Calendar

The State of Drupal

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

Day:

Day 2

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

Day:

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

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.

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.

Front End Performance - Making Drupal Lightning Fast

kkaefer — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:23:03 +0000

Front End Performance (by Konstantin Käfer)

Speaker bio:

Konstantin Käfer is currently studying IT Systems Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. He also works as a consultant for NowPublic, a large citizen journalism website using Drupal. He joined the Drupal community as a Google Summer of Code Student in 2006.

Co presenters:

Wim Leers

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.

Developing with PostgreSQL - Tips, Tools and Tricks

fiasco — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:26:52 +0000

Want to work with PostgreSQL but don't know how? Not sure of tool to use or even the tools available? This talk introduces PostgreSQL to developers and gives the 101 on how to work with PostgreSQL from development to testing to production.

Topics covered:

The database
- Structure
- Users
- diff -up mysql pgsql
Tools
- pgsql cli
- pgadmin3
Drupal SimpleTest suite
- Bug fixing
Production
- backing up data

Speaker bio:

Josh Waihi is a Drupal developer for an open source company called Catalyst IT in New Zealand and also the co-maintainer along side Damien Tournoud of the PostgreSQL driver in Drupal 7. He won the 2009 IT Rockstar Competition in New Zealand as a result of the work he has contributed to the Drupal community.

Co presenters:

Damien Tournoud

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Keep your code safe - Tips from the security team

heine — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:48:14 +0000

This session is aimed at the typical Drupal developer.

The session starts with a short overview of the most common security issues, their consequences and how you can use the Drupal API to prevent them. The second half of the talk is devoted to string handling as the most prevalent vulnerability, Cross site scripting (XSS), happens when you get it wrong. You should leave the session with a clear understanding of when to use filter_xss, check_plain, check_url & check_markup.

Speaker bio:

Heine Deelstra has been a member of the Drupal security team since 2006 and is its current Technical Lead. Other presenters may be added.

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.

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

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:

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.

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.