Calendar

The State of Drupal

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

Day:

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Speaker bio:

to-do

Real-time End-User Theme Configuration

maureen — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:50:36 +0000

By changing a theme's settings, an end-user can add their logo or mission statement, change some colors if the theme's designed to work with the color module, or adjust any other settings the themer has made available. These could be fields that allow you to change specific pieces of text or modify the page-layout. But what if you have a lot of custom settings - say about 300 - and you want to see the changes made to these settings in real time? Well with a little help from jQuery and jQuery UI, you can add this type of functionality to your theme.

Speaker bio:

I am the Assistant Director of Communications and Web Technologies for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. I've also built and/or themed Drupal sites for other groups at Harvard and beyond. I came across Drupal 3 years ago and I've have been hooked ever since.

Drupal multisite - a practical case.

sebasto — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:12:12 +0000

The power of drupal multi-site and what it can bring to your company.

In this session, I'll present a muti-site installation of drupal currently in production. This installation includes 15 sites for theme parks, all of them for the same client.

I will explain how it was done, why drupal was a very good solution, and what it did bring to our client through practical examples.

Speaker bio:

Coming from the world of science (genetics), I discovered drupal a few years ago and fell in love with it. I started in the drupal world as an associate in a little but multinational company with commercial entities in the US and France, and developpers in china (WorldZhulu). At the begining of this year, I funded my own company: Koriolis, entirely dedicated to building web sites with drupal...

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

Basics of making a mobile website with Drupal

twom — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:59:06 +0000

Going mobile is gaining importance and increasing numbers of users are accessing your website through their mobile devices. Still little amount of sites are prepared for this behaviour and offer non-optimal experiences.

With a few simple steps this experience can be optimized, and this is where this session will be about! How to go mobile with your existing Drupal installation, or design your Drupal site specifically for mobile.

The session will guide you through the basics of making a mobile website, the tools, pitfalls, etc...

Speaker bio:

Tom is software architect at the open source company Siruna. After having worked as a project and research coordinator at the Interdisciplinary Institute for BroadBand Technology with a focus on interactive television, recommender systems and mobile user experience, Tom joined Siruna. He has been working on the open source parts and integration with Drupal.

Front End Performance - Making Drupal Lightning Fast

kkaefer — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:23:03 +0000

Front End Performance (by Konstantin Käfer)

Speaker bio:

Konstantin Käfer is currently studying IT Systems Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. He also works as a consultant for NowPublic, a large citizen journalism website using Drupal. He joined the Drupal community as a Google Summer of Code Student in 2006.

Co presenters:

Wim Leers

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.

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.

Architecture is for everyone

eaton — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:00:39 +0000

Three years ago, Dries Buytaert announced that Content Mangement Systems had eliminated the webmaster, and challenged the Drupal community to eliminate the developer, too.

Speaker bio:

Jeff Eaton has been building Internet and desktop software for over a decade. In 2005, he began working with Drupal and never looked back. In the years since, he's become a core developer specializing in architecture and API development. As a consultant for Lullabot, he's helped plan and build the infrastructure for sites including MTV UK's music portal, SonyBMG's artist site platform, and Fast Company's groundbreaking business networking site.

Debugging Drupal

rfay — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:13:12 +0000

Session Website and Outline: randyfay.com/debugging_drupal

Video from the presentation: http://www.archive.org/details/DebuggingDrupal

We all know that Drupal is near perfect, but it hasn't fully arrived yet. Maybe in Drupal 7 there won't be any problems to debug, but until that great day, debugging skills are critical to solving real life problems.

There will be tips and strategies for both developers and site administrators in this session.

Preparing for success... Before the crisis

Speaker bio:

Randy Fay has been programming since the early 1980's and still has bugs in his code that have to be debugged. He does custom Drupal development from Grand Junction, Colorado, USA.

Performance and High Availability best practices

bjaspan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:21:20 +0000

Note: the description of this session needs to be updated.

How reliable is your web site? If one server at your hosting provider goes down, will it take your site with it? How quickly and confidently can you restore from backups? You DO have backups, right?

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.

Co presenters:

nnewton

davidstrauss

Amazon

killes

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

Understanding Drupal 6 Themes

Al Steffen — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:58:52 +0000

Drupal 6 is a powerful system that has a steep learning curve for those new to it. The included theme system is no exception to this. As with any complex system, the key to using it effectively is to understand it. The purpose of this session is to increase your understanding to get you on your way towards creating a look all your own.

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Al Steffen is the Lead Themer for pingVision, LLC based in Boulder, CO USA and has been building custom Drupal themes for over 2.5 years and have taken advantage of almost every facet of the system. He also created and co-maintain the Studio Theme Pack with Matt Tucker.

Video and Slides:

Video and slides

Case Study: labs.sonyericsson.com — how to build a global community portal without programming

Fabian — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:35:28 +0000

Sony Ericsson's first Drupal site ever, labs.sonyericsson.com, was planned, designed and implemented in just 462 hours by a team of five from NodeOne.

Two things made this possible:

Very close collaboration between NodeOne's team and the customer.
The power of Drupal modules such as CCK, Views, Flag and other which make it possible to build a such complex site with almost no programming.

Building community websites used to be a time consuming expensive process. Thanks to Drupal that is no longer true. In this presentation we will show you how and why!

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Co-founder of NodeOne and the project manager of the labs.sonyericsson.com project. Fabian has four years experience of managing Drupal projects. A passionate Drupal evangelist, he regularly talks about Drupal to companies and organizations eager to learn how they can use Drupal as part of their web presence strategy. When not working, Fabian can be found on the golf course or the shores of scenic island Gotland. --- Presenting with Fabian is, Joakim Stai, member of the NodeOne team. Joakim was responsible for the Drupal architecture and implementation of labs.sonyericsson.com. Joakim is a former Google Summer of Code student and a contributor to Drupal core. He is a long-time Drupal aficionado with years of experience developing with Drupal and has a remarkable talent for turning ideas into working solutions. When not realizing our clients' Drupal dreams, Joakim is DJing and rocks the dance floors with a moving mix of disco and funk.

Co presenters:

ximo

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.

jQuery for designers and themers

Bevan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:48:48 +0000

Slides are available at TinyURL.com/jQuery-Designers (Google Docs).
Video is available from Archive.org
Sample code is available at Drupal.org/Project/jQ4DaT.
Commentary and post-session notes are available at the CivicActions.com blog.

Funk up your sites and designs with jQuery.

Speaker bio:

At CivicActions, Bevan Rudge is a Drupal developer, software engineer and themer. Bevan is an advocate of FOSS, developer & contributor to Drupal core & contrib, member of the Drupal Association, local DUG enthusiast, usability nerd, snowboarder, mountain-biker, wannabe kitesurfer, wannabe sailor and beer-drinker. Bevan was a mentor to Jimmy "Boombatower" Berry in the Drupal Google Summer of Code 2008 project for a Usability Testing Suite for Drupal. Bevan was a student in the Season of Usability for improvements to node forms and presented on Scalable Theming at DrupalCon Boston 2008. Some of Bevan's other visible work includes the Witness Hub Map, DrupalSouth event & website, Just Cause theme, Rare Planet theme, ACLU TV series website, Feriana online fashion store, So Much World website, PHPlist websites and other projects. Bevan tweets on twitter, blogs at CivicActions.com and Drupal.geek.nz and works from his home in Christchurch, New Zealand. And just in case that wasn't enough, Bevan also studies computer science at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

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

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