Session Proposals

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.

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

Body Building: Modules You Need to Build Attractive Pages with Rich Content

effulgentsia — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:37:57 +0000

You've installed Drupal. Congratulations! You can now create pages and stories that contain text. Sorry, no images. Or video. And if you want the text to be formatted with bold, colors, bulleted lists, or links, you'll need to do that manually, using html tags. At this point, you might be thinking, why all the buzz around Drupal? Is it useful for anything besides creating a simple blog? And if that's all you want to do, scrap Drupal, and get an account on WordPress instead. But then, hopefully, someone fills you in on the secret to Drupal. Despite initial appearances, it's actually super powerful! Anything you can imagine, you can do! There's over 4,000 modules on drupal.org to choose from. All you need to do is figure out which 100 or so you need, and voila, pure website awesomeness!

Speaker bio:

is a Drupal programmer, and developer of the Body Builder module and some other modules. Prior to drinking the Drupal kool-aid 3 years ago, he created custom content management systems, but is now much more interested in improving Drupal than in creating yet another CMS. He spends way too much time thinking about how to best get interesting content into a node.

Porting biblio to cck

Coornail — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:38:14 +0000

Porting biblio to CCK was my summer of code project. I would like to share with you the hard things, the easy things, and all the joy I had with it.

Speaker bio:

I'm a geek from Hungary. I'm working with Drupal at Pronovix. I'm also learning CS in the University of Szeged.

Drupal.org best practices from 30 applications and 30Million page views per month

Amazon — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:16:11 +0000

Drupal.org is much more than just a big Drupal site. It is the heart of the Drupal community and requires integration and support for as many as 30 different applications.

In this session we will review best practices from the one of the best Drupal showcase sites, Drupal.org. We will cover scalability and performance for a site approaching 30 Million page views a month.

We will also cover best practices for upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 and our plan for upgrading to Drupal 7.

Speaker bio:

The Drupal infrastructure team manages the Drupal.org infrastructure and applications for the Drupal community. Gerhard Killesreiter is the manager of the Drupal infrastructure team

Co presenters:

davidstrauss

Damien Tournoud

nnewton

WCAG 2.0: What every themer and developer should know

kat3_drx — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:36:17 +0000

Web accessibility standards make a website usable for users with disabilities including limitations of vision, hearing, cognition, mobility, speech, and learning. The process for creating an accessible experience for a web site or CMS is controlled by not just one person, but by many components working together, and as such, each component is responsible for maintaining the process as a whole.

Speaker bio:

is a web developer for Drexel University Libraries. She advocated and made the push to Drupal for the Institution's library websites in 2008 and has been researching and developing since then. She is a researcher in the field of web accessibility and works toward educating developers, designers, and website writers in best practices to produce fair user experiences for all.

Here comes localize.drupal.org!

Gábor Hojtsy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:27:06 +0000

The Drupal.org site family just got a new member: localize.drupal.org. While it also helped pioneer single sign-on on drupal.org, its core goal is to highly simplify the localization of Drupal projects. As a central installation of the Localization Server project originally sponsored by Google Summer of Code, it is set up to offer text from the source code of projects released on drupal.org for translation on a web based user interface. It replaces CVS and the cumbersome release scheduling that was required to be done previously.

Speaker bio:

Gábor Hojtsy develops Drupal modules since 2003, is the Drupal 6 core maintainer and code gardener at Acquia.

Training Drupal professionals: Towards an open Drupal training curriculum and certification

bohemicus — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:05:02 +0000

One of the issues clients who want to build on Drupal as a sustainable platform face is identifying qualified Drupal professionals or making sure their inhouse developers get up to speed with Drupal in a reliable fashion. At the moment, there are several Drupal companies that provide bespoke Drupal training but there isn't a unified training curriculum that could be easily replicated and adopted for in house training and against which people who haven't had the time to gain natural experience in the community could be assessed.

Speaker bio:

Dominik Lukes of Dyslexia Action is an academic, educator and web developer who's developed a number of websites in the education most recently http://training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk. He started and manages Drupal for Research and Academia on groups.drupal.org. Dominik also has extensive experience with VLEs and online portfolio management systems.

Views modular and pluggable theming

ralf57 — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:11:35 +0000

This session will show you how an efficient theming of the views' output can be achieved even when many developers are involved into the same task.
Typical scenarios are corporate's large sites or public institutions portals.
You will learn:

The benefits of the modular approach
How to apply all this to the views' list type
How this technique can be extended to other types of views to fit all your needs

This talk will cover Views 2

Day:

Day 4

Speaker bio:

Donato Rotunno (aka ralf57) is a senior web designer for a vibrant consulting company based in Rome. He takes care of building usability and accessibility compliant web applications, with special regard to WCAG 1/2 guidelines. He is currently leading the design team within the development of the new portal (Drupal based, of course) for an important public institution.

