Sessions

Adaptive, Responsive, Mobile First and Drupal Theming for the Future with HTML5, CSS3 and Omega

himerus — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:01:07 +0000

Jake Strawn

As designers/themers we've always been pressed with dealing with screen sizes. I remember the days when we had to worry how many of our site visitors used a 800x600 screen resolution and when we could stop accommodating those users, much like we have with IE6 users today.

The problem is that in the past years, and more and more every day, the web is shifting back to smaller devices and resolutions in the mobile market. iPhones, iPads, Android phones & tablets, crackberries and more are quickly becoming the primary source by which our users consume the internet and media. So today, once again, there IS actually a reason to consider designs that will work well on an 800 pixel wide resolution. What you ask? An iPad in portrait viewing mode, and other large screen tablets. But it's not time to focus on a single resolution, but to focus on the concepts that will let us build for them ALL at ONCE.

This session will introduce you to Adaptive Design and Responsive Layouts and how you can implement designs and themes that will work on ANY device without the need for multiple versions of a site all with different themes and designs.

This session will be broken into two main portions:

Introduction to Responsive Design/Layouts & Examples
This portion will cover the ins and outs of responsive concepts and how to apply those to Drupal, the shortcomings in Drupal (and most frameworks) that make Responsive concepts still a somewhat "hacky" solution, and how we can better improve upon core to make this better for the mobile web in the future.
Introduction to ONE technique to get you started using these concepts now...
This portion will cover how Omega implements Responsive/Adaptive concepts, and where the future of this project is going, and how you can begin using the framework today, and contribute to it for the future all while creating powerful themes for any device your users may be using.
Omega has moved to a mobile first approach on design and layout concepts, making it simple to quickly push out a mobile friendly version of ANY drupal site, with options now to use multiple grids based on the 960.gs framework, but sized to your choosing. It is possible now to target certain device capabilities and sizes to render content in new ways using CSS3 @media queries.

Session Outline & Resources

Introduction
Let's talk Mobile...
- Types of Mobile Devices
  - Feature Phones & Smart Phones
  - Why we should still care about Feature Phones
- User Agent Detection
  - IS WRONG
- Mobile First Concepts
  - Reasons for Mobile First
  - Build for the Lowest Common Denominator
Responsive Web Design
- What is Responsive?
- Examples
  - colly.com
  - sasquatchfestival.com
- Drupal Can Do That Too!!
The Path to Responsive
- The JavaScript Method
  - Adapt.js
- The CSS3 Method
  - @media queries
    - @media all/print/screen
    - @media all and (max-width/min-width)
    - @media all and (max-device-width/min-device-width)
- Combining The Methods
  - Respond.js
- Which Method is Right?
Implementing Responsive Layouts
- History of Omega
- Features in Omega 3.x
  - Responsive Grids
    Omega 3.x ships with a 1200px, 960px, 720px, and fluid grid by default with customizable @media queries for each grid/layout.
  - Mobile First Approach
    No, not the First Mobile.... MOBILE FIRST!
  - Enhanced Performance
    Advanced Caching, Less looping, clever CSS aggregation.
  - (pre) Aggregation of Responsive CSS
    Because of a large set of media queries, the Responsive CSS (when CSS aggregation is turned on) will pre-aggregate all the media queries into a single CSS file.
  - Zones & Regions Easily Configurable
    Any zone can be placed in either <header>, <section> (main content) or <footer> semantic page elements, and any region can be assigned to any zone...
  - Primary Region, Source & Visual Ordering
    You can set a region to be the Primary Region, and adjust to regions around it, and set the visual ordering on page and ordering in source.
  - css[], libraries[], grids[]
    The new elements present in the .info structure for Omega allows customizable css, javascript libraries and grids with simple setup.
  - Extend/Implement your own Grids
    Using the new grids[ ] array in the .info file, you can declare your own grid structure based on 960.gs standards for your subtheme.
  - Equal Height Regions & Blocks
    Each zone can have equal height regions, and every region can have equal height blocks...
  - Simplified Theme Settings UI
    It really is this friggin’ simple...
  - Did I mention sites that are using Omega?!
- Where Drupal Falls Short
  - Drupal 8 Web Services & Context Core Initiative
  - Drupal 8 Design Initiative
Resources
- Omega Resources
- Other Resources
Who can I thank for this?
- Jake Strawn
  - Twitter
  - Facebook
  - LinkedIn
  - Google+
  - Drupal.org
- Sebastian Siemssen
  - Twitter
  - Facebook
  - LinkedIn
  - Google+
  - Drupal.org

Intended Audience:

This session, while labeled intermediate will be suitable for Beginner to Advanced Drupal themers/designers to gain knowledge on responsive/adaptive HTML5 designs and layouts targeted for multiple devices in a growing mobile market.

