I'm just in from a fantastic day 1 of DrupalCon here in Szeged. This is a beautiful town and extremely welcoming of us Drupalers - this is how welcoming: the vice-mayor of Szeged himself gave a brief talk to welcome us this morning. He explained that before becoming a vice-mayor he actually used to be a software engineer, and that the City of Szeged administration is very pro-open source, using Open Office and "an open source content management system" for their website. Admitting that it was actually Joomla drew good-natured cries of "we can change that!" from the audience. I think everyone was really chuffed to be greeted like that by such a representative from the city, especially when he clearly shared so many common interests with us. It set the day off on a great note.

Dries's "State of Drupal" keynote followed and provided some very interesting insights, most notably on the current state of play regarding CCK and Views in core. So, apparently CCK, or custom fields in some form, looks set to make it into core for Drupal 7. Views on the other hand is a much more complicated matter as there is so much to the module - the proposed solution seems to be to include just a part of it in core. I'm guessing the contrib part would then be like plugins to provide the amazing advanced functionality we've all come to know and love.

Rasmus Lerdorf presented a keynote talk that focused mainly on the issue of scalability in php frameworks and showed the huge changes that intelligent structuring of code can make to the performance of php-driven pages.

Another highlight of the day for me was the DrupalChix session, organised by webchick, where about 20 of us chatted about how much we love Drupal :-)

Having arrived in Budapest on Monday night and travelled to Szeged yesterday I'm still pretty jetlagged but there's a welcome party tonight which is at the same great spot where most of us ended up last night when there was an informal meet-up... maybe just one beer...

Photo credit: Robert Scales