Calendar

Drupal 101

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

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

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

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

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

Drupal multisite - a practical case.

sebasto — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:12:12 +0000

The power of drupal multi-site and what it can bring to your company.

In this session, I'll present a muti-site installation of drupal currently in production. This installation includes 15 sites for theme parks, all of them for the same client.

I will explain how it was done, why drupal was a very good solution, and what it did bring to our client through practical examples.

Speaker bio:

Coming from the world of science (genetics), I discovered drupal a few years ago and fell in love with it. I started in the drupal world as an associate in a little but multinational company with commercial entities in the US and France, and developpers in china (WorldZhulu). At the begining of this year, I funded my own company: Koriolis, entirely dedicated to building web sites with drupal...

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.

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

Functional Fips: PHP basics for themers

emmajane — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:55:50 +0000

There are a lot of theme snippets available in the Theme Guide. There is not, however, a lot of information about PHP which is the language that makes up these snippets. If you're tired of copying, pasting and praying and are ready to understand some of the magic behind those snippets, this session is for you!

In this session you will learn how to manipulate and master:

The very, very basics of PHP and the popular theming engine PHPtemplate
Variables and tpl.php template files

Speaker bio:

Emma Jane Hogbin has been working as a Web developer since 1996. She is well known in the Drupal community not only for her technical knowledge, but also for her engaging and humorous means of bringing Drupal to a wider audience—such as the Drupal socks and their GPLed pattern. Her wildly successful theming book, Front End Drupal (co-authored with Konstantin Kaefer), was launched this spring. Emma volunteers with the Drupal documentation team and blogs at emmajane.net.

Reinventing Journalism with Drupal

modulist — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:27:17 +0000

Many are calling 2009 the year that spelled the death of the newspaper as we know it. The very business model is under attack, as papers struggle with dying ad revenues.

This session discusses how to build a small city newspaper from scratch in Drupal. We'll walk through the process of planning, designing, building and launching a new publication that's largely community-based.

Speaker bio:

Claudio Luis Vera is a principal and creative director for Studio:Module, a leading design firm with clients in the Ivy League and the Fortune 500. Since adopting Drupal as its preferred CMS, Studio:Module has designed and developed with Drupal for MIT, Harvard, V-Day, and a number of large businesses and nonprofits. Claudio is a recognized designer with several Best of Show awards and numerous Best of Category awards to his name. Starting in 1994, he has played a role in managing interactive firms with talented professionals in the creative, marketing, strategy, and technology disciplines. Claudio is also admin for the Miami Drupal group and a founder of the Design Outreach Group

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.

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

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.

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

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:

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.

Co presenters:

nnewton

davidstrauss

Amazon

killes

Damien Tournoud

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.

Understanding Drupal 6 Themes

Al Steffen — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:58:52 +0000

Drupal 6 is a powerful system that has a steep learning curve for those new to it. The included theme system is no exception to this. As with any complex system, the key to using it effectively is to understand it. The purpose of this session is to increase your understanding to get you on your way towards creating a look all your own.

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Al Steffen is the Lead Themer for pingVision, LLC based in Boulder, CO USA and has been building custom Drupal themes for over 2.5 years and have taken advantage of almost every facet of the system. He also created and co-maintain the Studio Theme Pack with Matt Tucker.

Video and Slides:

Video and slides

Case Study: labs.sonyericsson.com — how to build a global community portal without programming

Fabian — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:35:28 +0000

Sony Ericsson's first Drupal site ever, labs.sonyericsson.com, was planned, designed and implemented in just 462 hours by a team of five from NodeOne.

Two things made this possible:

Very close collaboration between NodeOne's team and the customer.
The power of Drupal modules such as CCK, Views, Flag and other which make it possible to build a such complex site with almost no programming.

Building community websites used to be a time consuming expensive process. Thanks to Drupal that is no longer true. In this presentation we will show you how and why!

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Co-founder of NodeOne and the project manager of the labs.sonyericsson.com project. Fabian has four years experience of managing Drupal projects. A passionate Drupal evangelist, he regularly talks about Drupal to companies and organizations eager to learn how they can use Drupal as part of their web presence strategy. When not working, Fabian can be found on the golf course or the shores of scenic island Gotland. --- Presenting with Fabian is, Joakim Stai, member of the NodeOne team. Joakim was responsible for the Drupal architecture and implementation of labs.sonyericsson.com. Joakim is a former Google Summer of Code student and a contributor to Drupal core. He is a long-time Drupal aficionado with years of experience developing with Drupal and has a remarkable talent for turning ideas into working solutions. When not realizing our clients' Drupal dreams, Joakim is DJing and rocks the dance floors with a moving mix of disco and funk.

Co presenters:

ximo

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

Welcome to the Jungle! Basic Drupal Recipes and Best Practices for Beginners

c4rl — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:18:37 +0000

Congratulations! You've installed Drupal! Pretty cool, huh?

There's just one problem -- you've got a website to build, and you don't know where to begin.

Should you start putting in content? Maybe start with some modules -- hmm, which ones? Or, should you start tweaking the theme? How are you going to get the news page to work, anyway? Or events? Or downloads? Do you need taxonomy for that? Yikes!

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Carl Wiedemann is a Drupal developer in Denver, CO. He focuses on web strategy and SEO. He presented Best Practices at DrupalCamp Colorado in June 2009. He also ran the after party.

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

Ubercart development tip and tricks

mikejoconnor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:22:06 +0000

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

This session will show some of the critical Ubercart APIs that will help you to develop and deploy your own Ubercart e-commerce solutions.

Key points will include adding items to the cart with uc_cart_add_item(), and writing your own conditions/actions with Ubercart’s CA hooks.

Speaker bio:

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