Calendar

Drupal 101

jeffnoyes — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:30:07 +0000

This session will orient people on how to get started with Drupal. We'll address installation using the Acquia Drupal Stack installers, then dive into some fundamentals such as:

- how does Drupal work (at a very high level)
- how do you begin to build a site. Adding pages, inserting navigation
- how do create roles and grant privileges
- how do you extend Drupal's features (finding and installing modules)
- how do you create ad's or specific call outs on your site
- how can you organize information on a page - like show a list of events
- how do you theme a drupal site.

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Jeff Noyes is a user experience designer for Acquia. In this role, Jeff helps Acquia ensure customer facing information is easy to use and understand. Jeff aims to accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to its advancement and helping brand new users get up to speed.

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.

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

More than search: Apache Solr changes the way you build sites

pwolanin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:40:23 +0000

The search tool can become the central interface though which visitors find information on your site - supplanting the need for extensive hand-crafted site sections and navigation menus and improving the user experience by letting them quickly find what they are looking for following a pattern that is natural to them. Unfortunately, a SQL database is not optimized to provide these sorts of features, so solutions built totally within the PHP/SQL framework have difficulty performing well for large sites or for multi-sites search. Indexing the data from site content with Apache Solr allows you to offload the computational effort and optimization to a separate server. We will show how Drupal integrates with Solr and how a search integrating content from both groups.drupal.or and drupal.org could look.

Speaker bio:

Last year Peter joined Acquia as a senior engineer after being a Senior Scientist at a bio-tech company. Peter spent a large fraction of his non-working waking hours in the last couple years re-working Drupal core and maintaining contributed modules.

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:

Co presenters:

nnewton

davidstrauss

Amazon

killes

Damien Tournoud

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.

Keep your code safe - Tips from the security team

heine — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:48:14 +0000

This session is aimed at the typical Drupal developer.

The session starts with a short overview of the most common security issues, their consequences and how you can use the Drupal API to prevent them. The second half of the talk is devoted to string handling as the most prevalent vulnerability, Cross site scripting (XSS), happens when you get it wrong. You should leave the session with a clear understanding of when to use filter_xss, check_plain, check_url & check_markup.

Speaker bio:

Heine Deelstra has been a member of the Drupal security team since 2006 and is its current Technical Lead. Other presenters may be added.

Introduction to testing with Drupal: SimpleTest

boombatower — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:55:20 +0000

The session will cover the basics of SimpleTest in terms to workflow and API. It is aimed at those who are new to testing with Drupal or who want to affirm their knowledge.

The main areas to be covered are as follows.

Introduction to the testing methodology used by Drupal core.
Introduction to the basic SimpleTest API and format.
A good workflow to use when writing tests.
Testing related debugging tools and concepts.
Common mistakes explained and the solutions shown.
Demonstrate how the tests are run and managed by the automated testing system.
Provide tips on how to test your own code.

After attending this session attendees should be able to begin writing tests for Drupal core, contributed modules, and custom code.

Speaker bio:

I am the Drupal 7 SimpleTest maintainer and I played a large role in the addition of SimpleTest to Drupal 7. I have worked to increase the adoption of testing by the Drupal community and to increase core test coverage. To that aim I developed the automated testing system (testing.drupal.org) that is currently in use for Drupal core development, but should be extended to contrib by Drupalcon Paris 2009.

Ubercart development tip and tricks

mikejoconnor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:22:06 +0000

Ubercart is Drupal’s leading e-commerce solution. Combining its power and flexibility with the best of Drupal’s 1000s of modules and your e-commerce solution can achieve greatness.

This session will show some of the critical Ubercart APIs that will help you to develop and deploy your own Ubercart e-commerce solutions.

Key points will include adding items to the cart with uc_cart_add_item(), and writing your own conditions/actions with Ubercart’s CA hooks.

Speaker bio:

Mike is a Commerce Guy. He spends his days helping clients push the limits of e-commerce with Drupal.