Intermediate

Aegir-Based Business Models

Presented by

Aegir is a distributed provisioning system for Drupal that allows you to manage thousands of sites across as many concurrent instances of Drupal on as many servers as you need. At Koumbit Networks, a lead development shop behind the Aegir project, we are developing or already have in place several distinct business models, largely enabled by our Aegir infrastructure and expertise.

Intended audience

Anyone building a business on Drupal: Freelancers, Business owners, Drupal developers, site builders, system administrators

Questions answered by this session

What is Aegir, and how can it ease my dev/test/staging/prod workflow?

What is SaaS, and how does it allow me to leverage my existing Drupal portfolio?

What is IaaS, and how do Aegir .deb's make it possible?

What is PaaS, and what interesting reseller opportunities might it open up?

Multilingual Drupal Solutions: Use Cases and Modules

Building multilingual websites is hard. It's hard because there are many different decisions that need to be made, touching everything from business logic to technical considerations.

Every multilingual website is different: different countries, different languages, different organizational structures, different redaction workflows and cultural considerations on top of that. Drupal has the tools to address all of these issues, but being faced with the seemingly endless combinations of parameters can be discouraging.

Intended audience

Site builders wanting to get a better grasp of multilingual solutions for Drupal.

Questions answered by this session

How do I create a simple multilingual blog? An international corporate website?

What is the difference between translation and localization? Which one should I use when?

What are the current possibilities and limitations of multilingual solutions for Drupal?

The Rules Way of Life

Rules 2 for Drupal 7 is a powerful module that can ease your life as site builder drastically. This session will show best practices, tips & tricks and present how Rules can work together with other modules to gain even more power!

In particular, we’ll show what the holy four – rules, views, message & flag – can achieve together!

Have you ever heard the sentence “there is a module for that”? Replace it with “there is a rule for that” ;-) The flexibility of Rules with its intelligent data selector widget enables you to access any entity and property in a very fast way (no more PHP eval() like in Rules 1.x). We will show you all the awesome concepts in Rules:

  • Direct input including tokens and the Data Selector
  • Use Rules components and start re-using configurations
  • Make use of loops & lists
  • Learn about recent developments (also including the Google Summer of Code project)

Furthermore we show how popular use-cases can be implemented with Rules and build them into regular Drupal modules using Features. Stop coding custom modules, start using the power of Rules & Drupal’s ecosystem!

We'll show how one or more of those examples could be built:

  • Editorial workflows
  • Scheduled publishing
  • Notifications

In addition, we’ll show how developers can make use of the Rules API and create handy functionality just by writing some basic glue code.

Intended audience

Site builders, who are familiar with Drupal tools like Fields & Views

Questions answered by this session

How can I leverage the full power of Rules?

What modules play well with Rules?

How can I replace whole modules with the holy four?

What’s going on in the ecosystem around Rules?

I don’t want to write code, what can I do with Drupal?

Entities - Emerging Patterns of Usage

Presented by

Entities are a powerful new abstraction introduced in Drupal 7 that can provide new ways to approach and resolve several often-encountered development problems. Questions remain though as to when and how entities can best be put to use.

We believe that to a large extent answers can be found by studying and comparing existing modules that make use of entities such as Commerce, Organic Groups, Message and Media as well as looking at the modules that enhance core entity functionality such as Entity and Relationship.

Intended audience

Drupal developers and Drupal architects that are considering how they could use entities in their own development projects.

Questions answered by this session

When and how should I use entities in my own project?

How are other modules using entities and what lessons can be learned from that?

What are the modules that can help me to develop with Entities and enhance their functionality?

Drupal as Base System For Your iPhone Android iPad Apps

Presented by

Well no need to explain why mobile apps are important! At present you can't really ignore the iOS and Android platforms. Both these technologies have great potential to use our existing web based tools such as Drupal. You can totally use Drupal to manage your iPhone/Android native apps data in cloud.

A sequel to DrupalCon Chicago's and DrupalCon CPH's "Developing Apps for iPhone/iPad/Android using Drupal as Base System" session (more advanced!! more fun!!)

