3 great projects I found out about at DrupalCon SF

The Drupal community has grown to be huge, something that was driven home by the ocean of Drupalers greeting me at the con each morning. A great thing about having such a large community is that it means more projects, more than any one person can keep up with, more than one person can even hear about.

Below are three projects I hadn't heard a whisper of before attending DrupalCon that you can download right now.

Open Atrium: A Drupal based, well polished project management system. Sporting a clean look & feel reminiscent of basecamp and the 100% customizability of open source, it's hard to see why a shop with Drupal expertise wouldn't consider this for use as a primary organizational tool.

Context: Developed in conjunction with the Open Atrium project, Context appears to be clean, mature, and very useful. The basic principal of Context is that it allows you to create specific behaviors for elements based on their content type.

Parallel: A clever performance boosting module, Parallel splits elements onto separate sub-domains. Because browsers download 5 or fewer elements at a time from one page, the implication is that this can drastically improve page loading speed. I'll post more after I get a chance to benchmark it.

And a bonus upgrade from left field:

Drush 3: Technically not released yet, but the developer assured me it will be very soon. I have been a huge fan of Drush so I was surprised that I hadn't heard that the latest version was already nearing release. Drush 3 includes some great new features such as site aliasing, better drush_make support, more advanced drush module management, and the ability to use a local copy of drush to work on remote servers. Drush is a powerful tool for managing Drupal installations from the command line. If you haven't looked at it before you should absolutely check it out now.