Calendar

Drupal 101

jeffnoyes — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:30:07 +0000

This session will orient people on how to get started with Drupal. We'll address installation using the Acquia Drupal Stack installers, then dive into some fundamentals such as:

- how does Drupal work (at a very high level)
- how do you begin to build a site. Adding pages, inserting navigation
- how do create roles and grant privileges
- how do you extend Drupal's features (finding and installing modules)
- how do you create ad's or specific call outs on your site
- how can you organize information on a page - like show a list of events
- how do you theme a drupal site.

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Jeff Noyes is a user experience designer for Acquia. In this role, Jeff helps Acquia ensure customer facing information is easy to use and understand. Jeff aims to accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to its advancement and helping brand new users get up to speed.

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...

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

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.

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.

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

Faceted search means more sales - e-commerce with Ubercart and Apache Solr

mikejoconnor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:18:22 +0000

Ubercart is Drupal’s leading e-commerce solution. Combining its power and flexibility with the best of Drupal’s 1000s of modules and your e-commerce solution can achieve greatness.

Problem: Your site visitors don’t always know they’re about to become your customers. They might not know exactly what they are looking for.

Speaker bio:

Mike is a Commerce Guy. He spends his days helping clients push the limits of e-commerce with Drupal.

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.