday night bloggers salon. A big thanks to them for putting on such a fun and raucous gathering of good people. It’s always nice to catch-up with folks and put faces to names.

I had never met Jed Moffitt–King County‘s head of technology. He’s a super guy who put together Monday’s “Wiking the Blog and Walking the Dog: Social Software, Virtual Reality, and Authority Everywhere.” A session name that was sure to draw a crowd, and it did. I only wish we had more time. My slides for this presentation are online as well.

Drupal 4.7 sports a number of great new features. I’m most excited about the new search engine which does a much better job of indexing the site and allows users to do an advanced search. Searches now actually return meaningful results. Other features include a new Ajax-enabled content creation system with nifty improvements such as re-sizable text fields, collapsible elements, a file upload system that doesn’t require authors to leave their work, and live menu updates. On the development side, these new features are accessible via the new form-handling system. In other words, coders can easily incorporate these new Ajax elements in their own work. Theme developers will be happy with the ability to create an infinite number of regions–nice to achieve that highly-polished CSS look. I think a couple new block types were added as well.

Another great feature is the wiki-style revision system that allows editors to roll-back their work and leave editorial log messages (a very useful feature in large, collaborative environments). Commenting benefits, as well, with the ability of site administrators to manage and moderate multiple entries at once. Finally, Drupal 4.7 supports free tagging. Not something we’re using at this point, but, from my point of view, it means that the engine is there for future module work. I have a feeling I’ll be using those hooks for some forthcoming feature upgrades on the website itself…

The upgrade was fairly smooth. Drupal ships with an update script which ran flawlessly, but that’s the easy part. A fair amount of prep-work was done ahead of time to ensure that all of our custom modules were 4.7-compatible. Basically, this meant updating all of our form-handling code to handle the new system. We also segregated all of our own code and theme information from Drupal’s using the multi-site capability. This means that we can easily keep track of our own work without it getting mixed up with the vanilla code-base. This wasn’t completely necessary, but it was worth the work because it’ll make all future upgrades much easier to do. Doing things this way is also in-line with my philosophy of never touching stock code unless you absolutely have to.

The long and the short of this whole upgrade means that our users will probably not notice a lot of difference, but we’re now in a good position to work on AADL 3.2. And that they will notice.

For more info, check out these Drupal videocasts:

• An overview of screencasts
• What’s new in Drupal 4.7
• Installing Drupal 4.7
• Upgrading to Drupal 4.7
• Contribute your own Drupal Videocast