<p><imgsrc="http://walkah.net/sites/walkah.net/files/barcelona-2007.gif"alt="DrupalCon 2007 Barcelona"class="left"/>I haven't quite made it to "my bags are packed and I'm ready to go", but I'm only a load of laundry away. Tonight I'm flying off to Spain (for the first time ever!) to take part in the biggest <ahref="http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/">Drupal Conference</a> yet! Boy we've sure come a long way since a handful of us met in a basement in Antwerp just 2.5 years ago...</p>
<p>As usual, I'll be pretty busy. The following sessions should be interesting ;) :</p>
<ul>
<li><ahref="http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/531">OpenID: it's in core... now what?</a> This is going to be sort of a continuation to the talk I gave at the Yahoo OSCMS. I hope to cover a few main things : first, there's still a lot of confusion about what OpenID really is (or more so what it isn't). Hopefully, I can answer some of that. I'll also be outlining where I'd like to take the code moving forward, as well as new technologies in the OpenID community that we - the Drupal community - should keep our eyes on.</li>
<li><ahref="http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/533">Image handling in core... for real this time.</a> It wouldn't be a Drupal conference if I didn't, right? I have not spent as much time as I'd like lately with image/media stuff in Drupal - but a lot of really great people have. I'm hoping to gather as many of said people as possible, survey the landscape of "image*" modules and devise (or at least share my thoughts on) a plan for making Drupal better with images out of the box.</li>
<li><ahref="http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/532">Drupal and SimpleXML</a>. This will be a brand new talk, but one I'm excited about. The <ahref="http://gophp5.org/">move to php5</a> brings lots of advantages for developers, but the one I'm most excited about is the option to ditch all of our old expat-based parsing code in Drupal. As someone who enjoys writing a lot of 'web-services' type code, consuming and producing XML documents in a simple and efficient fashion is exciting.</li>
<p>I'll also be sitting on the <ahref="http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/442">Drupal Association panel</a> and hope to rock out on the <ahref="http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/246">Live podcast</a> (those are always fun). It should be a busy week! :)</p>
<p>I'm super excited to see all the awesome people in the community - especially some of the <ahref="http://angrydonuts.com/">new</a><ahref="http://buytaert.net/">fathers</a>. But, I'm *really* excited to be bringing my son Andrew with me. I love getting to travel as part of the Drupal community and am so excited to get to share a new adventure with my favourite guy on the planet.</p>