Questions answered by this session:

What is Responsive design?

How can I build for mobile devices easily?

How can I use a single site/theme/framework for ALL devices?

How can I extend Omega with my own grid sizes/columns?

How can I conditionally use alternate layouts in the same theme?

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 11:00 - 12:00

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Damn Quick Drupal: How to Make Drupal Perform and Scale Like a Rockstar!

soyarma — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:44:01 +0000

Michael Cooper

I've often heard folks complain that Drupal doesn't scale well and has issues with performance. You'll hear people saying it isn't suited for large sites, or that it is bloated and too slow. A year ago, after a Drupal site failed abysmally under load (in less than 60 seconds) I was wondering if all of those statements and predictions were true.

As it turned out, I was wrong and oh-so happy to be wrong. To a certain degree Drupal has been a victim of it's own success. The ease with which it can be extended has caused many coders to treat the inner workings as though they were a black box--an attitude that can bring about pain when it comes to light that code added to Drupal doesn't make proper use of all the advanced caching and tuning methods available.

This session is designed to both show how to enhance Drupal's performance drastically, with simple steps and tweaks; as well as provide you with the knowledge about how you can examine what your Drupal site is doing and extend these tweaks and best practices.

I will show you how to serve pages right out of Drupal (no Varnish or other reverse-proxy involved) at under 100ms per page with as many as 100 concurrent users. This course will show you how to make a Drupal site that can serve millions of monthly page-views off just two servers (web and mysql/cache). We'll discuss how to do this on fully anonymous sites as well as sites with high levels of authenticated users.

You'll learn how to make Drupal damn quick.

Intended Audience:

Coders and system administrators who want to make their Drupal site perform like it is just running core. How to make busy sites run really well on even a single server.

Questions answered by this session:

How do I run a busy site with fast page load times

What is the difference between things like APC, memcache, memcached, authcache, boost, etc?

What exactly will pressflow do for my site--both for authenticated and anonymous users

How can I find out what I need to cache most

What are the trade-offs and caveats

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 12:30 - 13:30

Room:

Concert Hall

Slides:

DC London Presentation.pdf

So What's this "Drew-paul" Thing You Do? (Explaining Drupal to Others)

davidneedham — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:00:07 +0000

David Needham

You're introduced to someone by a friend. The smalltalk begins and you know what's coming.

They ask, "What do you do?" The friend who introduced you tries to understand your explanation yet again.

You say, "Um, I do Drupal." They stare back blankly as you continue.

"...it's a content management system - you know, a CMS?"

You shudder as you try again, "...it's kinda like WordPress?" Still nothing.

Eventually you give in and explain it in a way that even your grandmother could understand: "I build websites."

Finally the look of realization comes across their face, but you feel dead inside.

---

This scenario is reenacted every time you meet someone. You're passionate about Drupal, but because of one reason or another you're unable to talk to people about it. Things get even more interesting if you start with your job title, in my case it's "Drupal themer and trainer." Great - at least one more term that I have to explain in gross generality.

I eventually give up and answer "I'm a web designer" to anyone who asks. Everyone does it. It makes things easier, but in today's culture it's a rather vague and unhelpful term to describe what we really do.

Intended Audience:

This session walks through some 'Drupal best practices' to explain your role to people who are unfamiliar with Drupal. We'll also cover techniques for combating know-it-all's and Drupal-haters, as well as ways to explain Drupal to your friends and colleagues.

Questions answered by this session:

What is Drupal and what is the history behind it?

How do I explain Drupal to someone who isn't familair with it?

How do I convince my boss or coworkers that Drupal is the way to go?

How can I market myself as someone looking for a freelance or full time job in Drupal?

How does "Certified to Rock" work and how do I increase my score?

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 11:00 - 12:00

Room:

Maple Room

Slides:

Drew Paul.pdf

dog: A New Era for Drupal Sitebuilding

sdboyer — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 21:06:18 +0000

Sam Boyer

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.

