Drupal Sprint India will have a non-stop 2 day long sprint where you can contribute by fixing bugs, writing module, documenting upcoming Drupal 7 or helping us in translating Drupal to local Indian languages.

Leading the Drupal documentation sprint is Addison Berry, lead of Drupal documentation project. So, if you are a technical writer or you are interested in documenting the best Open source CMS in the world, this is your chance to work with the real experts and learn a trick or two.

For those who love to code, we will have a large gathering of Drupal programmers around the country who will focus on improving upcoming Drupal 7 release by fixing bugs or migrating modules to Drupal 7. Those of you who love to code for Drupal, this is your chance to contribute and gain karma.

But that is not all. We have few things in store for the non-geeks, who love Drupal for its flexibility and extensive nature. Parallel to sprints, we will be holding talks and workshops to showcase case studies of successful Drupal implementation as well as we will showcase Drupal’s capabilities beyond a CMS. We will showcase Drupal’s ability to integrate with third party softwares such as a CRM, as well as Drupal’s capability to integrate with third party services such as social networking wesbite. So, if you are planning to use Drupal for your next big venture, this is the event for you. Come and meet the best Drupal brains in the country.

So book your calender for October 30-31 2009 and join us at Bhaskaraharya Pratishthan in Pune to be a part of the biggest Drupal event in India ever! And yes, do not forget to register for the event, it will take few minutes only but it will help us in organizing things.

Event Links

Event Website

Register for the event

Event Update

Drupal Sprint India 2009 took place at Bhaskaraharya Pratishthan in Pune. It started at 10 in the morning on 30th October and continued till evening (6pm) of 31st October. 32 hours of non-stop coding, theming, documentation (as the event progressed through the night of 31st October too). It was all fun with lots of happening around Drupal. Parallel to the event, talks / sessions / workshops were organised for the interested people. The overall contribution to the community can be summed like this :

1. Around 10 talks were presented.

2. 2 new modules were developed.

3. 4 modules were upgraded from D6 to D7.

4. 1 new theme was developed.

5. Many pages of documentation were written.

Overall impression of the sprint in Add1sun’s words, “The event was much better than i have attended.”

Download hi-res version of this collage

The ICT EXPO was organized at SKICC on 8-9 October 2009. ICT Expo, a trade show cum conference,  was intended to kick-start work on the Association’s roadmap. The event was organised in a trade show cum conference format and discussions were held about the role of ICTA, private ICT businesses, ICT consultants, and that of the government in promoting the ICT sector in the state. There were a good mix of people from (1) ICT Entrepreneurs From the State, (2) Government Officials,  and (4) ICT Consultants from the State.

The event was attended by Hon’ble Chief Minister of the State, Mr. Omar Abdullah and Hon’ble Minister for IT, Mr. Aga Rohullah Mehdi. Speaking on the event, the Hon’ble Chief Minister said that an integrated IT park will be setup in the valley. The CM said the government had received “expressions of interest” from a number of non-resident Kashmiris who wanted to come back and take part in infrastructure development projects. The CM said there were plenty of projects in the pipeline and ample investments coming into this area. “There is an investment of roughly Rs 150 crores in three projects, viz. SWAN, Data Centre and Common Service Centre.”

The chairman of ICTA, Jahangir Raina said there was lack of awareness about the Information and Communications Technology in J&K and “addressing it is the basic reason behind forming this association.”

Speaking on the occasion, the Minister for IT, Aga Ruhullah Mehdi said that IT projects worth Rs 150 crores are being implemented in the state with main focus to give priority to the local entrepreneurs. He minister said the idea behind implementing these projects is to provide better linkage between the offices. “These projects will enable the common people to have access to any information related to the government or non governmental organizations or about the private sectors like airlines, tour operators etc,” he said. “I invite locals to take up all the projects available with our department. I believe that once the local people are encouraged then the employment will naturally be followed,” he added.

This was followed by a Q&A session where visitors asked questions to the Hon’ble Chief Minister and other panelists about the ICT issues.

Post lunch, BizComp 2009 - an event to promote youth entrepreneurs in the state, was held. This included presentations from the five finalists for this competition, followed by voting by the audience as well as judges. Five cool concepts were presented by the presenters.

1. Book Me a Room - an idea to provide complete room booking system to the valley which will cover all hotels, houseboats, guest houses etc.
2. Gepouch - a business idea to use GPS for flight scheduling, weather monitoring etc
3. JASI - an idea to provide customized accounting systems to micro businesses.
4. Grid Computing - an idea to provide cost effective grid computing services to valleyites.
5. Publicist - an idea to promote brands and provide PR services using PR.20 medium.

Out of these five finalists, Book Me a Room was declared winner and a cash prize of Rs 1,00,000 was awarded to him for put his idea on work alongwith 6 months mentoring for the product by ICTA as well as Mercy Corps.

Overall the experience at the Expo was good. They were able to fetch a good number of quality visitors including professionals, govt officials, students and budding entrepreneurs.

Wordpress 2.8, named for noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. Overall 790 bugs have been fixed, according to the offical blog:

We also fixed over 790 bugs.

What’s New

Enhanced performance

Wordpress 2.8  is way faster to use. It provides faster loading of admin pages through script compression and concatenation. It also features jQuery 1.3.2 and TinyMCE 3.2.3. In addition there has been some improvements to database API also. The official wordpress blog says:

We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

Theme Updater - Browse new themes

With the success of core and plugin updaters, the same has been extended to themes also. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

Enhanced Code Editor

The in-built code editor with Wordpress has been enhanced to CodePress, which gives syntax highlight to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

New Widget API

Another feature of WordPress 2.8 is the revamp of the widgets section. Refreshingly, all your sidebars are visible at once (just like old times) and you can drag and drop the required widgets into them. You can have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Tag Management

A new sub-section has been added to the Posts section called “Post Tags” that contains all the tags that have been used so far in your blog. Just like categories, you can change the Tag name, Tag slug and also add description for your tags.

Other Features

• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four column.
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Option.
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment.
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module.
• Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows.

Related Links

Wordpress 2.8 can be downloaded at -http://wordpress.org/download/

Complete feature list & release notes at - http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8

BarCamp Kashmir is a community driven technology event on the spirit & philosophy of BarCamps. It is an event motivated by the desire of learning by sharing. It is a place where the IT fraternity of Kashmir gets together to discuss/rant/brainstorm/share opinions about Technologies, Trends, Mobile Internet, Hacking, Blogging, Programming, Web, anything about the technology that interests. The event aims to expose IT community of Kashmir to new trends in IT and boost their technical abilities and skills, besides aiming at attracting  IT communities from outside to Kashmir.

All major IT companies of Kashmir participate in the event and talk about technology. Leading experts from the industry share their experiences with the fellow campers to make them aware of the industry best practices as well as emerging trends in IT. The event attempts to bring together professionals from all specialities of IT to a single platform.

This event does not belong to any commercial entity and is purely a community effort. Target of the event is to foster communication between IT users and professionals in Kashmir and bring them together in the form of a community.

Date & Venue

14th of March, 2009. Gandhi Bhawan, University of Kashmir

Register

http://www.barcampkashmir.com

Join the discussion

http://groups.google.com/group/barcampkashmir

Event Photos

Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ehsanquddusi/sets/72157615368177326/

Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ehs4n/sets/72157615439667955/

Event Videos

Blip.tv  - http://blip.tv/file/1893548

Blip.tv - http://blip.tv/file/1891643