After over a year's worth of preparation and hard work, it's hard to believe that DrupalCon Chicago is less than six weeks away! DrupalCon is the international event that brings together the people who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform.

Since the end of 2009, we've been working with the Drupal Association to help put together the first DrupalCon in the Midwest. Not only is Palantir one of the event's top-level sponsors, but we're also donating hundreds of hours of additional company time. On top of that, many of the folks on the Palantir team are volunteering their own time alongside other members of the Drupal community in order to help make the event a huge success!

DrupalCon Chicago will be held March 7-10, 2011, and will feature dozens of curated sessions and panels from some of the most influential people and brightest minds within the Drupal community and beyond, as well as countless opportunities for networking, sprints, informal conversations, and more.

The Palantir team will be sharing their knowledge and experience in several sessions that will be presented at DrupalCon, as well as in the exhibit hall Day Stage program.

Highlights include:

• Aphorisms of API Design
  Senior Engineer and Architectural Consultant Larry Garfield will be bending attendees' minds (and possibly some spoons as well) with his session about extensible module-writing.
• Become an IA Superstar: Building Essential Navigation in Drupal
  John Albin Wilkins (who we lovingly refer to as a Mutant Hybrid Developer/Themer) will help people learn how to slice, sort, expand, and tweak Drupal's menu system to build usable information architectures for their websites.
• Faster Front End Performance
  Matt Farina, another of our Mutant Hybrids, will be presenting some strategies for helping make Web pages render faster in browsers. He'll be accompanied by Dan Mouyard of TerpSys.
• Lessons From Drupal 3
  In a session that's a perfect fit for this year's tenth anniversary of Drupal, Senior Engineer Ken Rickard will take a look back at the cutting edge of Drupal in 2001 and explore how much (and how little) has changed since that time.
• Project Management As an Art Form
  I'll be moderating this panel discussion that includes Amy O'Malley and project managers from Treehouse Agency and Phase2 Technology as they share their insights about working on large enterprise-level Drupal projects.
• Rockin' HTML5 with Drupal
  Jen Simmons, the newest member of the Palantir team, will be talking about the awesomeness that is HTML5 and how you can help make it a bigger part of Drupal.
• Workbench: Managing Content Management
  This panel presentation will cover one of the big projects that Palantir has been working on for most of the last year. Workbench is a revolutionary new system for Drupal 7 that helps improve and streamline workflow, media management, and user permissions for adminstrative users. Come hear Palantir's Director of People and Process, Colleen Carroll, join senior engineers Ken Rickard and Robin Barre as they demonstrate how Workbench can help you focus on the content management tasks that are most important to you and your company or organization.

DrupalCon Chicago will have content targeted at attendees of all levels, from those new to Drupal to the most seasoned veterans of the community. Go to http://chicago2011.drupal.org to find out more and purchase your ticket today - we hope to see you there!