Session Proposals

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

As Progressive as it Gets: The Latest in Progressive Enhancement

jasonreed — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:57:21 +0000

We'll cover:

The latest CSS3 properties
What can we use and who supports it?

HTML5
What's up with HTML5, and what can we be doing now to prepare?

Extending the font stack
Font embedding, Typekit, Cufon... what are our options?

Useful scripts and snippets
Let's open up the toolbox and share useful scripts and snippets to help you streamline your theming.

Speaker bio:

I'm Jason Reed, and I'm senior designer at Acquia. I've been designing and developing web sites since 1998, and have been a part of projects for many exceptional companies during those years, including Apple, Intel, and others.

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

Adventures in Drupal-Flavored Community Building

istos — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:20:10 +0000

Creating an online community website is a weird and wonderful process that calls for both technological and sociological tools and design patterns in order to provide a structure within which your community members can interact and your community can thrive.

We will look at:

What different types of communities can exist
How different communities call for different tools
Why it doesn't always make sense to throw in every single tool and the kitchen sink and let them figure it out

Speaker bio:

Ronald Ashri runs a web development company in Sicily, Italy and has been working with Drupal for the past four years - during that time all the websites handled by the company have been turned into Drupal websites. His particular interests lie in community websites and the variety of ways in which Drupal can be used to support online communities. Before moving to Sicily, Ronald was a research fellow at the University of Southampton working on agent-based systems, semantic web technologies, and issues of trust and reputation. He has authored and co-authored several papers and books on these subjects. Ronald holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton and a BSc in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Warwick.

Sept 2nd, Drupal 7 relase party. How continuous integration testing made this plausible

Amazon — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:12:57 +0000

On September 2nd, 2009 12:01AM at the end of the Drupal 7 development cycle 100% of 12,000 functional test will pass. Over 80% of Drupal 7 will have test coverage. Drupal 7 could conceivably be of high enough quality to ship. We will break out the champagne and celebrate the end of a development cycle with high enough quality to ship.

Speaker bio:

Kieran Lal has been working on automated testing to shorten the Drupal 7 release cycles for over three years. He does this to ensure no Drupal user ever has to endure the pain of a 9 month release cycle, like he did with Drupal 4.7. Jimmy Berry is the lead developer of the Automated Testing System and leading contributor to the Drupal 7 simpletest framework.

Co presenters:

boombatower

#multiversedomination

OriPekelman — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:47:23 +0000

We will be joined by the wonderful CommerceGuys and a bunch of other great people doing UbertCart for a breathtaking voyage into UberCart in the big ligue.

Day:

Day 4

Speaker bio:

Currently chief software architect for AF83 a young and vibrant company based in Paris with offices in San-Francisco and Lisbon specialized in community centric web sites Live web applications and mobile applications. In France, one of the promoters and organizers of Barcamps and other community activites, including the french DrupalCamps helping to drive the Drupal Community in France organizing regular events like monthly drupal meetups, Code Sprints, Drupal + Drinks and now the Paris 2009 Drupal Con, in charge of key accounts sponsorship. Formerly IT strategist for aSmallWorld.net an exclusive social networking site, Chief of R&D at Internet Patrol specialized in strategic information retrieval on the Internet for the luxury industry and CTO of Omikron Delta LTD specialized in Technical computing software.

Co presenters:

Damien Tournoud

mikejoconnor

There is No Spoon: Bending the Theme Layer to Your Will

JohnAlbin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:53:32 +0000

Too often, we see sites that “look like a Drupal website”. To me, that’s an obvious design FAIL. If you’ve ever felt restricted by Drupal’s default rendering of its content and HTML, this is a must-attend session.

We’ll discuss techniques for Themers and Designers to break out of Drupal’s default markup by using the tools already available to us. No kittens will be harmed.

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.

Rahisi - a new look at the admin interface

voidberg — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:57:29 +0000

I don't know about you but Drupal's admin interface has been a constant pain for me and for my clients. Something had to be done. :)

In this talk I will present Rahisi, a new admin for Drupal which focuses on the fact that users want to manage their content and not their site.

Curious? Vote. :)

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Alexandru Badiu is a Drupal developer from Romania who fell in love with Drupal 6 years ago and hasn't looked back since.

Following the Drop: the future of Ubercart

Island Usurper — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:23:42 +0000

"The Drop is always moving." And for the past year, the Drop has been moving pretty quickly. Drupal 7 is bringing us many great features and development tools, but it's up to us contributed module developers to make use of them.

Even though the Ubercart developers have been busy working on Ubercart 2.0, we've also been brainstorming on ways to use the new techniques available in Drupal 7 and even D6 that haven't been fully implemented yet. Discussion will center on these plans as well as thinking of even more ideas that we may have missed.

Speaker bio:

Ubercart, and by extension Drupal, has been Lyle's bread and butter for about three years. He claims responsibility for roughly half of the modules in Ubercart, though you might see him dabbling in other open source projects here and there.

Views 2 for coders 4 hours hands-on training

fgm — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:41:30 +0000

And for those of you who are seasoned Drupal coders, we have prepared a hands on training session to get into the rhythm : Views 2 for Coders (4 hours hand-on workshop).

The training session will be held in English by the very excellent Frederic Marand from OSInet

Though not obligatory, those who wish to participate in the training session are encouraged to donate to French Drupal Association (the funds collected will serve to organize further community events).