Intended audience

Beginner, iPhone iPad Android app developers, Coders, Curious

Questions answered by this session

Why to use Drupal (in cloud) as base system for your mobile app?

How to use Drupal as base system to manage your mobile application's data (photos, videos, content, users, geo data, taxonomies etc etc)?

How to quickly develop mobile app platforms using Drupal?

How to be an iPhone rockstar without knowing Objective C?

What it means "Titanium with RedHat Openshift and Drupal"??

Eating the Elephant - Managing a Big Drupal Project

Presented by

So what's it like to manage a huge Drupal project with over 100 people on the team, a multi million pound project budget, and demanding clients?

Colin Sweetman and Al Croston of Axis12 Limited will talk about the lessons they've learned about building and structuring big Drupal teams, scaling Agile and keeping Stakeholders happy.

This isn't deeply technical, but is aimed at explaining how you can scale a Drupal project, use virtual teams, work with agility and still meet customer expectations when they come from a waterfall world.

Intended audience

senior developers, project managers, organisations running large Drupal sites, team leaders.

Questions answered by this session

How do I scale a Drupal team for an enterprise project?

How can I keep agility and provide a waterfall wrapper for the customer?

hiring - how to find the superstars

building team cohesion

Selling Drupal to nervous clients

Slick Data Sharding: How to Develop Scalable Data Applications With Drupal

Presented by

High-traffic websites that capture a lot of data from users often encounter performance problems when database input becomes a bottleneck. High volume user-submitted content (comments, ratings, form submissions, etc.) is typically stored in a single (master) database, and this creates problems not only for scale but also for replication and useful backups. It becomes important to be able to write these sorts of things to other secondary storage locations.

Intended audience

Developers looking to build large-volume sites who haven't built massive-scale sites before. Developers looking to build complex applications that need to integrate with Drupal, but won't necessarily need to be in Drupal.

Questions answered by this session

What is data sharding, and how does it apply to Drupal sites?

Why MongoDB and how can I use it?

How can I use a secondary MySQL database (or database cluster)?

But Drupal's APIs give me what functionality I need. How can I do all of this without reinventing the wheel?

Besides scale, what other advantages do these techniques have?

Drush Deploy

From small sites to large, drush is an essential tool in a drupal deployment strategy. Many of us are already using commands like rsync, sql-sync, features-revert, and updatedb as steps in our deployment workflow.

Tools to manage deployments however are often varied (capistrano, fabric, puppet, chef, hudson, etc), and foreign (ruby/python). In this session, the maintainers of drush will introduce a new tool for managing deployments: drush deploy. This tool does some of what those tools do, all in a comfortable drush and PHP environment.

Intended audience

All developers and sysadmins.

Questions answered by this session

How can drush help automate tasks during deployment?

Why should I be using a deployment tool?

What is drush deploy?

How can drush deploy simplify drupal deployments?

Who is drush deploy best suited for compared to other deployment tools?

This Code Stinks!

Presented by

"Code smell" refers to hints and patterns within code that can be a tip off that something is wrong. Learning to recognize code smells is a critical skill in software engineering. If you can sniff out a bad code smell early, you can eliminate a bugs before they even happen. If not, you may find yourself needing to rip out large swaths of code (not to mention your hair) because you ran into a wall, muttering to yourself "I knew that was too hacky an approach..."

Intended audience

Developers that want to rewrite their code fewer times. Evaluators who want to pick the right modules the first time. Tech Leads and QA teams that want to know when to push back on code that is going to be a problem long-term.

Questions answered by this session

How can I recognize a problem before it becomes a problem?

If I spot a potential problem lurking, what do I do?

Just how pedantic should I be about good code when I have a deadline to meet?

What habits can I develop to write less stinky code?

What is a true unit test, and why does it help me?

Free Software and You

So you've taken the plunge into Drupal and you know that it's open source. But what does that mean in practice?

Free and Open Source Software means more than just no licensing costs. In fact, it doesn't technically even mean that. Open Source is both a development philosophy and a social philosophy that work together to build better software and better communities.

Intended audience

This session is for themers, developers, consultants and anyone else in the Drupal community.

Questions answered by this session

What is the GPL and how is is diffent from some other licenses you may commonly see used in open source projects.

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