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DrupalCamp Edinburgh is this Saturday @ the Informatics Forum: http://dcedinburgh.drupalscotland.org/

It's free and the tracks are Beginners, Community and Business.

They've lined up loads of great sessions: http://dcedinburgh.drupalscotland.org/program/session-schedule

There is free coffee and lunch, but you have to register by 5pm on 18th May.

There is also an afterparty @ Sneaky Pete's: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=149619238439720

If you're down south, Drupal7Camp Leeds is the same weekend: http://2011.drupal7camp.org/

The slogan of the new Drupal website is:

Come for the software, stay for the community

This is the typical process by which people learn that Drupal's ultimate strength is its community, rather than its code base.

Websites are like human beings - any two websites can be very different and do very different things, but under the hood they are 99% the same. Any website (large or small) has very small unique code base, compared to the enormous software stack that it sits upon. Other components in the stack are typically:

Collisions with non-Drupal PHP code

In theory, although I have never see this happen, a PHP library that Drupal is utilising could declare a function or class that is already declared in Drupal. This would cause PHP to abort.

PHP 5.3 has a solution - namespaces (http://php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.php).

Drupal 8 should require PHP 5.3 - it was released 2009-06-30. Drupal 7 requires 5.2 and may just get released this year. When will D8 be released? Probably 2012 or 2013 - by then PHP 5.3 will be 3 or 4 years old.

Earlier this year Drupal core developers were getting a strange error message while developing Drupal 7:

This was causing a lot of head scratching because it doesn't provide any information about what caused it.

Drupal 7 uses exceptions more than any previous version of Drupal and this turned out to be the problem.

PHP exceptions are handled in one of two ways:

In addition to whatever custom modules / themes are required, a typical code repository for a Drupal website also contains Drupal core and stock contrib modules. This makes repositories for Drupal websites much heavier than they need to be. It shouldn't be necessary for these external projects to be checked in - they already have their own repositories on drupal.org.

I have developed a technique to avoid this using Git submodules.

Blue Droplet Video and Storage API now support RTMP streaming with Amazon CloudFront.

Storage API now supports serving with Amazon CloudFront.

CloudFront is the CDN for Amazon S3. It has 14 edge locations:

• United States - Ashburn, VA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Newark, NJ; Palo Alto, CA; Seattle, WA; St. Louis, MO
• Europe - Amsterdam; Dublin; Frankfurt; London
• Asia - Hong Kong; Tokyo

One of the best sites that uses Blue Droplet Video and Storage API is SharkScopers.

I wrote up a showcase detailing how I helped SharkScope put it together.

Blue Droplet Video now uses Flowplayer instead of JW FLV Media Player to play videos in-browser.

This functionality was sponsored by SportsHD Productions.

From May 7, Blue Droplet Video snapshots will depend on the Flowplayer module (by Rob Loach). It has a javascript colour selector. Make sure you have installed and enabled it before upgrading Blue Droplet Video.

You might also want to configure the new player on its global configuration page under site configuration, and also in the Blue Droplet Video field configuration.

Flowplayer is free software (sort of), is highly skinnable, and has really great javascript integration.

I have created a new site called Planet Drupal TV that aggregates Drupal video feeds in a manner similar to how Planet Drupal aggregates Drupal blog posts. Videos can be viewed in-browser or downloaded. There is a "most popular" section that utilizes the fantastic Radioactivity module.

It utilizes my Blue Droplet Video module and its Feed API integration.

I've added all the Drupal video feeds I could find, although it does not work with YouTube feeds as they do not use the enclosure tag. Miro can acquire video from YouTube, so it should be possible in future. Really, blip.tv is much better than YouTube, or you could use Blue Droplet which outputs the source video in the enclosure tag.