Speeding up the snail and making Drupal scale

manarth — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:53:40 +0000

Like all frameworks, Drupal comes with a performance cost, but there are many ways to minimise that cost.

This session explores different and complementary ways to improve performance, covering topics such as caching techniques, performance tuning, and Drupal configuration.

We'll touch on benchmarking before presenting the results from applying each of the performance techniques against copies of a number of real-world Drupal sites.

Speaker bio:

I work as a PHP software engineer for Ibuildings where I specialise in delivering websites with Drupal and integrating SAAS/SOA components. I've developed websites for the NHS, local government and a national TV broadcaster. When I'm not in front of a computer, I can often be found scrambling up muddy hills or scuba diving in murky quarries.

Simple CCK - a simplified User Interface for CCK

zserno — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:15:38 +0000

This talk is going to present a module that we developed to make it possible for end-users to work with CCK.

Basically it's a UI module on top of CCK built to improve it's usability.
A tool you can give your customers to build their own content types - without previous Drupal knowledge - in minutes.
A way to build new content types with custom fields in an easy, drag and drop way.

In the session we are going to show:

How it works.
Some existing and potential use cases.

Day:

Day 4

Speaker bio:

Ernő Zsemlye is working as a Drupal developer at Pronovix since 2007. He presented before at the Prague Drupal conference and the Budapest and Vienna Drupal User Group meetups. He was actively taking part in organizing Drupalcon Szeged 2008 as a volunteer. This year he graduated from University of Szeged as a program designer mathematician.

Eh? Pee Eye Dot Dee Dot Oh!

emmajane — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:00:13 +0000

Remember the first time you heard someone say "Drupal" out loud and the word they used was nothing like what you'd been hearing in your head? Remember that other time when someone said, "dee dot oh" out loud and you wondered what secret code they were referring to? The Drupal community is rife with confusing jargon, but it's also jammed full of awesome information that you can use to quickly build an amazing theme. This talk will show you how to take advantage of http://api.drupal.org from a themer's perspective.

You will learn:

How api.drupal.org is compiled

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.

A guide to building your e-commerce business.

Andy — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:25:35 +0000

Are you thinking about adding e-commerce to your site? Are you a developer who wants to build e-commerce sites? If so, this session is for you. We will discuss the basic steps to create an e-commerce site from choosing the right shopping cart software to accepting credit cards to fulfilling orders. There's much more to it then just installing a shopping cart and this session will attempt to discuss all the steps, decisions, and pitfalls beyond just installing and configuring a shopping cart. Users will walk out of this session with a plan for getting to their first sale.

Speaker bio:

Andy built his first e-commerce site in 1997. In the past 10 years he has started several successful online businesses with over $10 million yearly revenue, built dozens of e-commerce sites, and consulted for dozens of startups. In 2006 Andy started the Ubercart project. His company, Prima LLC., continues to fund Ubercart development.

How to Build a Successful Drupal Business - It's not about the code!

volacci — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:23:42 +0000

Most businesses grow to the founders ability to keep all the balls in the air. This session will discuss how to take your Drupal business to the next level. There are 5 key things that every successful business must have: Processes, Recruiting, Sales, Finances, and Synergy. This non-technical session is designed primarily for entrepreneurs, owners & managers.

We'll cover the following things:
+Designing and building a positive company culture.
+Recruiting the right team. Getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats!

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

Ben Finklea is the founder and CEO of Drupal SEO company Volacci. He's worked on projects for major Drupal clients like Acquia and Fast Company. Ben is also the creator of the Drupal SEO Checklist Module and author of the Drupal SEO Book from Packt. Ben built Volacci from a 1-person startup in 2005 to a 50-person, diverse team that continues to grow and thrive.

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:

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.

Make a Module: A Hands-on Intro to Module Development

mbutcher — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:21:08 +0000

Interested in learning how to develop a custom Drupal module? This is a practical session designed to introduce you to module development.

Get hands-on. Bring your laptop and build your own module as we go. (Of course, you're welcome to just listen.)

We will cover:

Basic module architecture
.info files and .module files
Using hooks
Using existing Drupal APIs
Finding documentation
Debugging
Installing and uninstalling

By the end of this session, we will have created a functional module.

Speaker bio:

Matt Butcher is the author of "Learning Drupal 6 Module Development" and "Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery". He is a professional Drupal developer at Palantir.net.

Sharing Information, Services and Interactions in the Next Decade

nickvidal — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:48:52 +0000

Foreword

This is a session proposal for DrupalCon Paris 2009. In this session I hope to offer the Drupal community an overview of the work being developed at the UFRGS university. I intend to give a very technical session, so the text below will serve as a background for the session.

