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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Taxonomy Everywhere: D7 Core Overhaul and the Expanding Contrib Universe

Benjamin Melançon — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:01:00 +0000

Long a selling point for Drupal, robust categorization and tagging of content is receiving a long overdue overhaul in Drupal 7. Meanwhile, contributed modules continue to be added and improved that leverage taxonomy for displaying, searching, filtering, sorting, and recommending content– and for connecting your site to other sites and classification methods.

Ironically, the plethora of contributed taxonomy modules are as poorly organized and hard to keep track of as any set of Drupal projects. We'll help you make sense of it all.

Speakers:

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

* More bios coming<br /> * Benjamin Melançon does Drupal development with Agaric, which builds powerful web sites for people who do things. Sharing code, ideas, and helping connect everyone and everything goes well with his personal goals of the economic justice, genuine liberty, and collective organizing for all sorts of progress.

Co presenters:

bangpound

chach

mh86

Xano

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.

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.

Rules: How to leverage rule-based automation on your sites!

fago — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:06:44 +0000

The session demonstrates how to use the module to easily solve real-world problems by implementing some common use-cases. Thus attendees should get a good picture how to leverage rule-based automation for faster and more flexible site building!

The session starts with a basic introduction to the Rules Module and some related modules providing useful integration. Afterwards it's shown how these tools can be used to implement common use-cases, probably covering:

ul>

Custom Login Redirects

A publishing workflow

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Day 2

Speaker bio:

Wolfgang Ziegler is part time student and drupal developer since 2005. He is studying "Information & Knowledge Management" and "Computational Intelligence" at the Vienna University of Technology. Currently he is working on his master thesis, which deals with the Rules modules.

Co presenters:

klausi

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

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.

Image module in core it's almost real!

quicksketch — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:50:01 +0000

The simplest things can be so hard. Drupal core has never had a way to upload an image and then output a thumbnail it. Of course there are dozens of solutions for making thumbnails in the contributed modules repository, but it will be a huge benifit to new users to have this handling out of the box. The time is at hand for making Drupal's core, default installation come with kick-ass image manipulation abilities. Come see what we've got and we're headed in Drupal 7.

Speaker bio:

Nate Haug is a Lullabot. He's spent extensive efforts in improving the user interface and image handling abilities of Drupal. He maintains FileField and ImageField, as well as several other media-based modules.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Agile Drupal Development with Scrum

pips1 — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:45:53 +0000

Scrum is a collection of working techniques, structures, roles and methods for project management in an agile development process. Because every project is unique, Scrum is designed in such a way that it can be arranged to suit different situations. Techniques of Scrum will help you overcome issues that traditional methods could not resolve, drive projects at a fast pace and keep everyone engaged.

This introductory session on Scrum is designed for freelance Drupal developers and Drupal development shops that have never used Scrum for their projects before.

The session includes:

Speaker bio:

Philipp works as a project manager at Liip, a Swiss web development company that uses Scrum very successfully with their client projects. His co-presenter Mori Sugimoto is a freelance web consultant / developer based in London and has used Scrum to manage his work with clients.

Co presenters:

mori

Functional Interactive Design

Laura Scott — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:04:49 +0000

Ever walk up to a door and pull on the handle, only to discover the door is push-only? Do you really know how to operate your clock-radio? Doors may be pretty, clocks may look cool, but when we have to actually use them, the measure of their design changes.

Same with websites. A website may be pretty at first blush, but can you find what you're looking for? Can you do what you want to do? Can you even figure out what you're supposed to do?

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Laura Scott is President and Creative Director of pingVision, an interactive design and development company founded in 2005, based in Boulder, Colorado. Laura has been designing websites since 1995, working in video, film, television, and multimedia. Since 2004 she has been working with Drupal almost exclusively for web development. Laura has presented on design and technology at BlogHer 2006, OSCMS 2007 and DrupalCon Boston 2008.

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.

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

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.

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.

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:

Paying for the plumbing

Allie Micka — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:56:02 +0000

It's easy to make a living building Drupal solutions, and there's a good business case for contributing your work. But increasingly, we all depend on "tools to build tools", such as CCK, Views, Drupal core enhancements, and other frameworks or API's that make our work point-and-click.

How do we fund these initiatives, or other work that provides a long-term return on investment, without any immediate gains in the short term?

Speaker bio: