Session Proposals

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.

Plugins: Making code swappable

Crell — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:01:08 +0000

Plugins are a key part of the Views API. They allow a developer to write their own implementation of part of a View and swap it in at will, changing the behavior of a query.

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. "When in doubt, make it configurable" is one of Drupal's guiding principles, and Larry is a firm supporter of it. That's why his goal is to make all of Drupal configurable, right down to what code even exists. That and swapping out code at runtime is fun.

What keeps us going? Living in a Do-Ocracy

eigentor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:11:42 +0000

The drupal seas can be rough, and they can be mild like a breeze. Know the social rules to be a better sailor.

What are the non-spoken-laws of our community?
What drives people to commit a considerable amount of their time to a voluntary project?
How do I act best when wanting to be a superstar or just get things done?

This is a half fun and half serious attempt to track the hidden and obvious rules Drupal and other OSS Communities and voluntary-driven projects obey to.
The presenter has a loving eye on all the stuff for Drupal feels like home to me.

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

Thomas Moseler works as a freelance Web Designer. He tried himself at Music and Paedagogy, but this did not cut it anymore in 2000. So design and computers became his new obsession. Fell in love with Drupal and its community in Barcelona and has not recovered from that. Mostly to be seen in the UX department.

Image to theme within 30 minutes

scheepers — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:35:24 +0000

Learn how to theme a site from scratch within about half an hour using the painter module in conjunction with the joker theme - no coding.

Start out with a theme design, cut up the image elements using joker, including logo, page header, footer, blocks, buttons and navigation. Theme page title, primary and secondary links as well as primary and secondary tabs with the painter.

Day:

Day 4

Speaker bio:

I am a themer and developer for the coolest company on the planet called Telamenta. It's based in Johannesburg, where I studied information technology at RAU, now known as the Univarsity of Johannesburg. I have spent a few years doing design, web development and programming for a couple of big South-African companies.

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.

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.

Flag: an API to spice every meal you cook

TUc — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:02:26 +0000

This session is aimed at the developer looking for good practices in coding.

We study flag module for its all-purpose approach, its good integration with other modules (both Drupal core and contributed), and its object-oriented design.

After this session, you might me able te bend flag module every way. Moreover, you learn how to integrate your own modules with the API of others.

Speaker bio:

Jan Heynen is a developer at Krimson.

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.

How the Drupal association accomplishes it's mission

Amazon — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:51:46 +0000

The Drupal association provides support in developing, communicating, promoting, distributing the Drupal pro ject and in deploying an infrastructure in support of the Drupal project.

In this session the attending members of the association will discuss the goals of the association and their individual contributions towards those goals. We will also provide insight into the election of new permanent members of the association and what members look for when electing more permanent members.

The association will provide an update on the Drupal.org redesign and lessons learned.

Speaker bio:

The Drupal Association is an organisation dedicated to helping the open-source Drupal CMS project flourish. We help the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, events, promotion and distribution.

Co presenters:

dries

webchick

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")

Build A Community Site - No Coding Required

MatthewS — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:21:14 +0000

In November of last year, my wife and I launched TraumaAdoption.org as a way to support the foster care and adoptive community--particularly those who have adopted or foster kids from tough circumstances. We decided to build the site in Drupal using Core, Contributed Modules, and a Contributed Theme. It took less than two weeks in our spare time.

This session will cover, from soup to nuts, creation of a modest community site using only Drupal Core, Contributed Modules, and a Contributed Theme. We'll look at:

Speaker bio:

Matthew Saunders is the Senior Web Producer at pingVision, a consultancy providing interactive design and development services for all media, specializing in Drupal. 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.

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.

Does Drupal Suck? A Contrarian View On The Best CMS

gr — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:23:06 +0000

Drupal is the best Open Source CMS, and probably more. It is also a great source of frustration for many of its supporters.

This presentation will walk you trough a selection of EPIC FAILS from the point of view of a long time Drupal integrator, user and fan. It also tries to offer solutions to those problems, including prototypes, code contributions and sponsoring.

Also, you will laugh. Half-heartedly.

Speaker bio:

Usability expert based in Paris, France with 13 years experience as Product Manager for various software development companies. The products I designed, specified and oversaw are a wide range of web sites and desktop applications, both for consumers and businesses. I use Drupal since 2001. In 2006 I founded 8 Points, a holistic design agency for Web, Mac and Windows application. Drupal is my weapon of choice for web projects, but I also use and recommend WordPress.

