Calendar

The State of Drupal

dries — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:07:29 +0000

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

to-do

Drupal 7 Status Update and Next Steps

webchick — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:39:26 +0000

This talk will provide an overview of the state of Drupal 7 and what our next steps as a community will be in order to see this fantastic new release come to fruition. Topics will include things such as:

* Overview of Drupal 7 development cycle.
* Shout-outs to the core development team.
* New and exciting features to look forward to for end users, designers, and developers.
* Advice for those who wish to start porting their modules and themes.
* What's left to do before release, and how you (yes, you!) can help.

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Angela "webchick" Byron is the Drupal 7 core maintainer, a Lullabot, co-author of the O'Reilly book Using Drupal, and recipient of the Google-O'Reilly Open 2008 Source Award for Best Contributor. She got her start as a Google Summer of Code student in 2005 and since then has completely immersed herself in the Drupal community.

Explore the glory of Drupal 7's improved render and theming systems

weitzman — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:26:13 +0000

One focus of Drupal 7 has been to empower module developers and theme developers to more easily achieve the look the want for their final output. We added hook_page_alter() where a themer or module developer can alter any part of the page just before it is rendered. At this point, the page is still a raw array that can be easily manipulated.

Speaker bio:

Moshe Weitzman has been a consistent contributor to Drupal core and Contrib since November 2001 (i.e. before drupal.org was born). As such, he has pretty much touched the whole core code. He maintains the Organic groups, devel, and drush projects, the core bootstrap code, and the groups.drupal.org web site. He is the #1 Drupal developer on Ohloh. He is also a member of the Security team and a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association.

Sustainable theming: How to take a vacation.

caroltron — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:22:45 +0000

We all want to take vacations, and we all want our sites to grow beyond without us holding its hand, or at least some of us do.

JohnAlbin and I will be co-presenting a session on how to think strategically about your theming so that it can stand on its own legs. At Palantir.net we strive to reduce the amount of bugs related to theming after a site has launched. It can be difficult to do, but with a little patience and planning you can build a theme that works on its own from a toolkit of design elements.

Speaker bio:

Colleen Carroll is Lead of Theming team at Palantir.net She is also the maintainer of the Austin theme. John Wilkins is a Senior Themer at Palantir.net and the maintainer of the Zen theme (among other things).

Co presenters:

JohnAlbin

Communicating design - Sketching your way to understanding.

yoroy — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:50:38 +0000

“Clear communication between web developers and their clients — and among members of the development team — is key to the succes of any web project.”

Where code is low-bandwidth and can generally be well discussed and assessed with words, design is very much high-bandwidth. You just can't discuss it using words alone. So, let's draw some pictures!

Through a case study of how I worked with a development team redesigning a community web site, we'll discuss how sketching can help in two ways:

Defining the right question to ask.
Finding the best possible answer.

Speaker bio:

Roy Scholten is an interaction designer based in Hilversum, The Netherlands. He's one of the people working on a better Drupal user experience. He runs his own small design studio at yoroy.com

Intro to the Field API for Module Developers

bjaspan — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:34:23 +0000

Drupal 7 includes the new Field API which provides "CCK functionality" in core. The Field API supports attaching custom data fields to nodes, users, remote data objects, and any other type of entity. This session introduces the Field API for module developers and shows how it differs from Drupal 6's "hook_nodeapi" approach.

Speaker bio:

Barry Jaspan has been a Drupal contributor and core developer for over three years. He developed the Schema API and is the team leader for Field API. He is a Principal Engineer at Acquia, Inc. and is an entrepreneurially-minded computer programmer with a strong focus on computer security and privacy. Prior to Acquia, Barry created interMute, the first commercial web annoyance blocker, and Spamnix, a spam-blocking product. Barry is a maniacal whitewater kayaker and rock climber and generally spends his time wherever rocks, water, and gravity meet.

Functional Fips: PHP basics for themers

emmajane — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:55:50 +0000

There are a lot of theme snippets available in the Theme Guide. There is not, however, a lot of information about PHP which is the language that makes up these snippets. If you're tired of copying, pasting and praying and are ready to understand some of the magic behind those snippets, this session is for you!

