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.

Views 2 for developers

Crell — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:15:30 +0000

Views is an incredibly powerful module if you know how to use it. Views is also perhaps the most extensible system in all of Drupal, able to be extended in ways that make it the swiss army knife of data querying, marshalling, and formatting. But how do you extend it cleanly to bend it to your will?

This session will attempt to explain the over-arching design of the Views 2 module, and how one goes about writing plugins and handlers. The goal will be to give attendees a sense of how Views is put together, and therefore how to extend it gracefully. Production code samples will be included.

Speaker bio:

After four years working with Drupal, Larry Garfield is the Senior Lead of Programming at Palantir.net. He also serves as the Director of Legal Affairs for the Drupal Association, and since 2008 has been the Drupal database system maintainer. He also maintains a number of modules, including several Views plugins. As Views plays a major role in nearly every site Palantir builds, Larry has become so versed in the Views API that it keeps him up at night with the fear that he's starting to think like merlinofchaos. His friends have advised that by helping other people think like merlin he will feel less weird about it.

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

Drupal Software Design Patterns

Crell — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:46:10 +0000

Design patterns: They sound like something scary academics come up with to make life harder for programming students doing complicated object-oriented stuff no one understands. But really, design patterns are simply a way of discussing common solutions to common problems, and they don't have to have anything to do with objects. By learning about and leveraging common solutions, you can make better APIs that are more consistent, easier to understand, and more flexible than would have been possible with a one-off solution.

Speaker bio:

After four years working with Drupal, Larry Garfield is the Senior Lead of Programming at Palantir.net. He also serves as the Director of Legal Affairs for the Drupal Association, and since 2008 has been the Drupal database system maintainer. He also maintains a number of modules, including several Views plugins. A firm believer in the "anything worth doing is worth doing right" doctrine, Larry is well-known as a pedant and standards evangelist. He also appreciates a well-turned API, and not having to remember too many ways of doing things.

Drupal + PostgreSQL for business

fiasco — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:03:50 +0000

Drupal + PostgreSQL for business is a beginner level talk to explain the what PostgreSQL is and how it is different to the other databases supported by Drupal. The talk will cover :

What is PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL support in Drupal
PostgreSQL vs MySQL
PostgreSQL + Drupal as a business solution
- when to use PostgreSQL
- When not to use PostgreSQL
Q & A

This talk will be relevant for both Drupal 6 and the upcoming Drupal 7 and briefly touch on existing use cases of Drupal and PostgreSQL.

Speaker bio:

Josh Waihi is a Drupal developer for an open source company called Catalyst IT in New Zealand and also the co-maintainer along side Damien Tournoud of the PostgreSQL driver in Drupal 7. He won the 2009 IT Rockstar Competition in New Zealand as a result of the work he has contributed to the Drupal community.

Co presenters:

Damien Tournoud

Developing with PostgreSQL - Tips, Tools and Tricks

fiasco — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:26:52 +0000

Want to work with PostgreSQL but don't know how? Not sure of tool to use or even the tools available? This talk introduces PostgreSQL to developers and gives the 101 on how to work with PostgreSQL from development to testing to production.

Topics covered:

The database
- Structure
- Users
- diff -up mysql pgsql
Tools
- pgsql cli
- pgadmin3
Drupal SimpleTest suite
- Bug fixing
Production
- backing up data

Speaker bio:

Co presenters:

Damien Tournoud

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.

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.

Foreign Affairs case study

gdemet — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:18:41 +0000

Foreign Affairs is the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan member organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas. Since its inception in 1922, articles and essays published in Foreign Affairs have helped shape political debate and policy on some of the most important issues of the day. Authors who have written for the journal have included influential intellectuals and political leaders ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton.

This session will explore how the new Foreign Affairs Web site, which was developed by Palantir.net and launched in March 2009, showcases Drupal’s wide variety of capabilities. In addition to leveraging existing modules, the site features a significant amount of new functionality developed for the site and contributed back to the Drupal community.

Speaker bio:

George DeMet is the founder and co-owner of Chicago-based Web development firm <a href="http://www.palantir.net/">Palantir.net</a>, Inc. Working in collaboration with a variety of creative partners, he has managed the development of visually and functionally sophisticated Drupal sites for a variety of high-profile corporate, educational, and institutional clients.

Co presenters:

mbutcher

agentrickard

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.

Web services, mashups, and QueryPath

mbutcher — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:49:54 +0000

Write a web service interface in ten lines. Import legacy HTML from a couple dozen lines of code. Get the content outline from an ODT document in 130 characters of code. Mash up five web services in a single module. This is what QueryPath makes possible.

There are hundreds of XML-based APIs, ranging from simple RESTful tools (like Twitter's XML API) to complex SPARQL-based semantic web endpoints (like DBPedia). The new QueryPath library makes it easy to write code that takes advantage of such web services.

Speaker bio:

Matt Butcher is a programmer and author. He has written five books, including "Learning Drupal 6 Module Development" and "Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery". He is a professional Drupal developer at Palantir.net. He maintains numerous Drupal modules, including Quiz, QueryPath, and Amplify. He lives in Chicago in the USA.