workflow

For people interested in big websites and their unique challenges, this panel offers a behind the scenes look at The Economist site. A team of experienced Economist developers will talk about the complicated challenges, the innovative solutions, and the still-to-be-solved issues of this popular website. There will also be a (lively, no doubt) Q&A.

Intended audience

Developers and business people interested in the technical aspect of The Economist website and the big-website solutions the team has developed.

Questions answered by this session

How does The Economist handle workflow and quality control?

How does The Economist handle testing?

What performance solutions has The Economist developed?

What aspects of The Economist site are custom-coded in innovative ways?

What's the status on The Economist migration to Drupal?

nuvole-drupalcon-london-2011.pdf

Drupal 7 allows to easily build and maintain distributions, i.e. repeatable website templates; you can benefit from this in all cases, whether you aim at large-scale deployments or even at maintaining a single website.

We will show how to package core and contributed modules in a distribution by using a Makefile and a profile and keeping them up-to-date during the whole development cycle.

Intended audience

All developers who wish to benefit from a clean development workflow allowing collaboration, code reuse and safe updates. The distributions workflow can be applied to single sites too, with similar benefits.

Questions answered by this session

How do I design my Features properly?

How can I create a Drupal distribution?

How does the distributions approach allow a cleaner workflow in general?

How can I have a safe upgrade path for my sites?

How can I easily maintain a Drupal distribution?

Multilingual_Drupal_solutions.pdf

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?

Dev-Deploy-Scale-Sleep.key.pdf

Drupal site best practice workflow includes initial development on local workstation, testing in a staging environment, and a production environment ranging from a single server to a high-performance high-availability cluster. After initial deployment, future versions go through the same workflow with the additional need to run tests based on the current production database and filesystem.

In this session, I'll demonstrate how to easily develop, test, and scale your Drupal site through this entire lifecycle without losing your mind.

Intended audience

This session is for anyone that builds or deploys Drupal sites for their own organization or for clients.

Questions answered by this session

How can I get develop locally and easily deploy the site to a high performance server or cluster?

How do I seamlessly and automatically scale my production web site up and down to handle varying traffic, without downtime?

How do I keep track of multiple Drupal sites, databases, and files directories, each with a development, testing, and production environment?

How do I ensure my site stays up 24x7 even when one or more servers fail?

Who do I go to when I encounter an server operation or Drupal problem I need help with?

dclondon-dog-session.pdf

Dog is a new approach building Drupal sites that deeply embraces Git in order to build portable, deployable Drupal site packages. Dog makes the process of developing, managing, and maintaining a Drupal site easier for everyone from the individual hobbyist to multi-cluster-backed Drupal sites with teams of developers.

Intended audience

Anyone who cares about workflows for putting together Drupal sites.

Questions answered by this session

How can I use dog to build my basic Drupal site?

How can my company use dog to assist/improve our internal development workflow?

How does dog integrate with external tools, such as build systems, configuration management, etc.?

What does dog mean for Drupal distributions?

How does dog connect with existing Drupal "packaging" techniques, like drush make and site tarballs?