As I posted before, I'm super excited about the upcoming Drupalcon in Hungary. I've never been further east than Barcelona, and I never imagined I'd get to spend my first anniversary with Christina in Budapest... I'm definitely up for any sightseeing recommendations for our time there.

The Uberdevs have set some goals for Ubercart at Drupalcon, and one of them is to present and share as much information and knowledge as possible. To that end, we've proposed two sessions and a BoF that I hope folks will find useful (and vote for accordingly).

I'll be doing my Introducing Ubercart session for the third time running, presenting attendees with a brief overview of Ubercart, a look at some advanced feature configuration, and an update on Drupal 6 development (with an eager eye toward the future).

Lyle and I are also planning to present A Hands-On Guide to Module Development aimed at beginner and intermediate developers. We're looking to walk through our module development "best practices" that go beyond coding and security standards into the things we've done wrong and are starting to do right when it comes to structuring/writing code and using Drupal and contributed module APIs. Code samples will be provided... check out the description for more info on the format.

Lastly, we've scheduled a BoF to talk about Ubercart in Drupal 6. We're looking to brief folks on where things stand and where we hope to be in the coming months. Hopefully there will be some good brainstorming and collaboration to make Ubercart's core more solid, consistent, and easy to work with on Drupal 6 and beyond.

We're eager to share and to learn, and we're looking forward to a good time once again.

I made an earlier limited announcement about this event to gauge interest and availability, and now I'm casting the net a little further. Plans have been laid for an Ubercamp on July 25th - 27th to be hosted by the Ubercart team in Louisville, KY and at Lake Cumberland (ideally enjoying Andy's houseboat and some water sports).

The tentative schedule includes a pre-camp hackathon at the Ubercart office during the day on Friday. In the evening, depending on crowd size and wireless availability, we'll head down to the lake and spend the weekend sharing, learning, discussing, and hacking on Ubercart.

While our primary focus will be Ubercart planning/development and testing the Drupal 6 port (codenamed Uber Tuber), Drupallers looking to learn and help where they can are welcome to join us. If you're interested, you can find more scheduling/pricing information and RSVP in the Ubercamp thread. Mike O'Connor will be coordinating things through there as the plans unfold.

We're excited about the chance to meet and spend time with the folks who can make it. We had a great time with other Drupallers interested in and working with Ubercart in Boston and hope to have a wonderful time at the Ubercamp. No official word on the Camp Song yet, but I bet it involves haiku...

Ahh, for once in my life I've registered early for an event. I spent a couple hours over the last few days nailing down the details of an Ubercart excursion to Drupalcon Szeged and am happy to report that the new company credit card works just fine.

Registration on the Drupalcon website is quite an experience. It took me a few minutes to orient myself to the whole process (lots of pages to flip through), but once I got it down I was able to register myself and the other Ubercart devs for the event at the awesome discounted rate. Not only that, I got us rooms in a hostel a few blocks away from the venue (no 2 mile hike a la Boston ) and easy travel between Budapest and Szeged at the same time. The organizers were even able to accommodate the trouble I'm causing by bringing my wife along who needs a shuttle bus ticket but won't be attending the conference.

Of course the best part... Christina will be joining me again, and we'll celebrate our first anniversary in Budapest before shuttling down to hang out in Drupaltown. We're totally excited, and I can't wait to see the folks I know and the new people I'll meet in Szeged.

Ahh, the sweet smell of a fresh release... if I could turn it into a drink, it would be a pumpkin spice latte (or perhaps a caramel frappuccino which doesn't smell as good but tastes great!). Today, 15 months after the initial alpha release, we've released Ubercart 1.0 for Drupal 5. As I said in our announcement, reaching the milestone is quite an achievement, but doing the work alongside a worldwide community of Drupal/Ubercart users and contributors has been a real joy. Many thanks to the countless folks who have made a 1.0 release possible.

If so, you might have used Ubercart unknowingly. Or maybe you did know it and didn't really care.

While Ubercart has plenty of blemishes, it's encouraging to see that both Top Notch Themes and the new Theme Artists sites have found Ubercart to be a workable solution for peddling their wares. Lyle and I will readily confess our lack of theme mojo, and there are plenty of forum threads pointing out our mistakes to prove it. Now after many months of development and patience from the themers patrolling the forums, Ubercart is at a point where Steph et al from Top Notch are actually comfortable enough to offer Drupal themes designed for Ubercart sites. Very cool.