In this session you will learn how to manipulate and master:

The very, very basics of PHP and the popular theming engine PHPtemplate
Variables and tpl.php template files

Speaker bio:

Emma Jane Hogbin has been working as a Web developer since 1996. She is well known in the Drupal community not only for her technical knowledge, but also for her engaging and humorous means of bringing Drupal to a wider audience—such as the Drupal socks and their GPLed pattern. Her wildly successful theming book, Front End Drupal (co-authored with Konstantin Kaefer), was launched this spring. Emma volunteers with the Drupal documentation team and blogs at emmajane.net.

Social + Media: What We Need Next

chrisheuer — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:38:24 +0000

The Media Revolution launched with NCSA Mosaic has been underway for 16 years and I have been a front line advocate for the web and social computing throughout. I believe that "the great restructuring" underway requires us to think more holistically about how to think about how people and organizations are using Drupal. We need to bring a new perspective to Drupal development in order that it can serve the greatest good. I also believe the answer really is "42" so perhaps I am living in a bit of fantasy.

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

Chris Heuer launched his first interactive agency, Guru Communications, out of South Beach, Florida in 1994. He has since helped numerous start-ups with go-to market strategies, product design, web site development, online marketing campaigns, e-commerce and what is now widely referred to as Social Media. Chris formed Social Media Club in March, 2006 to educate professionals on the greater significance of what it means to be social and how media production/consumption has changed. To this end, Social Media Club has local groups around the world promoting media literacy, encouraging the sharing of lessons learned, promoting industry standards and discussing questions of ethics. More recently, Chris launched a new kind of ad-hoc consultancy appropriately called AdHocnium. Together with a senior team of "Creative Catalysts" from around the world, AdhHocnium developes innovative growth strategies for global client that leverages emerging technology and social media.

Web Typography Fundamentals: From Em Dash to Hanging Punctuation

markboulton — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:17:23 +0000

Typography is at the very heart of the web. Unfortunately, web typography generally sucks. This presentation will help anyone – developer or designer – not suck at typography. From Em-dashes to hanging punctuation, we'll cover simple fundamentals of good typography for the web.

What will be covered in this presentation:

Typographic Structure
Hierarchy and language
Whitespace and typographic colour
Typesetting on the web
Tables, lists and forms
@font-face and font embedding

Speaker bio:

Mark Boulton is a designer from the UK and runs the design studio behind the recent redesign of Drupal.org and Drupal 7 UX (working alongside UX designer, Leisa Reichelt). His life outside of Drupal consists of working for other clients (yes, we do that!) such as ESPN, Warner Brothers and the BBC. He also writes the odd book, runs workshops and speaks at conferences.

Make a Module: A Hands-on Intro to Module Development

mbutcher — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:21:08 +0000

Interested in learning how to develop a custom Drupal module? This is a practical session designed to introduce you to module development.

Get hands-on. Bring your laptop and build your own module as we go. (Of course, you're welcome to just listen.)

We will cover:

Basic module architecture
.info files and .module files
Using hooks
Using existing Drupal APIs
Finding documentation
Debugging
Installing and uninstalling

By the end of this session, we will have created a functional module.

Speaker bio:

Matt Butcher is the author of "Learning Drupal 6 Module Development" and "Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery". He is a professional Drupal developer at Palantir.net.

All youre (x)html(5) are belong to us!

mortendk — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:10:43 +0000

Drupal comes with a lot(!) of predefined markup & css.
Modules are adding styles and markup to the themes and so themers have limited control over whats going on inside the theme - that works well for some themers - others not so much.. or to put in other words:

"WTF does all this bib markup do in my bib site - aaargh for bib sake, Gimme lean mean mother bib 'ing markup"

The Mothership is a theme thats build in the opposite way normal drupal practice: clean out "useless" markup & remove classes that clutters op what should be beautiful source.

Speaker bio:

mortendk is a markup loving design geek straight outta copenhagen who loves all finer things in life: Drupal, Rock n Roll, bulldogs, CSS, the GF, XHTML, beer tasting, metal \m/, & nerdy stuff (miniature painting!) and fiddling with themes Runs a one man theming army shop: geek Röyale Been involved with the D. since 4.7 - and still loves it, even that he whines abit about the lack of designers in the D.

Making Drupal Dance: Techniques for Beautiful, Core-worthy Designs

JohnAlbin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:29:18 +0000

For too long the Drupal community has lamented the lack of high-quality themes that are freely available. But the solution to this problem is much simpler than we’ve ever thought. We need learn how to communicate with the Design community and make Drupal dance!

