dc

Designing professional reports in Drupal is not trivial. At the same time, Drupal has one of the most advanced query builder tools (Views) that any CMS (open-source or not) has ever dreamed of. There's clearly a gap.

I've been cooking some stuff up for a while now and will be putting a presentation together for DC Drupalcon. Drupalcon topics are chosen by popular vote, so if you want to learn how to easily create awesome charts, graphs and reports in Drupal, please give a vote: http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/business-analytics-drupal-views

DrupalCon DC was announced today on Drupal.org. We've known it for a while, to be honest, but now it's official! DrupalCon DC will be held March 4-7, 2009 and registration will be opening next week.

The importance of DrupalCon DC is hard to overestimate. Washington, DC is home to many non-profits and PR Agencies, the most active users of Drupal, to date. It's also right next to Virginia's tech hub - the largest tech "settlement" on the East coast. And, being on the east coast, it's also a shorter flight for European Drupallers.

Local firms like Phase2 Technology and DevelopmentSeed have put a lot of effort into making Drupalcon DC a reality, but winning the bid and the announcement is just a start. There will be a lot more tasks to do to make DrupalCon DC the largest and the best DrupalCon. We hope that you will join our efforts.

Sponsorship slots are still available and there are numerous other ways to get involved, as well. Please stay tuned while the official conference site is being born or e-mail

with any questions you may have.

In college, our civil engineering professor opened his first class with an anecdote. According to the story, a bunch of engineers were planning trail paths at a newly built campus in city X. There was a large set of lawns on campus. Instead of building sophisticated simulation models to find optimal trails, the engineers did not pave trails for the first couple months. During these months people walked on certain paths on the lawns enough to cut natural trails through the grass. Eventually, the engineers simply paved those trails. The story concludes that the paths turned out to actually be the optimal trails.

In the modern Web 2.0 world we would inevitably call this story a blazing example of the "wisdom of crowds". Back then, however, James Surowiecki had not yet written his famous essay, so the story was told to us as simply a great example of a common-sense approach.