To participate you should be familiar with drupal module development, PHP5 object model
and admin-level Views 2.

Day:

Day 1

Speaker bio:

Engineer, architect, teacher

Co presenters:

esmerel

Drupal and Microsoft

Hank Janssen — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:59:54 +0000

Windows and SQL Server for PHP and Drupal

Speaker bio:

Group Program Manager at Microsoft's Open Source Lab - I have been working with UNIX and Later Linux and Other OSS for about 20 years. I started working at AT&T and did a lot of kernel programming and worked on the SYS V process scheduler used for Digital Telephone switches (5ESS). While working at AT&T I designed a globally distributed database system before people knew what they were. Utilizing such golden oldies as uucp and rje. In the early and mid nineties I was the lead programmer and designer on a Point Of Sale system that did real time cell phone activations for Sprint. The first anywhere in the US. It was solely build on and with OSS software. Most of my career has been spend in applications development, data manipulation and database design and development. For the last 7 or so years I have mainly worked as an Architect for large (and small) cellular telephone companies. Virtually all of the work I have been doing has been in or with UNIX, Linux and OSS related areas. Favorite languages remain C/C++ and favorite editor is still Emacs :). My recent work at Microsoft included leading the Microsoft team behind PHP 5.3, and my latest major project has me going back to my roots again. Oddly enough, in that role I had the pleasure of writing several articles for PHP Architect Magazine. Going forward I will be Microsoft’s Principal Software Development Engineer for the Linux Integration components Microsoft contributed to the Linux kernel in July 2009. And I will continue to be active in the Microsoft on Windows PHP effort.

Co presenters:

pierre.couzy

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.

The State of Drupal

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

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

to-do

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.

Dr Clonelove: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud

greenman — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:35:03 +0000

A best practice approach to moving into the Cloud. We will explain the how we built the server infrastructure for School of Everything on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

* Getting started in the cloud
* How to safely move your servers into a cloud cluster
* What tools Amazon gives you
* Mysql Clustering with Mysql-Proxy

Speaker bio:

Peter Brownell is a Co-Founder of School Of Everything, a Drupal based start-up in London. He is also a Director of Code Positive, and has been involved in the London Drupal Community for many years.

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.

Secure your Drupal installation with SSL

sanduhrs — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:04:22 +0000

Drupal is the perfect match when it comes to collaboration and communication in teams. As it is easy to setup and flexible to use, an intranet setup for companies or a setup for closed groups of people is easy to realize.

However, stealing your login credentials or your session from a public network is trivial, securing your confidential information a must.

Speaker bio:

Stefan is co-founder of and senior developer at erdfisch. In his four years of professional experience with Drupal, he realized several smaller and larger projects and is totally convinced of it's capabilities. He is interested in Open source at large, believing it is the future of information technology and in e-learning and data privacy in particular. Other presenters may be added.

The Curse of Dreamweaver: Moving Clients from Static HTML to Drupal

CrookedNumber — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:07:18 +0000

Great! You've finally convinced your client or boss to move their old, clunky site over to Drupal.

But this might only be half the battle.

You might quickly find out that they are still stuck in the static-HTML mindset, what I like to call "the Curse of Dreamweaver." The symptoms include:

A tendency to micro-manage pages
Insistence on pixel-perfect renderings
Confusion about architecture vs. navigation
Pre-occupation with the homepage
And just general misunderstanding and misapprehensions about the database-driven website

Speaker bio:

David helps non-profits gets the most out of drupal. He helps with theming, module development, administration -- as well as more general web development concepts: architecture, navigation, web standards, maintainability, etc.

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.

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.

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.

State of the drupal modules french translation and HOWTO translate modules in your language

Moreau — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:23:03 +0000

Drupal rocks, we all know that. But for non-english speakers (french users in our example, but this is not restrictive), whereas a basic drupal installation in their language is now a basic, when it comes to "can't live without them" modules, UI is often only in English. When a big institutional customer has to benchmark different CMSes, this can plague drupal.

Speaker bio:

CEO of Open Web Solutions : in the LAMP web development since 2001, I've discovered drupal 3 years ago and can not live without it ever since ! More seriously, I'm managing big french web projects in drupal for our customers : from specs til hosting.

Co presenters:

sbordage

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 use the Light Side to bend Drupal your way?

Gábor Hojtsy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:14:44 +0000

Drupal is a lot of things to a lot of people. When setting up a website, you will likely use generic modules to build your pages. However, generic tools have generic forms and generic output. They are configurable to an extent but you might need more. A different form submission workflow, easier input methods, and so on.

Speaker bio:

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

Upgrade-Proof Your Site: Best Practices to Avoid Major Version Upgrade Headaches

rfay — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:07:58 +0000

In this session we'll flesh out best practices for site design that will avoid the enormous pain in that next upgrade cycle. Custom modules, custom themes, and poor choice of contrib modules can cause major pain on the coming Drupal 7, and Drupal 8! Think ahead!

We'll cover topics like:

Informed contrib module selection
Ways to avoid custom code in themes and modules
Ways to avoid pain when you do use custom code

This session is a learning and sharing session... We'll be searching for best practices.

Speaker bio:

Randy Fay does Drupal development from Grand Junction, Colorado, USA. You can probably guess that he's had some painful major-version upgrades.