[ Edit: Given the state of the miscommunication between Designers and Developers just before Drupalcon Paris, I’ve re-written the first half of my presentation to talk about the improperly-named “Designer vs. Developer” problem. ]

Speaker bio:

In the Drupal community, John is best known as JohnAlbin, the maintainer of the Zen theme, which is a highly-documented, feature-rich “starter” theme with a powerfully flexible CSS framework. John currently works with a bunch of really cool Drupal developers and themers at Palantir.net.

Drupal Ingredients for your Website Dish, or Modules You Should Use on Every Site

coltrane — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:11:48 +0000

With thousands of community contributed modules on drupal.org you have a wealth of features available to use, but how do you know which ones are right for your site? We'll be giving a brief overview of the modules which are just so handy you'll probably want to use them on most of the sites you build. We'll talk about modules that fit into recipes for certain website "flavors", such as community and social networking, media, and commerce.

You can view the session slides at http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcv55663_82d9m66bdz

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Brad (beeradb) Bowman began working in backend systems development at Aten Design Group in 2003, while still in college. Today, Brad handles implementation and customization of backend systems at every stage of Aten projects. Ben (coltrane) Jeavons is a senior developer at pingVision, a consultancy providing interactive design and development services for all media, specializing in Drupal. Greg (greggles) Knaddison is a partner at Growing Venture Solutions a full service website consultancy based in Denver and New York.

Co presenters:

greggles

beeradb

The state of Drupal performance and scalability

davidstrauss — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:06:40 +0000

Drupal 7 has made major leaps forward for performance and scalability. In this presentation, we'll walk through the advances made, the engineering/testing behind them, how they help medium and large sites, and the kind of infrastructure required to deploy them.

Some current ideas:

DB-TNG's database replication support, including session flagging for not using replicated servers
Modular storage back-ends for fields
Modular query engines for Views (including Solr)
Reverse proxy caching headers
Lazy session creation for anonymous users
Tracker 2 in core (#105639)

Speaker bio:

Four Kitchens co-founder David Strauss has gained world-class Drupal experience from his work with the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, The Economist, Mansueto Ventures, Lifetime TV, NBC-Universal, and the Internet Archive. David is well-known in the Drupal community as an expert in scalability and database optimization and is a member of the Drupal.org Infrastructure Team. He has attended several Drupal coding sprints and served as a chair on the session committee for Drupalcon DC 2009 and is a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association.

Co presenters:

Damien Tournoud

Agile Drupal Development with Scrum

pips1 — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:45:53 +0000

Scrum is a collection of working techniques, structures, roles and methods for project management in an agile development process. Because every project is unique, Scrum is designed in such a way that it can be arranged to suit different situations. Techniques of Scrum will help you overcome issues that traditional methods could not resolve, drive projects at a fast pace and keep everyone engaged.

This introductory session on Scrum is designed for freelance Drupal developers and Drupal development shops that have never used Scrum for their projects before.

The session includes:

Speaker bio:

Philipp works as a project manager at Liip, a Swiss web development company that uses Scrum very successfully with their client projects. His co-presenter Mori Sugimoto is a freelance web consultant / developer based in London and has used Scrum to manage his work with clients.

Co presenters:

mori

Functional Interactive Design

Laura Scott — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:04:49 +0000

Ever walk up to a door and pull on the handle, only to discover the door is push-only? Do you really know how to operate your clock-radio? Doors may be pretty, clocks may look cool, but when we have to actually use them, the measure of their design changes.

Same with websites. A website may be pretty at first blush, but can you find what you're looking for? Can you do what you want to do? Can you even figure out what you're supposed to do?

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Laura Scott is President and Creative Director of pingVision, an interactive design and development company founded in 2005, based in Boulder, Colorado. Laura has been designing websites since 1995, working in video, film, television, and multimedia. Since 2004 she has been working with Drupal almost exclusively for web development. Laura has presented on design and technology at BlogHer 2006, OSCMS 2007 and DrupalCon Boston 2008.

Semantic Web fundamentals

DanBrickley — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:24:48 +0000

The World Wide Web is the most successful linked information system that has ever existed. Hidden away in the original 1989 CERN memo proposing the Web are several ideas that are only now reaching fruition via W3C's RDF technology stack. This talk will show in practice how the full 1989 vision for the Web is being realised using RDF-based technologies (RDF/RDFa, SKOS, SPARQL, FOAF, OWL), and how the two concepts of information linking, and information layering are all you really need to understand a powerful suite of tools and standards for Web-based data sharing.

