Welcome to DrupalCon Asia!

It was in 2011 that Srijan spearheaded the first ever Drupal Camp in Delhi. A few meetups had happened before this. There were barely 50­-60 of us at the Camp, but the interest in Drupal was high. Some of us even dared to think that one day we could have Drupal’s global conference, DrupalCon, right here in India.

Cut to today. We have the very first DrupalCon of the continent being hosted in Mumbai in Feb 2016. And when we look back, as a community we have grown and come a long way!

Drupal started off as blogging platform in 2001, today Drupal is recognized as a robust enterprise-ready web content management. The latest release, Drupal 8, has a modern development framework and technical improvements to help us build multilingual, mobile and highly personalized experiences of the future. But technical wizardry aside, the best feature of Drupal is the community. With over 1,000,000 passionate developers, designers, strategists and architects, Drupal has one of the largest open source communities in the world.

Increasing number of Drupalers: India has over 70,000 registered ‘Drupalers’ and is  the second highest source of traffic on Drupal.org, the global community portal

Huge contributions to Drupal code: Developers from various Drupal agencies and IT companies in India have committed their time and skill into resolving critical issues for Drupal. In fact, India had the second largest number of contributors working on the Drupal 8 core.

Camps to encourage Drupal talent: All this has been made possible because of the efforts of Drupal agencies, and their efforts to build the community by conducting Drupal Camps in various cities. Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai and many other cities have been conducting Camps, and it is heartening to see the Camps getting bigger each year.

Global events, the DrupalCons: DrupalCons are mega events for the community, drawing Drupalers from across the globe. These are held across the US and Europe and give the community a chance to come together and participate in learning sessions, talks, code sprints and social events. Indian companies have been regular participants at DrupalCon events in Los Angeles, Austin, Barcelona, London, Munich and more.

IIT, Mumbai will be the venue for the first Drupal Con in Asia: That India is avenue for a DrupalCon speaks volumes about the strength and passion of the Drupal community in India. DrupalCon Asia has lined up top speakers from the Drupal community across the world to present valuable tech and business sessions. A key highlight of the event is the one­day Business Summit, where Drupal agencies will discuss trends and challenges for their businesses today.

Engage with DrupalCon: We would like to invite the Indian IT community to engage with DrupalCon. There are many ways one can do that. IT companies can send their Drupal and PHP developers to attend the event and keep abreast with the latest in code. Companies seeking Drupal development, and Drupal agencies will find the one­day Business Summit very insightful. Companies can also be sponsors for the event, details of which are here.

DrupalCon Asia 2016 is going to be an exciting event, and pathbreaking for the Indian Drupal community. Come, be a part of it!

Contributed by Rahul Dewan an entrepreneur, open source and agile evangelist, blogger, green activist and yoga & meditation practitioner. He is the founder of Srijan Technologies, a 13­ year­old consulting company with expertise in building high­traffic websites and building online business applications.