Calendar

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

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.

Projets Multilingues, multilingual internationlized projects too!

douggreen — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:52:11 +0000

It all sounds so easy. Your client says "Can you create a multilingual social networking multimedia website?" and you say "Sure, Drupal can do that!" Give me a couple weeks... or months maybe. Off to the projects page for i18n, og, and a bunch of other modules.

Ok, we knew this wasn't going to be exactly easy. But why is it this hard!?

This presentation will be more about implementing a large multilingual website, the best practices, and pitfalls of mixing modules, than about any one technology, but we will alsotalk about the state of i18n.

Speaker bio:

Doug Green is a 3 year veteran of Drupal with many credits to his name, including coder, views fast search, and the 6.x search patch. Doug graduated from Cornell University Engineering and has over 20 years experience as a Software Developer. Doug is a partner with CivicActions, one of our DrupalCon sponsors.

Co presenters:

Damien Tournoud

z.stolar

Transforming The Economist Online using Drupal, open-source and Scrum

ebaumes — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:49:11 +0000

The Economist was founded in 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress”. In 2008 Economist.com undertook the mission to move from a traditional online magazine publishing model and build the 'foremost destination online for analysing and debating the global agenda, drawing on the intelligence of journalists, readers and guests'.

Speaker bio:

Eric Baumes is Chief Technology Officer for Economist.com. He has more than 15 years of experience in developing, marketing and managing electronic publications and services. He has previously served as Technology Director and Marketing Manager for the Economist Intelligence Unit and as a Product Manager for the electronic publishing division of Oxford University Press.

Co presenters:

davidstrauss

rob purdie

stewsnooze

weitzman

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.