Calendar

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

Taxonomy Everywhere: D7 Core Overhaul and the Expanding Contrib Universe

Benjamin Melançon — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:01:00 +0000

Long a selling point for Drupal, robust categorization and tagging of content is receiving a long overdue overhaul in Drupal 7. Meanwhile, contributed modules continue to be added and improved that leverage taxonomy for displaying, searching, filtering, sorting, and recommending content– and for connecting your site to other sites and classification methods.

Ironically, the plethora of contributed taxonomy modules are as poorly organized and hard to keep track of as any set of Drupal projects. We'll help you make sense of it all.

Speakers:

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

* More bios coming<br /> * Benjamin Melançon does Drupal development with Agaric, which builds powerful web sites for people who do things. Sharing code, ideas, and helping connect everyone and everything goes well with his personal goals of the economic justice, genuine liberty, and collective organizing for all sorts of progress.

Co presenters:

bangpound

chach

mh86

Xano

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 RDF in Drupal 7

scor — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:18:10 +0000

Over the years, there has been multiple attempts to integrate RDF and Drupal with many contributed modules like Relationship, Semantic Search or FOAF. None of them has proven to be sustainable and popular until 2007, when the RDF API came out for Drupal 6, followed by many other RDF modules for Drupal 6.

Day:

Day 4

Speaker bio:

Stéphane is currently working towards a Master's degree in Semantic Web at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway, Ireland. He is particularly interested in bringing Semantic Web technologies into Drupal and is leading the effort to integrate RDF in the next version of Drupal core. He also maintains several RDF modules. In addition, he has been in charge of IT and web development of Eco Innovation since February 2006. He has also been a web developer for the French company Iciformation since 2003.

Co presenters:

Benjamin Melançon

Reinventing Journalism with Drupal

modulist — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:27:17 +0000

Many are calling 2009 the year that spelled the death of the newspaper as we know it. The very business model is under attack, as papers struggle with dying ad revenues.

This session discusses how to build a small city newspaper from scratch in Drupal. We'll walk through the process of planning, designing, building and launching a new publication that's largely community-based.

Speaker bio:

Claudio Luis Vera is a principal and creative director for Studio:Module, a leading design firm with clients in the Ivy League and the Fortune 500. Since adopting Drupal as its preferred CMS, Studio:Module has designed and developed with Drupal for MIT, Harvard, V-Day, and a number of large businesses and nonprofits. Claudio is a recognized designer with several Best of Show awards and numerous Best of Category awards to his name. Starting in 1994, he has played a role in managing interactive firms with talented professionals in the creative, marketing, strategy, and technology disciplines. Claudio is also admin for the Miami Drupal group and a founder of the Design Outreach Group

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

Learn to use the CTools suite

merlinofchaos — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:03:44 +0000

The Chaos Tools Suite, known as CTools, is kind of a extra core API library. It includes a number of tools to greatly ease certain functionality. In this lecture, merlinofchaos will describe how to do the following tasks:

Create a multi-step form using the form wizard tool
Create advanced ajax forms using the ajax tool
Create more advanced ajax forms using the modal tool
Make your objects exportable like Views
Use collapsible divs that look nicer than collapsible fieldsets
Use CSS caching and sanitization

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.

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:

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.

Sharing content across multiple sites with Domain Access

agentrickard — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:16:05 +0000

We will take an in-depth look at the Domain Access module and how it can be used to support complex content sharing scenarios.

We will explore the features of the module and examine how they can be used to build sites such as:

- www.interlochen.org
- www.skirt.com
- www.rowelevenwines.com

We will concentrate on what makes Domain Access different from other Drupal Node Access modules, such as Organic Groups and Taxonomy Access Control.

Attendees should learn the following during the session:

Speaker bio:

I am a senior Drupal programmer at Palantir.net and a longtime Drupal contributor. I am the maintainer and author of the Menu Node API, MySite, Domain Access and Skeleton modules. I also co-chair the Newspapers on Drupal group and the Knight Drupal Initiative.

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