DrupalCon DC 2009 is getting started early this year, with the date for session proposals already passed. Palantir has once again submitted a number of sessions, but it's of course very possible that we won't be able to do all of them given how many strong proposals there are this year.

What are we up to? Have a look below, and go vote for those you like! (That's all of them, right?)

One downside of the early proposal period is that we can't really pitch the really cool stuff that Palantir is working on right now, because it hasn't launched yet. So, with appropriate smoke and mirrors, we've pitched two mystery site showcases. (Insert ominous music here.) The first is a higher education/museum web site. Without giving away too much, if you liked our earlier work with the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, you're really going to dig this site! There's work we're doing for it that isn't even mentioned on the DrupalCon site yet, but we'll be releasing it along with the site launch before DC DC.

The second is for a leading public affairs news publication. We can say even less here, other than if you think the deploy module is a cool concept, you want to see this site. We also feature the most elaborate user management system Palantir has ever done (4 different layers of users, only one of them Drupal). See the link for more details.

Speaking of the deploy module, Palantir's own Greg Dunlap is hosting a panel on different strategies and approaches to staging and deployment along with Kathleen Murtagh. Staging is a decidedly hard problem in a mixed system like Drupal, but there are various ways to address the problem depending on your use case and work flow.

On the other end of the development stack, Palantir's lead Themer Colleen Carroll is teaming up with Palantir colleague and Zen theme Maintainer John Wilkins to talk about how to not just skin a Drupal site but theme it properly, in a sustainable, forward-looking fashion. Reader's digest: Zen does 2/3 of your work for you if you just let it, CSS is your friend, and always think of how you would extend the site later. For the full version, vote for the presentation and stop by in DC!

On the subject of Zen, people who understand how it works know how it can save you 50+ hours of theming on every site. If you want to be one of those people, John has also proposed a public vivisection of Zen, covering all the gory details of the the most sustainable and forward-looking theming system available to Drupal today.

In fact, you may want to come to that session just to keep up. There's a strong push to get Zen into core, and to leverage it to kill off some of Drupal's aging core themes and replace them with new hotness. The plan is already afoot, and hopefully we'll have a status update in DC. Bye bye, Pushbutton.

And Palantir's lead Programmer, Larry Garfield, is pitching to be his usual verbose self as well. Drupal guru Karoly Negyesi (chx) has referred to Larry as the person "driving the adoption of OOP" in Drupal, and if you don't know what that means then you'll want to be at Larry's gentle introduction to OOP. No, we're not making all of Drupal object-oriented, but objects are coming and you'll want to know when they're appropriate to use (and when they're not).

Our largest object-oriented system, of course, is Drupal 7's new and shiny database layer, now with SQLite support. Back by popular demand, Larry will be giving an updated version of his Databases: The Next Generation session from Szeged which won the informal award for "most gratuitously geeky slides". Improve your database-fu and your geek quotient at the same time. Now that's a deal.

And, last but not least, a little fun. Want to know how top Drupal developers construct their sites? Come see Whose Drupal Is It Anyway?, a light-hearted quiz-type panel featuring Drupal gurus Larry Garfield (Crell), chx (chx), Jeff Eaton (eaton), and Earl Miles (merlinofchaos). Ask them brain-twister Drupal questions about how to solve business problems and see if they can come up with an answer on the spot. Think you can stump the experts? Vote for the session if you want a chance to try...

(OK, I submitted the session but it was chx's idea originally. I blame him for it.)

Hm, only nine sessions submitted. We must be slacking. And there's more competition in DC than there was in Szeged for presentation slots, so who knows if they'll all get accepted. We're going to try. Care to help?