Aside from getting messages like these from a very supportive community, one of the coolest things about working with Drupal and Ubercart is seeing the end result of someone else's job well done. He hasn't been tooting his own horn, but I can't let his work pass by unnoticed. As such, I'll happily advise you to check out the latest beauty from JaceRider and give him some feedback or a pat on the back.

The site is called Transformetrics and includes quite a bit of solid content, a sharp looking store/custom catalog (powered by Ubercart but much prettier than anything I could ever come up with), and a nice little SMF integration. This is all packaged up in a very sharp theme with plenty of polish and pizazz. It's quite a testament to the developer's ingenuity and the flexibility of Drupal in making it all possible. So, my hat's off to folks like JaceRider who can take all the pieces floating around drupal.org, add some personal flair, and churn out such incredible sites.

After a lot of work from the development team and community, Ubercart has decided to stand on its own two feet and announce its candidacy for a 1.0 release. We're excited about Ubercart's non-partisan politics and history of improved e-commerce sites, but several pundits are worried about his lack foreign policy experience. Don't let them dissuade you! There was a time when Ubercart survived a DDoS attack as fierce as any sniper fire when deploying on a non-profit website in Bosnia.

Yes, Ubercart wants you to believe in the fierce urgency of now. Now is the time to update your existing sites to the latest release. Now is the time to post your feedback and bug reports. Now is the time to polish up this release so we can dream of a better future on Drupal 6 and beyond.

Feel free to read more if you want some of the details.

Thanks for reading, and Ubercart for President.

Shai Gluskin has posted pics of me (sometimes doing funny poses) and the audio to my presentation through his podcast page. Many thanks to Shai for getting this up there.

I'll post my presentation slides here as soon as I can get to a Mac, though the bulk of what I showed were demonstration pages from the Livetest. If you want to check out admin stuff without doing a self-install, you can head to http://demo.ubercart.org.

(You can check out the attached PDF for an early version of my slides.)

Well, I'm sitting back at home in Louisville, KY trying to gather my thoughts and recover from a crazy, awesome week in Boston. Here in Louisville we have a foot of snow, but my plane landed fine and I'm happily inside staying warm with my wife. I must admit, coming home to Mrs. Ubercart was the real joy of the week! However, I do love meeting people from around the world that are using and contributing to Drupal, so I certainly wasn't in agony while I was away. This conference was a particular joy to me in that I got to meet face to face with dozens of users, developers, and shops that are using and contributing to Ubercart. I'll expose my naivety and say that I simply had no clue all you folks were out there!

As I chat with the people who stayed behind, I find it hard to describe what the event was like. There are so many things to be said, but I keep coming back to describing the excitement and energy that exists in the Drupal community. Again, I particularly benefited from the energy surrounding Ubercart itself, hence the title of this blog post. This conference helped me to grasp the bigger vision for what Ubercart is and can become and how we can harness all the energy (particularly in volunteer development, design, and documentation hours) to continue to improve the project and expand its reach. Many thanks to the countless folks who introduced themselves and chatted about the project in the halls, over dinners (how about that Ethiopian Uberdinner?), and in a productive BoF session. (I won't name the folks who followed me to the bathroom to chat, too. ) Together, you have all helped me form the vision for Ubercart's future, and I couldn't have done it without you.

My recurring illustration is that I feel a bit like Pecos Bill as he stares down a tornado but somehow manages to lasso it and ride it like a bronco... quite a bumpy ride, I'm sure, but he was able to harness and direct a tremendous amount of energy. While you'll probably never find me in cowboy boots, I am excited about the opportunity to lasso and direct the energy building around Ubercart. Drupalcon has shown me the tornado, and I'm getting ready for the ride.

Many thanks again to the sponsors, organizers, and volunteers who made our week in Boston not only possible but an incredibly fun and productive time.

Ken and Addison have scheduled Greg Bear and myself for a 90 minute session titled Selling with Drupal on Wednesday morning of the conference. Greg and I will join forces to chat about the benefits of using a Drupal based e-commerce solution (as opposed to a dedicated application or a weak integration) and the nuts and bolts of preparing to sell online. Then we'll split up and each have a chance to talk about e-commerce solutions in Drupal. As you might guess, I'll spend my time presenting Ubercart, demoing its simple installation/setup and core features using the Livetest. I'm also excited about the opportunity to showcase some awesome sites that are taking advantage of various core features. We'll close off the session with some group Q&A time and stick around to chat for a while afterwards.

I've posted a brief outline of the Ubercart Overview below. Feel free to comment on either the outline or this event in Boston's history that I was unaware of until today.