With a single command, Dog can roll out an entire new instance of a site - whether that site is intended for hacking by a developer, testing by an automated tool, or real production use. Multiple site instances that satisfy different use cases; one unified process for initial deployment, updates, and development. With its powerful-but-simple command set, dog makes it easy for both humans and computers to work together throughout the process of developing, deploying, and maintaining a drupal site.

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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 15:00 - 16:00

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Slides:

dclondon-dog-session.pdf

Take Full Control of Your Site Layout with Display Suite for Drupal 7

swentel — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 07:54:16 +0000

Kristof De Jaeger

Jan-yves Vanhaverbeke

Display Suite offers you a drag and drop UI that allows you to easily manage the layout of your site in a consistent and centralized way.

In this session we will show you what Display Suite offers out of the box, but also the more advanced features. Developers will learn how to extend its power by adding custom (block) fields, formatters and layouts. For themers we will show how using Display Suite can make you forget all about the template hell, and how it allows you to have clean and consistent HTML throughout your site.

A step-by-step example will show how easy it is to set up Display Suite, and how to use it in combination with other popular modules such as Views and Panels. Learn all the tips and tricks by the people that created Display Suite to get the most out of it!

Intended Audience:

Drupal themers Drupal developers that want to prepare their site for themers in a consistent way Drupal integrators that want to control their layout right from the backend

Questions answered by this session:

How can I manage my site layout without touching any template file?

How can I optimize my HTML code?

How can I get the most out of Display Suite?

How do Display Suite and Panels work together?

How do Display Suite and Views work together?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 17:00 - 18:00

Room:

Fairfield Room

Slides:

display-suite-drupal7-drupalcon-london.pdf

The Path to a Mobile Drupal: Techniques, Tools and Failure

JohnAlbin — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:39:45 +0000

John Albin Wilkins

Recently, I received an email invite for a webinar on mobile device development. I tried to sign up via my iphone, but was told that my mobile device wasn’t supported. True story.

As mobile device usage grows exponentially, the web developer community’s assumptions about user experience are being challenged. We’re realizing that what we thought we knew about how to build web sites was becoming too formulaic, treating our users as cookie cutter entities. Fortunately, many have started exploring ways to deliver appropriate user experiences, not just for “mobile” users, but for all users.

The main approaches we’re exploring can be summarized:

Responsive designs
Adaptive designs
Mobile First sites
Mobile only sites

But what is the right path for Drupal to take? What’s the right path so our users are given an experience tailored for their needs? What are the right questions to ask when building a new site? I’ll give you a hint; it’s not “What mobile devices should we support?”

In this session, we’ll discuss the main approaches to “mobile development“, try to define the mobile context, explore technology like media queries, fluid grids, and responsive images, and explore tools like adapt.js, 320 and Up, and WURFL. And one critical element that is often overlooked: performance.

Finally, we’ll look at how Drupal is uniquely positioned above most frameworks to provide mobile solutions: Its low cost of failure.

About The Presenter

John Albin Wilkins is one of the top 30 Drupal contributors to Drupal 7 and is listed a few times in D7’s MAINTAINERS.txt. He maintains several well-used contrib projects, including the Zen theme, Menu Block and Menu Position. He’s also the co-author of Drupal 7 Module Development, co-host of the Using Blue design/ux/theming podcast, and a Senior Front-end Developer at an awesome Drupal shop, Palantir.net.

Intended Audience:

Front-end developers, designers, site builders and even decision makers will find this session essential in understanding the Drupal mobile landscape.

Questions answered by this session:

What does “mobile context” mean?

What are the performance implications of mobile devices?

Which mobile technique is better?

What Drupal modules will help you build websites for mobile?

How does Drupal’s low cost of failure help all of us?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 10:45 - 11:45

Room:

Concert Hall

Creating and Measuring the User Experience

Noyz — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:54:54 +0000

Jeff Noyes

This session will cover:

Methods to flush out requirements and uncover both good and bad ideas
Tools and methods to accelerate user interface design
Tools and methods to test designs for accuracy and measure for continued improvement

All of the above will provide you with tools and processies to ensure that you are both building to meet your customers needs by making informed design decisions, and getting better over time.