Introduction

Speaker bio:

I'm a researcher at UFRGS university and the author of ISS (Instant Syndicating Standards), a set of open standards that enable people to discover and syndicate information within their social network. ISS support on Drupal is being sponsored by the Knight Foundation under the Knight Drupal Initiative.

Job Fair

Ineation — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:05:10 +0000

Due to the rapid growth of our preferred CMS, many Drupal companies are looking for new employees. Developers, designers, themers, whether you are a wise experienced ninja or a young crazy student you may find your next job here.

The job-fair will take place Thursday, the 3rd of September, at the Maison Internationale from 5pm to 8pm.

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

Blogger, Trainer, Marketer

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

Social + Media: What We Need Next

chrisheuer — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:38:24 +0000

The Media Revolution launched with NCSA Mosaic has been underway for 16 years and I have been a front line advocate for the web and social computing throughout. I believe that "the great restructuring" underway requires us to think more holistically about how to think about how people and organizations are using Drupal. We need to bring a new perspective to Drupal development in order that it can serve the greatest good. I also believe the answer really is "42" so perhaps I am living in a bit of fantasy.

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

Chris Heuer launched his first interactive agency, Guru Communications, out of South Beach, Florida in 1994. He has since helped numerous start-ups with go-to market strategies, product design, web site development, online marketing campaigns, e-commerce and what is now widely referred to as Social Media. Chris formed Social Media Club in March, 2006 to educate professionals on the greater significance of what it means to be social and how media production/consumption has changed. To this end, Social Media Club has local groups around the world promoting media literacy, encouraging the sharing of lessons learned, promoting industry standards and discussing questions of ethics. More recently, Chris launched a new kind of ad-hoc consultancy appropriately called AdHocnium. Together with a senior team of "Creative Catalysts" from around the world, AdhHocnium developes innovative growth strategies for global client that leverages emerging technology and social media.

Firehouse.com or "So How Fast Can You Build A Site?"

MatthewS — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:08:19 +0000

Firehouse.com came to us and asked that we redevelop their site so we looked at the existing site. Then we discovered that they had a partially completed Drupal installation that wanted us to review. We looked at and thought, "This isn't so bad. It'll take 300-400 hours tops!"

Then they sent the requirements documents... We realised we were looking at least 3/4's of a person year and they needed it in 8 weeks.

This is the story of what we learned, how we adapted, and where we found ourselves at the beginning of July.

Speaker bio:

Matthew Saunders is the Senior Web Producer at pingVision. He manages client relations in the development process translating and interpreting client needs. In his spare time he acts as the community manager for TraumaAdoption.org and is a host on the TechSoup Emerging Technology forums.

Organic Groups and Views: Building Better Community Sites

billfitzgerald — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:08:29 +0000

Organic Groups and Views are two of the more popular modules on available on Drupal.org; however, they often go under-utilized, as people are unfamiliar with the range of options both modules provide.

In this session, we will cover how to use Organic Groups within your site, and how to use Views to display content within your groups. The content in this session will focus on what can be done using the administrative interfaces of both modules; in other words, all config, and no code.

Speaker bio:

Bill Fitzgerald has been active in the Drupal community since 2005. He is the author of Using Drupal in Education (from Packt). He is a founding partner of FunnyMonkey, a development shop located in Portland, OR, US.

Including any Web Service in Drupal using YQL

sh1mmer — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:23:54 +0000

There is lots of great content and services available through web services, or even page scrapping. However web services all have different architectures (SOAP, XML-RPC, REST, etc) and authentication schemes (HTTP-Basic, OAuth, etc) which makes them a pain to include in your Drupal site.

Yahoo! offers a service called YQL which allows you to access lots of web services or even scrape web pages using a syntax like SQL. This makes it really easy to access web data and include it in your Drupal site.

Speaker bio:

My name is Tom Hughes-Croucher. I've been mucking about with CMSs since the early 2000s when I helped shape the UI of Plone. When I started working at Yahoo! I got interested in PHP. Since then I've worked with a variety of PHP based content management systems, including Drupal.

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

Drupal Resource Monitoring

Slurpee — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:54:37 +0000

Want graphs generated for your Drupal related services: Apache, MySQL, Linux system, bandwidth, etc?
Need to receive a text message every 5 minutes if a site has failed?
Want to sleep better knowing your Drupal system is correctly backed up each night?
Need any of the above, but require open source solutions?

Cacti http://cacti.net/

Knowledge of how to utilize Cacti for generating graphs related to Drupal resources such as disk space, memory, CPU utilization, MySQL, Apache, bandwidth, and more.

Speaker bio:

owner at DrupalAdmin.net and posses extensive experience working at an ISP. Long history of dealing with critical open source systems 24/7. Currently traveling the world spreading the word of Drupal full time by taking care of Managed Drupal Services. Favorite hobbies include Drupal, organizing DrupalCampChicago.org, and managing the Chicago Drupal Meet Up Group (cdmug.org).