The past week has been a big one, for the small but growing Sydney Drupal Users' Group [1]. Last week, on Tuesday through Thursday (May 20-22), we manned the first-ever Drupal stall at the annual Sydney CeBIT Expo [2]. CeBIT is one of the biggest technology shows in Australia — and the original CeBIT [3] in Germany is the biggest exhibition in the world. For three days, we helped "spread the word" by handing out leaflets, running lives demos, and talking the talk to the Expo's many visitors.

Volunteers manning the Sydney CeBIT Drupal stall (on Flickr [4]).

Laptops running Drupal for passers-by (on Flickr [5]).

The Sunday before (May 18), we also arranged a full-day get-together at the University of Sydney [6], as a warm-up for CeBIT: there were a few informal presentations, and we got some healthy geeked-up discussion happening.

Full-day "Barcamp" meetup at Sydney Uni (on Flickr [7]).

The meetup was followed by dinner and drinks — and plenty of both (on Flickr [8]).

Thanks to everyone who travelled to Sydney for the meetup and Expo, from places far and wide. Kudos to Michael and Alan from CaignWebs [9] in Brisbane; to Simon Roberts [10] from Melbourne; and especially to the fine folks from Catalyst IT [11] in New Zealand, who hopped over the ditch just to say hello. Many thanks also to everyone who helped with organising the past week's events. Along with everyone (mentioned above) who visited from other cities, the events wouldn't have happened without the help of Ashley [12], of Drew, and particularly of Ryan [13].

I gave a presentation at the Sunday meetup, entitled: "Drupal's System Requirements: Past, Present and Future". I talked about the minimum PHP5 and MySQL5 version requirements that will be introduced as of Drupal 7, and the implications of this for Drupal's future. The presentation sparked an interesting discussion on PDO [14] and on Objest-Oriented-ness. You can find my slides below. Other presentations included: "Drupal's Boost module [15] (by Simon); "The Drupy [16] (Drupal in Python) project" (by the Catalyst guys); and "The Drupal Sydney Community" (by Ryan).