Vote for Drupal at SXSW!

Since my last post about Drupal at South by Southwest, there have been a couple of new developments to share:

First, the main SXSW Web site has been redesigned and relaunched as a Drupal site! Kudos to the festival organizers for picking Drupal to run the site for what’s probably the coolest music, movie, and interactive festival in the country.

Second, the Interactive Festival Panel Picker is now live. This site gives you the opportunity to review all of the more than 1200 panel proposals that were submitted for the 2009 festival and vote for your favorites. I’ve submitted two proposals:

• Yes, You Can Make Beautiful Sites with Drupal! is a panel of Web gurus sharing their experiences working with creative partners and colleagues to develop visually stunning and highly functional Web sites using Drupal. This session will incorporate some material from the Dos and Don’ts of Designing in Drupal talk I’ll be giving at Drupalcon Szeged in a couple of weeks, but will also include insights from other people directly involved in designing and building Drupal sites.
• Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny is a session based on an idea that we came up with last year at SXSW while planning Content Management System Roundup. The concept here is that we would hold an Iron Chef-style competition where three teams of Web developers would build out an identical site for a worthy not-for-profit organization in three different CMS platforms (including Drupal), with the winner being decided by the organization based on which site meets their needs best.

I haven’t had an opportunity yet to peruse the full range of other panel suggestions for this year, but I did notice that there’s at least one other Drupal-oriented session, Drupal With Its Pants Off, that’s been proposed by Jeff Eaton, who was also part of the Content Management System Roundup panel last year.

Voting runs until August 29, and anyone is allowed to create an account and register their votes, whether they’re planning to attend the festival or not. If you’re interested in having Drupal represented at SXSW, voting for these sessions is a great and easy way to show your support.