Drupal Downunder is scheduled to be held from January 13 to 15; tutorials and workshops will take up the first day with presentations and keynotes to follow on the 14th and 15th. The conference will be held at the Jasper Hotel in Melbourne.

Benjamin told iTWire: "We expected to get at least as many people as attended Drupal Downunder in Brisbane last year, which was around 160, perhaps a few more given Melbourne is a larger city, and the event itself increased awareness among the Australian Drupal community.

"We've now got over 220 people registered to attend which is fantastic. I'd hoped we might reach 200, so this is a really great turnout."

She said that despite it having a steep learning curve, Drupal "does a lot more out of the box, and with a few contributed modules installed it is a great framework for building websites. There's a balance between simplicity and flexibility. The balance with Drupal swings towards flexibility."

When the simplicity of WordPress vis-a-vis Drupal was raised, Benjamin, who headed the organisation of a successful Australian national Linux conference in Melbourne in 2008, said that a lot of people saw Wordpress and Drupal as competitors.

"In some ways, and for some sectors that's true. I prefer to see them as open source stablemates. Equal tools for different jobs.

"In his London DrupalCon keynote last year, (Drupal creator) Dries Buytaert spoke about how large companies are standardising on Drupal - because it can be used equally for small sites, and large sites. In some ways, I see Drupal as the Linux of content management systems - it's amazing how versatile it is."

Thirty-six talks will feature on the program over the two days of the main conference. Benjamin said that about 100 proposals had been received in all, and thus about a third had been chosen.