Calendar

The State of Drupal

dries — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:07:29 +0000

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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.

How to contribute to Drupal

Bevan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:06:28 +0000

Want to contribute soemthing to Drupal but not sure how? Learn how the Drupal ecosystem works. Discover what an issue queue is, what to do with patches, how Drupal and contrib modules evolve over time, where Drupal developers talk and – most importantly – how you can get involved.

Day:

Day 2

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. Stella Power, also of CivicActions will be co presenting this session; Stella Power joined the CivicActions team in 2008 as an Engineer working on a project funded by Sony to improve Drupal's internationalization features. She is the author and maintainer of several Drupal projects, including the popular Lightbox2 and FAQ modules. Previously, Stella worked as a senior systems developer and assistant development manager in financial transactions services companies. She has worked on a number of different projects, from billing systems to gift card solutions, and was lead developer on Europe's first Virtual VISA Voucher system. Stella graduated with a Computational Physics degree from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and is currently studying for a Masters degree in Software Engineering in Dublin City University. When not working or studying, Stella can be found in the ceramics studio or pursuing her passion for amateur photography.

Co presenters:

stella

Bevan

Drupal multisite - a practical case.

sebasto — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:12:12 +0000

The power of drupal multi-site and what it can bring to your company.

In this session, I'll present a muti-site installation of drupal currently in production. This installation includes 15 sites for theme parks, all of them for the same client.

I will explain how it was done, why drupal was a very good solution, and what it did bring to our client through practical examples.

Speaker bio:

Coming from the world of science (genetics), I discovered drupal a few years ago and fell in love with it. I started in the drupal world as an associate in a little but multinational company with commercial entities in the US and France, and developpers in china (WorldZhulu). At the begining of this year, I funded my own company: Koriolis, entirely dedicated to building web sites with drupal...

45 Modules in 45 Minutes - the Best Modules You're Not Using

ultimike — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:57:15 +0000

Most Drupal developers are more than familiar with the top 25 Drupal modules in terms of usage (Views, CCK, ImageCache, etc...) But what about the other few thousand modules? Don't have enough hours in the day to sift through them? Take this opportunity to get a vetted list and practical rundowns of each.

Speaker bio:

Mike Anello is a partner in DrupalEasy.com and has been developing Drupal sites for over 3 years. He specializes in Drupal training, theme integration, project management, and custom module development.

Aegir: Build Once, Deploy often. Real life use-cases.

demeester_roel — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:36:45 +0000

"How to lose your clients"
' and the 5 ingredients to make them feel good about it. '

The aim of this session is two-fold.

We'd like to share our experience with two recent and similar projects aimed at making our clients self-sustainable.
We'd like to start up a discussion on how technology can help (or not) in doing more strategic work.

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

Roel De Meester has 10 years experience in enterprise developement (java/.net). He is pulling the Drupal community wagon in Belgium. He is co-founder of Krimson. A team of committed Drupal experts in Antwerp, Belgium. Roel has a master degree in both physics and IT and is always searching for opportunities where technology can be used as a tool to solve bigger problems, rather than being the solution to a single problem. Roel is a happy father of three kids. Roel loves Open Source, but he loves the friendly Drupal community even more.

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

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.

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.

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.

Open Atrium; Building a product with Drupal and the Power of Decentralized Features

jmiccolis — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:50:41 +0000

Open Atrium is an opensource team intranet built using Drupal core, contributed modules and some custom 'glue' modules. I'll share the evolution of Atrium's development and talk about what lessons we've learned in developing this product using Drupal. How we identified needs and managed development of critical modules like notifications and casetracker, and when and why we began to develop new modules like spaces and features. Additionally I'll talk about the decentralized features model that has emerged from to Atrium development.

Speaker bio:

Jeff is a senior developer at Development Seed. He’s an experienced Drupal developer with more than 50 websites under his belt, and he’s co-created several innovative Drupal modules such as Context, Spaces and Features.

