I sat down at my computer, checked my email, read the latest rants from Reed on IRC, cheered that IE8 was passing the acid2 test, and got down to fixing some bugs. The chanting drowned out my keystrokes and it was hard to concentrate.

Then, as if a haze had cleared, I understood the chanting:

Ken Kovash. Ken Kovash. Ken Kovash.

Oh wait. That wasn’t a dream. That was everyone else celebrating Ken Kovash Day.

Oh, and going to the Slashdot 10-year anniversary party isn’t an excuse to miss this. You can come to PDXPHP, talk about L10n, fill up on pizza, and still show up fashionably late to the Slashdot party.

If you followed the saga when we were trying to launch, you know we ran into some headaches with scaling the code to the amount of traffic that goes to the site. I’ve already written about building a localizable site with CakePHP (and then wrote some more, and a little more), but I don’t think we’ll have time to get into the details like that. I expect this will probably be a higher level discussion, more about concepts and what we tried that didn’t work.

You can read the full description if you’re interested, although I don’t think we’re going to be able to cover all that in the 45 minutes. If you have anything you want me to cover for sure, let me know; and if you’re going to be at OSCON, feel free to drop by.

This was my first time attending one of their meetings, but I think the turn out was impressive for such an informal get-together (I’m guessing around thirty people showed up). There were several newcomers to Drupal that were just wondering what the buzz was about and how it could make their lives easier. After some introductions, the talk flowed mainly around nodes vs. pages, views and CCK. I think a lot of people got their questions answered and got a jump start on their projects.

On the multilingual side of things, I was not so fortunate. By the end of the night, I didn’t find anyone who was already using Drupal in more than one language. A couple people mentioned waiting for Drupal 6 with it’s pile of i18n additions, but that’s not really an option at this point since I need to get something up and working. So, my plan is still to stride boldly forward, armed with a list of modules people mentioned (I’ll post more on that once I have a chance to use them), and my newfound friend.

After the meeting was over, I lost track of time while meeting people and sharing ideas. Eventually our conversations migrated into the parking lot, and we decided we should all go home and sleep before the sun started rising again.

Overall it was definitely worth going – I didn’t learn what I went for, but I got some good ideas (not just about Drupal!) and met a bunch of new people. If you’re in the area and have an interest in Drupal, it’s a great place to meet others and see what kinds of things they’re doing with it in the real world. Thanks to Sam Keen for organizing and the bus project for providing the meeting space.