Calendar

The State of Drupal

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

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

to-do

Real-time End-User Theme Configuration

maureen — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:50:36 +0000

By changing a theme's settings, an end-user can add their logo or mission statement, change some colors if the theme's designed to work with the color module, or adjust any other settings the themer has made available. These could be fields that allow you to change specific pieces of text or modify the page-layout. But what if you have a lot of custom settings - say about 300 - and you want to see the changes made to these settings in real time? Well with a little help from jQuery and jQuery UI, you can add this type of functionality to your theme.

Speaker bio:

I am the Assistant Director of Communications and Web Technologies for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. I've also built and/or themed Drupal sites for other groups at Harvard and beyond. I came across Drupal 3 years ago and I've have been hooked ever since.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Foreign Affairs case study

gdemet — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:18:41 +0000

Foreign Affairs is the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan member organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas. Since its inception in 1922, articles and essays published in Foreign Affairs have helped shape political debate and policy on some of the most important issues of the day. Authors who have written for the journal have included influential intellectuals and political leaders ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton.

This session will explore how the new Foreign Affairs Web site, which was developed by Palantir.net and launched in March 2009, showcases Drupal’s wide variety of capabilities. In addition to leveraging existing modules, the site features a significant amount of new functionality developed for the site and contributed back to the Drupal community.

Speaker bio:

George DeMet is the founder and co-owner of Chicago-based Web development firm <a href="http://www.palantir.net/">Palantir.net</a>, Inc. Working in collaboration with a variety of creative partners, he has managed the development of visually and functionally sophisticated Drupal sites for a variety of high-profile corporate, educational, and institutional clients.

Co presenters:

mbutcher

agentrickard

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

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.

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.

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.

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