Session Proposals

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

Trellon Sponsor Session

techsoldaten — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:38:24 +0000

to do

Day:

Day 4

Speaker bio:

to do

Improving off-line revenue with e-commerce

mikejoconnor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:29:22 +0000

This session will help us find out the why Waste Management (WM) Information Technology organization has adopted Ubercart and as a tool for redemption. Waste Management, a fortune 200 company, is the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico leading provider of comprehensive waste and environmental services, collecting approximately 66 million tons of solid waste annually from nearly 20 million residential, municipal, commercial and industrial customers. This session will cover how Ubercart helped WM to leverage the power of Drupal/Ubercart in response to challenging business opportunities.

Speaker bio:

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

Co presenters:

wm_greenopolis

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.

From Vancouver to Vladivostok via I18N and Views: Migrating osce.org to Drupal

valic — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:57:17 +0000

The OSCE is in the process of migrating its website from an in-house CMS to Drupal.

Day:

Day 3

Speaker bio:

Velimir Alic is a Website Architect at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). He has more than 18 years of experience in software development and managing software development projects in international and non-governmental organizations. Velimir currently manages the relaunch of the OSCE’s public website, migrating it to Drupal from an in-house content management system.

Bare Naked (Open Source) Design

leisa — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:42:09 +0000

Finding a way for a strong design and user experience culture to develop in open source software communities could be one of the more critical challenges for open source projects to address if they are to remain sustainable or, better still, go close to meeting their incredible & exciting potential.

Since around August last year I've been working with the Mark Boulton Design & the Drupal open source community to make some pretty fundamental changes to the design and user experience firstly of the Drupal.org website and now to the user interface for the upcoming release of Drupal 7.

Speaker bio:

Leisa Reichelt is a design researcher and user experience designer who worked with Mark Boulton Design on the D7UX project. She blogs at www.disambiguity.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

Drupal + PostgreSQL for business

fiasco — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:03:50 +0000

Drupal + PostgreSQL for business is a beginner level talk to explain the what PostgreSQL is and how it is different to the other databases supported by Drupal. The talk will cover :

What is PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL support in Drupal
PostgreSQL vs MySQL
PostgreSQL + Drupal as a business solution
- when to use PostgreSQL
- When not to use PostgreSQL
Q & A

This talk will be relevant for both Drupal 6 and the upcoming Drupal 7 and briefly touch on existing use cases of Drupal and PostgreSQL.

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

"Why & How": Drupal for France 24 and RFI (1)

DrupalconParis — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:26:50 +0000

In the first part of this two part presentation, France24 and RFI will be presenting the modules specialized for media publishing they are going to release to the community.

Speaker bio:

to come

Inter your face development

Xano — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:52:03 +0000

This session mixes development with tips and tricks for using Drupal and jQuery, some common sense and a tab of usability. We will go through several examples that show how Drupal can do the heavy lifting for you so you create functional interfaces with little to no work at all. Endless fieldsets and needlessly visible content, begone with thee!

Render forms within tables with one hand.
Implement jQuery UI
Too much text is evil.
Play hide but no seek with unnecessary content using JavaScript.
Too little text is evil too.

Speaker bio:

Crazy, enthusiastic, driven, beer-loving student Communication Studies who can't live without his daily shot of Drupal. I help make Drupal 7 make more sense and easier to use. Furthermore I organise Drupal-related events in the Netherlands, from professional meetings to casual events where people can have fun and get to know eachother on a more personal level. I love beer, Chinese food, newbies and webchick.

Open Atrium; Building a product with Drupal and the Power of Decentralized Features

jmiccolis — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:50:41 +0000

Open Atrium is an opensource team intranet built using Drupal core, contributed modules and some custom 'glue' modules. I'll share the evolution of Atrium's development and talk about what lessons we've learned in developing this product using Drupal. How we identified needs and managed development of critical modules like notifications and casetracker, and when and why we began to develop new modules like spaces and features. Additionally I'll talk about the decentralized features model that has emerged from to Atrium development.

Speaker bio:

Jeff is a senior developer at Development Seed. He’s an experienced Drupal developer with more than 50 websites under his belt, and he’s co-created several innovative Drupal modules such as Context, Spaces and Features.

Filling the Gap - Bringing Drupal to the Design Community

jasonreed — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:01:40 +0000

This session will be co-presented by myself and Mark Boulton. What will we cover?

Why (as a developer) should I care? (What's in it for me?)
Trying to underline the broader scope of the Drupal community- Drupal is used by plenty of people who don't contribute, don't follow along- how do we as a community address their needs and concerns? Not just designers, either, but designers' clients too (end users).

Why is the design community important? What value is there in addressing their needs?

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.

Content Multigroup and FlexiField: Create Complex Fields by Combining Simple Fields

effulgentsia — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:34:42 +0000

We all love CCK and Views! With lots of amazing field modules out there, you can create almost any content type you need without writing a single line of code, have a reasonably usable form into which to add your content, and create pages that let you slice and dice that content in all sorts of ways. As a result, a big part of site architecture now is planning what content types you need and what fields are needed to represent that content type. Fields have become such an important way of structuring a Drupal website that starting with Drupal 7, the entire Field API is part of core. We've almost removed the need for writing code to build a custom content type. Almost, but not quite! What happens if you need to group fields and then build content that needs multiple instances of the group?

Speaker bio:

is a Drupal programmer, and developer and maintainer of the FlexiField 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.

Keep your code safe - Tips from the security team

heine — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:48:14 +0000

This session is aimed at the typical Drupal developer.

The session starts with a short overview of the most common security issues, their consequences and how you can use the Drupal API to prevent them. The second half of the talk is devoted to string handling as the most prevalent vulnerability, Cross site scripting (XSS), happens when you get it wrong. You should leave the session with a clear understanding of when to use filter_xss, check_plain, check_url & check_markup.

Speaker bio:

Heine Deelstra has been a member of the Drupal security team since 2006 and is its current Technical Lead. Other presenters may be added.

The Final Sprint

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:50:25 +0000

Apply all that soaked up knowledge, insights and fresh ideas during the a final day of code/documentation sprints.

Day:

Day 5

Speaker bio:

by the Community

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

The State of Drupal

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

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

to-do

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.

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.

Hosting meetups, camps, and virtual classes: building the community that builds Drupal

Benjamin Melançon — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:24:11 +0000

Drupal has a fantastic tradition of involving newcomers, from all sorts of backgrounds, in the project. From IRC help and banter to mentored/sponsored projects to a vibrant local meetup scene, "the community" this helps build is a major reason people stay with Drupal and how it keeps getting more awesomer.

Speaker bio:

Copresenters to come; nominating yourself is welcome! Benjamin Melançon does Drupal development with Agaric, which builds powerful web sites for people who do things. Sharing code, ideas, and helping connect everyone and everything goes well with his personal goals of the economic justice, genuine liberty, and collective organizing for all sorts of progress.

Co presenters:

stella

ceardach

amye

Susan MacPhee

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.

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