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

Geo tools for Drupal

Allie Micka — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:26:49 +0000

The Drupal community has been working together to build tools that help collect, search and map geographically-relevant data for Drupal.

This new generation of Geo tools goes beyond placing pins on a map: you can collect complex and relevant data for legislative lookups, distance searches, and making your information more relevant to users. Through the use of open standards and a flexible framework, these new solutions can work together with other modules to provide mapping, exports and feeds to GIS servers and mashups.

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Allie Micka, and her company Advantage Labs, have been longtime Drupal developers and community advocates. Their primary focus is to provide a sustainable platform for managed drupal hosting, training and community participation, and to continue to support the development of Drupal modules for Mail, CRM, Geospatial and community engagement solutions.

Co presenters:

becw

jerdavis

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.

Functional Fips: PHP basics for themers

emmajane — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:55:50 +0000

There are a lot of theme snippets available in the Theme Guide. There is not, however, a lot of information about PHP which is the language that makes up these snippets. If you're tired of copying, pasting and praying and are ready to understand some of the magic behind those snippets, this session is for you!

In this session you will learn how to manipulate and master:

The very, very basics of PHP and the popular theming engine PHPtemplate
Variables and tpl.php template files

Speaker bio:

Emma Jane Hogbin has been working as a Web developer since 1996. She is well known in the Drupal community not only for her technical knowledge, but also for her engaging and humorous means of bringing Drupal to a wider audience—such as the Drupal socks and their GPLed pattern. Her wildly successful theming book, Front End Drupal (co-authored with Konstantin Kaefer), was launched this spring. Emma volunteers with the Drupal documentation team and blogs at emmajane.net.

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

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.

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.

Drupal Ingredients for your Website Dish, or Modules You Should Use on Every Site

coltrane — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:11:48 +0000

With thousands of community contributed modules on drupal.org you have a wealth of features available to use, but how do you know which ones are right for your site? We'll be giving a brief overview of the modules which are just so handy you'll probably want to use them on most of the sites you build. We'll talk about modules that fit into recipes for certain website "flavors", such as community and social networking, media, and commerce.

You can view the session slides at http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcv55663_82d9m66bdz

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Brad (beeradb) Bowman began working in backend systems development at Aten Design Group in 2003, while still in college. Today, Brad handles implementation and customization of backend systems at every stage of Aten projects. Ben (coltrane) Jeavons is a senior developer at pingVision, a consultancy providing interactive design and development services for all media, specializing in Drupal. Greg (greggles) Knaddison is a partner at Growing Venture Solutions a full service website consultancy based in Denver and New York.

Co presenters:

greggles

beeradb

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

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.

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:

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