It was a great fun and proud feeling to be a part of worldwide celebration of Drupal 7 Release Party. I attended the one at CIGNEX, Ahmedabad about which Dries twitted a day before on 6 Jan 2011. Although signups for the event almost reached a CENTURY, not all people turned up for the event, yet around 70 attendees were there at CIGNEX, Ahmedabad, D7RP. Few people traveled to the event all the way from Surat (6 Hrs drive by road), from Anand (2 Hrs drive by road) to be a part of Drupal 7 release celebrations.
DRUPAL 7 RELEASE PARTY:
At entrance everyone got in Party mood, they got stamped by D7RP TATOO on hand and was given a D7RP Entry PASS. Toral and Parth captured most of them in camera. Check out #D7RP Pics on Flickr. The place was decorated with balloons in Blue and Green. The venue hall was playing Drupal song in 4 different moods, and a couple more from CivicActions on Drupal Modules and the Drupal Framework song that too were wonderful. And what a co-incidence party was scheduled to begin at 6:30 but it eventually started at 7 PM. (Drupal 7 Release Party on Jan 7, at 7 PM)... WOW!!
There were few people who were working with Drupal as early as 2006 and there were few who have just started on Drupal. Some do not know much about Drupal but want to know more as their clients need it. Couple of people were there who have already started on Drupal 7 projects. Overall it was fun to meet so many people with different interest in Drupal.
The event started at CIGNEX, conference hall with a welcome message and an brief introduction of Drupal 7 by Mrunmayi Desai, she was host for the evening. Followed by speech on "Community Contribution in Open Source Projects" by Kartik Mistri, a Debian Developer and Open Source supporter who contributes to Gujarati Translation in KDE. Kartik, Special Guest of the evening, maintains his blog in Gujarati language, he got all audience get into a discussion on "How to get started in Community Projects like Drupal". Hardik Dalwadi, another Special Guest of the evening, who is Field Application Engineer (FAE) of Central Asia, Australia and New Zealand for Canonical (Ubuntu) and Co-founder of GNU/Linux Community portal, shared his experiences of working with Drupal. He maintains his site GNULinux.in in Drupal.
DRUPAL 7 KNOWLEDGE SHARING: Followed by Knowledge Sharing on Drupal 7 and its features by Mittal Patel, Dheeraj Dagliya (myself), Nikunj Koteja, Nisha Mehta and Gaurav Khambhala. Thereafter, Mruni conducted a very interesting Quiz on Drupal and presented gifts to those who answered the questions correctly. At last Aruna Kathiria gave her thanks speech.
DRUPAL CAKE: Everyone then went to Cafeteria @ CIGNEX for Drupal Cake Cutting. Everyone shouted 4 .... 5 ..... 6 ...... 7 ....... and the 7 cake candles were blown off by Preeti. Cake was cut by Hardik, Preeti (who won most of the gifts in Drupal Quiz), and Mrudang Mehta, Special Guest for the evening and Professor at DDIT, Nadiad. And then everyone got into discussion with each other over Tea/Coffee and Snacks.
And finally we all departed at 9:30 PM, end of a wonderful evening.
Thanks to CIGNEX Management who supported and sponsored the event.
And all Drupllers @ CIGNEX deserves three cheers :) :) :) for making the evening a memorable one.
