Calendar

Code and documentation sprints

DrupalconParis — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:32:28 +0000

Code/documentation sprints get developers together for a set amount of time – usually one to two days – and just focus writing code or documentation. That's it. No explicit teaching, no sessions, just sharing knowledge, learning from the others as the day progresses and work towards a common goal.

Use the core sprint coordination wiki page, find yourself a spot and people :-)

Day:

Day 1

Speaker bio:

by the Community

The State of Drupal

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

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

to-do

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

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.

How to easily set up an intiutive WYSIWYG editor that supports inline image placement using CCK image fields

Jen Lampton — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:59:54 +0000

Historically WYSIWYG editors have been a burden to set up. Fortunately, the WYSIWYGAPI module has taken most of the pain out of the set up process. Gone are the days of editing random JavaScript settings files!

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Jennifer Lea Lampton is currently a developer for Chapter Three LLC in San Francisco, CA. Jen has been actively building sites with Drupal for almost four years.

Drupal for Good meet-up

José San Martin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:28:45 +0000

A meeting to discuss an share experiences on progressive, citizenish, good and socially conscious Drupal initiatives.

Across its history, Drupal has shown itself as an important ally for good initiatives - grassroots political campaigns, big big big public international organizations, efforts to preserve minority languages, government efforts, NGOs, community organizing, - well, name it.

Speaker bio:

I'm not the speaker, just the one who's calling the meeting! (anyway: José San Martin is Brazilian Drupal shop owner, linguist and a Drupal for Good'er. He will also be talking about "Drupal for minority languages and indigenous communities in Brazil")

Using Ubercart: Just the Basics

Uberchic — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:45:27 +0000

A starting point for new Ubercart users and a how-to overview of specific feature use cases.

Will cover installation, basic configuration, and a generalized look at common use cases using the current stable release: Ubercart 2.0 for Drupal 6. Will include a step by step walk-through of creating a product. Will cover briefly some of the versatility and potential of Ubercart.

Recommended for new users.

Speaker bio:

Jes Whitman, Uberchic, has been a part-time employee of Prima LLC, Ubercart's birthplace, in numerous non-drupal roles since 2006, and a full time employee since March 2009. She has been a constant behind the scenes supporter and cheerleader of Ubercart, including joining the uberteam for DrupalconSzeged in Hungary and DrupalconDC. Jes helps market Ubercart to Drupallers and those unfamiliar with Drupal.

Co presenters:

Andy

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.

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

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

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.

Drupal + PostgreSQL for business

fiasco — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:03:50 +0000

Drupal + PostgreSQL for business is a beginner level talk to explain the what PostgreSQL is and how it is different to the other databases supported by Drupal. The talk will cover :

What is PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL support in Drupal
PostgreSQL vs MySQL
PostgreSQL + Drupal as a business solution
- when to use PostgreSQL
- When not to use PostgreSQL
Q & A

This talk will be relevant for both Drupal 6 and the upcoming Drupal 7 and briefly touch on existing use cases of Drupal and PostgreSQL.

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

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.

Projets Multilingues, multilingual internationlized projects too!

douggreen — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:52:11 +0000

It all sounds so easy. Your client says "Can you create a multilingual social networking multimedia website?" and you say "Sure, Drupal can do that!" Give me a couple weeks... or months maybe. Off to the projects page for i18n, og, and a bunch of other modules.

Ok, we knew this wasn't going to be exactly easy. But why is it this hard!?

This presentation will be more about implementing a large multilingual website, the best practices, and pitfalls of mixing modules, than about any one technology, but we will alsotalk about the state of i18n.

Speaker bio:

Doug Green is a 3 year veteran of Drupal with many credits to his name, including coder, views fast search, and the 6.x search patch. Doug graduated from Cornell University Engineering and has over 20 years experience as a Software Developer. Doug is a partner with CivicActions, one of our DrupalCon sponsors.

Co presenters:

Damien Tournoud

z.stolar

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:

Co presenters:

Damien Tournoud

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.

So you think you know PHP?

chx — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:32:05 +0000

This session will be questions-and-answers. I will ask the attendees questions like whether a number "bitwise or" 0 can result in a different number and then show why both yes and no are wrong. It will be fun :D I plan to create a website where people can vote live on the various questions.

Speaker bio:

I am chx. I hack core. The rest is irrelevant.

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.

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

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.

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:

Building blocks for your module's UI

Bojhan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:58:54 +0000

There are more interface patterns available to Drupal module developers then ever before. Drupal has standars for writing code. But what about the interface?

Tabs, accordions, fieldsets, overlays, hover links etc. When to use which?

Join Bojhan Somers and Roy Scholten from the UX-Team for a tour of the available options and some advice on when to use each one. Consider this talk the kick-off for getting our ui-pattern library in shape. It's been asked for a lot.

We will cover the following topics :

UI-Pattrens

Speaker bio:

Bojhan Somers is UX-Team member and has been active in Drupal's usability the past two years. Works as User experience consultant on (web)applications, websites and devices.

Co presenters:

yoroy

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.

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.

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

"Agile" is not "Cowboy" spelled backwards (redux)

Laura Scott — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:08:38 +0000

A discussion on best ways to estimate and manage Drupal design and development projects in the real world.

Speaker bio:

Laura Scott is Co-Founder and President of pingVision. Other pingVision staffers will be there.

Co presenters:

jcfiala

MatthewS

Al Steffen

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.

Closing session

DrupalconParis — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:32:05 +0000

Farewell party

Speaker bio:

to come