This past Friday and Saturday I attended DrupalCampToronto, a BarCamp-style gathering of Drupal enthusiasts here in Toronto. Now, I’m not really a Drupal guy, but now that I’m developing professionally in PHP, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to learn about and discuss one of the more popular open source PHP projects and CMS frameworks.

I’d estimate roughly 100 people attended the ad-hoc conference, spanning 4 rooms at the University of Toronto’s Bahen centre. I attended mostly introductory sessions: a general Drupal overview, an event-site building tutorial, an introduction to module development, and so forth. The event’s highlight, for me at least, was James Walker’s technology-agnostic talk on OpenID – an in-depth continuation of a shorter demonstration he gave at DemoCamp13 last month.

As a beginner I found the Drupal material a little tough to digest, and by Saturday’s end (and a week of fooling around with a local Drupal installation) I couldn’t consider myself among the converts. I did however meet some interesting folk, had two fantastic meals, and picked up a killer event t-shirt – a recipe for success if there ever was one. Thanks to the organizers for a great job.

See also: DrupalCampToronto on Technorati.