DrupalCon Austin 2014 kicks off today in Austin, Texas, at the Austin Convention Center. More than 3,300 people are expected to attend the event, which offers educational and networking opportunities for the mix of developers, designers, IT managers, agencies and Fortune 500 companies that make up the Drupal community.

In keeping with tradition, DrupalCon Austin will start with a keynote address from Dries Buytaert, the founder of the Drupal project. The address will be followed by three days of keynotes, technical sessions, training and networking events. Speakers include renowned open source expert Erynn Petersen and the SXSW Interactive Festival Director, Hugh Forrest.

DrupalCon Austin comes in the midst of a very exciting time for the community. There are now well over 1,000,000 documented Drupal websites live on the web, and a large share of them are large, complex, high traffic sites. Additionally, Drupal-based businesses have recently experienced unprecedented interest from investors. DrupalCon North America is also a forum for the community to work together on Drupal 8, the powerful upcoming release of Drupal.

Drupal 8 Technical Sessions
DrupalCon Austin will feature a long list of technical sessions focused on the highly anticipated upcoming Drupal 8 release. Drupal 8 will include several new features and capabilities including improved support for HTML5, Web services and mobile support with responsive design capabilities out of the box. Drupal 8 sessions will cover a variety of topics including the new field API, upgrading modules to Drupal 8, improved multilingual capabilities, and the new unified plugin system. DrupalCon Austin will also feature tracks specifically devoted to Symfony, which has several components included in Drupal 8 core.