Drupal-based templates: design, deployment, support, usability

pescetti — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:32:58 +0000

Template websites are "distributions" of Drupal targeted at different organizations having common needs: for example, local branches of student organizations, or Universities that want to promote a Master Course through an online dissemination platform. In these cases, more than a plain Drupal, it is better to rely on a standardized template including Drupal, a set of preconfigured modules, an easily customizable theme and extra services.

Youth Agora vzw, a Brussels-based organization, will present its experience in creating Drupal website templates.

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Andrea Pescetti, Antonio De Marco, Christof Devriendt and Peter Vanhee founded Youth Agora vzw, a Brussels-based organization specialized in innovating youth information through Drupal-based website templates. Projects by Youth Agora power hundreds of sites in Europe and all custom modules of general interest are contributed back to the community. See http://www.youthagora.org for more.

Co presenters:

antoniodemarco

cdevrien

pvhee

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.

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.

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.

Automated Clustering of Freetagging Taxonomy Terms

russell — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:00:33 +0000

Launch event for a new suite of modules performing automated clustering of free-tagging taxonomy terms in a Drupal vocabulary.

The School of Everything Taxonomy Suite allows users to express interests and teaching subjects in a large free-tagging vocabulary, and offers new ways of finding matches between subjects. Configurable Normalised Co-occurrence Analysis of taxonomy is used to find related subjects, and thus get round the problem of ever diverging and fragmenting folksonomies.

Speaker bio:

Russell Blakeborough Lead Developer - School of Everything - www.schoolofeverything.com Drupal developer with special interest in taxonomy and multilingual development

"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

Interact & Engage: Managing Readers Comments

celinet — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:36:17 +0000

Investigative journalism can shed light on a problem, but where do we go from there? We hope that the people who read our investigations have an inherent desire to solve problems—to be the whistleblowers, the people on the front lines, the idea makers. And, we feel a responsibility to provide our readers with the tools to do so.

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

Celine Nadeau has worked on Drupal sites since 2005, focusing on non-profit community initiatives such as netsquared.org, plos.org, ctsi.ucsf.edu, and currently, motherjones.com. Originally from France, she holds a MBA and has lived in San Francisco for the past 11 years.

Image module in core it's almost real!

quicksketch — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:50:01 +0000

The simplest things can be so hard. Drupal core has never had a way to upload an image and then output a thumbnail it. Of course there are dozens of solutions for making thumbnails in the contributed modules repository, but it will be a huge benifit to new users to have this handling out of the box. The time is at hand for making Drupal's core, default installation come with kick-ass image manipulation abilities. Come see what we've got and we're headed in Drupal 7.

Speaker bio:

Nate Haug is a Lullabot. He's spent extensive efforts in improving the user interface and image handling abilities of Drupal. He maintains FileField and ImageField, as well as several other media-based modules.

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

Open Up the Library: How to Use Drupal to Build Library Websites

kat3_drx — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:54:14 +0000

Libraries all over the world are trying to move with the pace of developing technology by establishing a strong online presence. Many of the most usable and informational library websites use Drupal to achieve this. However, many more libraries have a need for Drupal but do not even know where to start. This session will educate attendees on best practices for making library websites with Drupal.

In this session, attendees will learn about the following:

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 currently conducting ongoing research into Drupal-based community in libraries.

Design on the Edge of Drupal

modulist — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:58:41 +0000

Can any truly good design happen with Drupal? How edgy can you be?

We'll answer these questions an more, as we explore the outer fringe of design, and how it could be built with Drupal.

 How to draw inspiration from the real world: 

things that work, things that inspire, and things that do both

learning from fast food

simplicity is never simple 

How to fake having more design talent than you do:

how to ask important-sounding questions and reveal nothing

10 insanely great buzzwords that are guaranteed to impress

Speaker bio:

Claudio Luís Vera (@modulist) is a creative director and principal of studio:module, an award-winning design and information architecture boutique based in Miami. His past work includes the design and architecture of HarvardScience and designs for Verizon, Intelsat, Comcast, MIT, and Blue Cross. He likes kittens and dogs, and he doesn't typically talk about himself in the third person. For the record, he also would also like to add that he is not a particularly big fan of soft jazz.

Drupal for Facebook

Dave Cohen — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:56:32 +0000

The Facebook Platform allows developers to build websites with social features for the 200+ million users of Facebook. With Drupal for Facebook we can build these social applications using Drupal, the powerful tool we're already familiar with.

Speaker bio:

Dave Cohen built his first Drupal site with version 4.6. He's been a freelance Drupal developer ever since.