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

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

Debugging Drupal

rfay — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:13:12 +0000

Session Website and Outline: randyfay.com/debugging_drupal

Video from the presentation: http://www.archive.org/details/DebuggingDrupal

We all know that Drupal is near perfect, but it hasn't fully arrived yet. Maybe in Drupal 7 there won't be any problems to debug, but until that great day, debugging skills are critical to solving real life problems.

There will be tips and strategies for both developers and site administrators in this session.

Preparing for success... Before the crisis

Speaker bio:

Randy Fay has been programming since the early 1980's and still has bugs in his code that have to be debugged. He does custom Drupal development from Grand Junction, Colorado, USA.

Case Study: labs.sonyericsson.com — how to build a global community portal without programming

Fabian — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:35:28 +0000

Sony Ericsson's first Drupal site ever, labs.sonyericsson.com, was planned, designed and implemented in just 462 hours by a team of five from NodeOne.

Two things made this possible:

Very close collaboration between NodeOne's team and the customer.
The power of Drupal modules such as CCK, Views, Flag and other which make it possible to build a such complex site with almost no programming.

Building community websites used to be a time consuming expensive process. Thanks to Drupal that is no longer true. In this presentation we will show you how and why!

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Co-founder of NodeOne and the project manager of the labs.sonyericsson.com project. Fabian has four years experience of managing Drupal projects. A passionate Drupal evangelist, he regularly talks about Drupal to companies and organizations eager to learn how they can use Drupal as part of their web presence strategy. When not working, Fabian can be found on the golf course or the shores of scenic island Gotland. --- Presenting with Fabian is, Joakim Stai, member of the NodeOne team. Joakim was responsible for the Drupal architecture and implementation of labs.sonyericsson.com. Joakim is a former Google Summer of Code student and a contributor to Drupal core. He is a long-time Drupal aficionado with years of experience developing with Drupal and has a remarkable talent for turning ideas into working solutions. When not realizing our clients' Drupal dreams, Joakim is DJing and rocks the dance floors with a moving mix of disco and funk.

Co presenters:

ximo

Automate your site maintenance troubles away with the Aegir hosting system.

adrian — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:10:50 +0000

This session will illustrate the use of the Aegir hosting system to simplify the life of developers and administrators, by automating a lot of the common tasks involved in deploying sites.

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

For more than six years now (really, he’s user 1337 on Drupal.org), Adrian has been working with Drupal and is one of the few people who can say that they were at the very first DrupalCon (Antwerp, 2005). During this time, he’s contributed major code enhancements to the project, including the PHPTemplate template engine and Drupal Forms API. And he’s the man for managing massive Drupal deployments. Adrian is the father of Aegir, a set of contributed modules that solves this very problem by providing a simple Drupal based hosting frontend for networks of sites.

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.

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:

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.

Staging Drupal: Managing your project in multiple environments

ebeyrent — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:46:42 +0000

Abstract:
Building complex web applications, especially in a team environment, requires more than just code and geeks; it also requires strategy. Drupal shops need to understand how to manage the platform in multiple environments and in all phases of the application lifecycle.

Agenda:

Drupal development strategy
Multiple environments
- sandboxes, staging area, production
Managing Drupal with Subversion
- Repositories, branches, tags, externals, template files, etc

Speaker bio:

Erich has 12 years experience in web technologies, specializing in open-source solutions and application integration. He is currently the Vice President of Engineering at CommonPlaces e-Solutions, LLC, and led the team that built Greenopolis.com, an environmentally-themed social networking and education site. Erich also led the team that built Twolia.com, a social networking and e-commerce platform for independent female artists that mimics Facebook, Etsy.com, MySpace, and YouTube. Erich is the author of the Permissions API module, and maintains the Drupal 6 version of the Signup Restrict By Role module. Erich lives in New Hampshire with his wife, two sons, and two weimaraners.

Co presenters:

miche

cpliakas

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

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.