A Look Back at Drupal 2009
This year has turned out to be quite a year for Drupal. Landmark websites were launched, great educational resources were made available in both book and online instructional format, and awards were won. With the release of Drupal 7 just around the corner, now is a good time to look back at the Drupal highlights of 2009.
Best Drupal Websites
Thousands of new Drupal websites were launched in 2009. Obviously, we cannot mention all of them, but a few stood tall above the crowd. The new White House website is a thing of beauty. It is huge, but very well organized and features a great new design. Duke University's new webiste is stellar, as is Now Public, a recently launched citizen journalism website featuring "Crowd Powered Media."
Top Drupal Books and Tutorials
Again, as the Drupal community's population explodes, we realize we can't catch everything, but we do our best to mention everything we came across that we found helpful. Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting by Emma Hogbin and Konstantin Kafer answered a lot of my questions and got me past some difficult roadblocks. I also enjoyed Drupal 6 Social Networking by Michael Peacock and Ben Finklea's Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization.
Acquia and Lullabot added a wealth of education video and audio podcasts to their websites. Tom Geller at Lynda.com released a great new series of Drupal videos called Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data. And even though he is currently on hiatus, Bob over at Mustardseed Media churned out several helpful tutorials on such diverse topics as the Twitter module, Panels 3, the Calendar module, and more
Drupal Awards 2009
Drupal continues to pull in the hardware. Both the Best Open Source PHP CMS Award and the inaugural Hall of Fame Award Open Source CMS were given to Drupal by Packt Publishing. Drupal also pulled in a Webware 100 Award for the Social & Publishing category.
Drupal Community Growth
The Drupal community is blossoming at a staggering rate. DrupalCon Paris had a nice turnout and DrupalCon DC completely sold out. Most impressive, however, is the amount of Drupalcamps that popped up all over the country. It was here that the top Drupalers mingled and shared their thoughts on all things Drupal. Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Denver, Philadelphia, Montreal, San Francisco, and San Diego all put together great Drupalcamps. I'm sure many great websites, educational resources, and awards were not included in this post. What were your favorite new Drupal websites? Which Drupal books and tutorials would you recommend? Let us know. We're always looking to improve our Drupal knowledge.