Day:

Day 4

Speaker bio:

Dan Brickley is best known for his work on Web standards in the W3C community, where he helped create the Semantic Web project and many of its defining technologies. He currently divides his time between "future of TV" research at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, advisory work for the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, and nonprofit activities around the 'Friend of a Friend' project.

What's new in Panels 3

merlinofchaos — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:50:47 +0000

Panels 3 was an unexpected but necessary major overhaul of Panels 2. In fact, it should probably not really be called Panels, as it is just a tiny piece of it. Instead, Panels 3 is really a Page Manager and it gives you vast amounts of control over your site.

See how this works, how Panels is extended, and how this is really just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Speaker bio:

Earl Miles is well known within the community for his contributions to the Drupal projected, particularly Views, Panels and improvements to the theming system in Drupal 6.

Continuous Integration and Drupal

joshk — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:40:44 +0000

Note: this description needs to be updated.

Austin Smith, David Strauss, Josh Koenig, Stewart Robinson and Moshe Weitzman present real-world lessons learned and practical how-to examples for creating a robust Continuous Integration environment for enterprise-level Drupal development.

Speaker bio:

Josh Koenig (josh_k) is a co-maintainer of groups.drupal.org, co-founder of the Drupal Dojo, and a founding partner and CTO at Chapter Three, where he has worked on projects with (among others) PBS, Intel, Stanford University and The Economist.

Co presenters:

davidstrauss

boombatower

Amazon

Building blocks for your module's UI

Bojhan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:58:54 +0000

There are more interface patterns available to Drupal module developers then ever before. Drupal has standars for writing code. But what about the interface?

Tabs, accordions, fieldsets, overlays, hover links etc. When to use which?

Join Bojhan Somers and Roy Scholten from the UX-Team for a tour of the available options and some advice on when to use each one. Consider this talk the kick-off for getting our ui-pattern library in shape. It's been asked for a lot.

We will cover the following topics :

UI-Pattrens

Speaker bio:

Bojhan Somers is UX-Team member and has been active in Drupal's usability the past two years. Works as User experience consultant on (web)applications, websites and devices.

Co presenters:

yoroy

Staging Drupal: Managing your project in multiple environments

ebeyrent — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:46:42 +0000

Abstract:
Building complex web applications, especially in a team environment, requires more than just code and geeks; it also requires strategy. Drupal shops need to understand how to manage the platform in multiple environments and in all phases of the application lifecycle.

Agenda:

Drupal development strategy
Multiple environments
- sandboxes, staging area, production
Managing Drupal with Subversion
- Repositories, branches, tags, externals, template files, etc

Speaker bio:

Erich has 12 years experience in web technologies, specializing in open-source solutions and application integration. He is currently the Vice President of Engineering at CommonPlaces e-Solutions, LLC, and led the team that built Greenopolis.com, an environmentally-themed social networking and education site. Erich also led the team that built Twolia.com, a social networking and e-commerce platform for independent female artists that mimics Facebook, Etsy.com, MySpace, and YouTube. Erich is the author of the Permissions API module, and maintains the Drupal 6 version of the Signup Restrict By Role module. Erich lives in New Hampshire with his wife, two sons, and two weimaraners.

Co presenters:

miche

cpliakas

Designing Grid Systems Does Not Begin And End With 960

markboulton — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:28:08 +0000

Grid Systems should underpin any well-considered web layout. Applying a cookie-cutter approach to this – but using a CSS framework such as Blueprint or 960 (and the Drupal 960 theme) – means you're cutting out a vital process in the design of your site: the design of the grid system itself.

This presentation will detail my grid design process. Throughout the presentation, I'll cover:

The typographic grid: its history, usage and application on the web
Different types of grid: modular, columnar, hierarchical, rational, irrational,

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Accelerated grid theming using NineSixty

himerus — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:34:10 +0000

This session will be co-presented by Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens.

Finding the proper starting point for a theme is a long drawn out process for any themer. We struggle with either maintaining our own base theme, starting from Garland, creating a Zen sub-theme, or just writing something from scratch.

Speaker bio:

Jake is an engineer/themer with CommonPlaces E-Solutions, currently busy with various theming projects, and maintaining and creating several contributed modules.

Co presenters:

Todd Nienkerk

Closing session

DrupalconParis — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:32:05 +0000

Farewell party

Speaker bio:

to come