Greetings from DrupalCon 2011 at the Sheraton in Downtown Chicago. Mediacurrent has several team members in attendance, and we have a company information table setup at booth 31 in the exhibit hall if you want to stop by to say hello.

I'll be keeping a log of highlights from the sessions I attend each day during the conference. After Dries' keynote this morning that reviewed Drupal 7 and outlined plans for Drupal 8 process, Tuesday is starting with an overview of the Media module, followed by sessions about client and project management.

Media!

by Aaron Winborn & Jacob Singh

With the last week's release of Drupal 7 and a steady stream of large enterprise sites continuing to migrate onto the content management platform, excitement abounds in the Drupal community. While celebrating all that is new, however, let's not forget about some of the early adopters that helped pave the way for all of the brand-name companies now hopping on board.

Drupal's multi-site feature makes it possible to significantly increase the efficiency of managing a group of similar sites.  Imagine you have a group of clients where each client owns a site within your multi-site structure.  Undoubtedly, many of them will want to take advantage of Drupal's ability to add new features, which makes sense.  But if you're not careful, you can find yourself in a nightmare situation caused by a perfectly reasonable business decision to implement what clients want, when they want it.  The purpose of this blog entry is to provide some best practices that will make managing this kind of system a rewarding experience for you and your clients:

1. Prohibit Site-Specific Functionality:

There was some little reported financial news that came out of Wall Street last month that did not make much traction in the Drupalsphere, but it should – particularly to our partner Acquia and those of us in the open source world. The news was that the darling of commercial open-source business models, Red-Hat, reported that business is good, very good, despite the global economic recession.