Flushing out requirements
Well look at several ways to get multiple stakeholders engaged and on the same page. We'll learn to quickly identify both good and bad ideas

Accelerating interface Design
Well look at tools, proceesies, and the roles needed to create both wireframes and visual designs in an expedited way

Testing for accuracy and measuring the user experience
Well review many tools and processes used to test for effectiveness, and demonstrate methodologies that will ensure that each new feature or enhancement improves the experience.

In conclusion, I'll show some examples of how such tools and processes had a positive impact on business.

This session applies to people working in waterfall or agile methodologies, and applies to both website and web application design. It applies to business or product owners that are looking to increase traffic and adoption.

Last, the session will use Drupal and Drupal Gardens as the basis of this discussion.

Intended Audience:

Designers looking to learn to accelerate their artform Developers looking to include design, or some of it's user centered practices into their artform Business or product owners looking to build products that map to user needs and improve over time

Questions answered by this session:

How can I make sure that my work improves the product I'm working on?

How can I weed out bad ideas and focus on good ones? What processes can I put into place to validate my thinking?

What tools can help me during the lifecycle of concept to creation?

How can I accelerate my design practice while including feedback from my peers and users?

How is Acquia applying this to Drupal. What are we doing to ensure our contributions are good ones?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 12:30 - 13:30

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Slides:

Final Presentation_for distribution.pdf

Node.js and Drupal

beejeebus — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 05:53:49 +0000

beejeebus

Howard Tyson

Drupal is a powerful, flexible platform for building applications, but not something that handles realtime notifcations easily.

Node.js is a breath of fresh air in the Open Source web server landscape. It makes writing applications that handle thousands of open connections at the same time easy.

The Nodejs module integrates Drupal with Node.js, allowing for the best of both worlds.

This presentation will address:

Why realtime
Why Node.js
How the Nodejs module integrates Drupal and Node.js
Current features of the Nodejs module
Where the Nodejs module is going

Now with 100% more BoF - Node.js and Drupal BoF.

Intended Audience:

Developers, Site Builders

Questions answered by this session:

How to add realtime support and push notifications to Drupal sites

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 13:45 - 14:45

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Contributing Without Code

mrf — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:40:08 +0000

Mark Ferree

When you think about contributing to Drupal your first thought is usually of patching bugs and writing new features.

If you are not a developer, don't worry! There is a huge opportunity to increase your understanding of Drupal, shape the future of the software you work with, and help out the Drupal project along the way.

Learning Drupal can be a difficult and frustrating process. Getting involved in the community is the fastest and most fun way to climb the learning cliff and learn to love using Drupal!

I will describe how your efforts in the following areas can help maintain a healthy ecosystem and promote growth in the project:

Advocacy
Design
Documentation
Project Management
Support
Testing
Translation

If you are already a non-code contributor, please bring your own stories to share!

About the Presenter

Almost five years ago, Mark Ferree was a front-end developer thrown into the world of Drupal. After struggling for several years to find effective ways to contribute, he has developed into an active and passionate contributor. He works for ISL Consulting in San Francisco doing custom Drupal development. In addition to his other work with Drupal, Mark helps organize the monthly SFDUG Users Helping Users session.

Intended Audience:

New users wanting to get more involved in the Drupal community. Long-time Drupal users trying to find an effective way to contribute.

Questions answered by this session:

What are the benefits of donating my time to Drupal?

What is this Drupal community all about?

How do I get involved?

Where are the easiest places to get started helping?

What kind of community effort is needed to keep this project growing?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 17:00 - 18:00

Room:

Maple Room

Slides:

contributing-without-code-drupalcon-london.pdf

Relation

chx — Tue, 03 May 2011 06:08:10 +0000

Károly Négyesi

Claes Gyllensvärd

Dick Olsson

Relation is a new module to create relationships between entities. In this session you will see some of the feature of this extremely powerful module. See how easy it is to create one relation containing all five Marx brothers. Describing a donation a user made to a party. etc.

Intended Audience:

all site builders who ever needed to relate two entities

Questions answered by this session:

Relations between entities

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 13:45 - 14:45

Room:

Maple Room

Minnesota Usability Study : What Do Users Have to Say About Drupal 7?

dcmistry — Tue, 03 May 2011 14:49:03 +0000

Angie Byron

Brad Bowman

Jennifer Lea Lampton

Three years after our first round of formal usability testing on Drupal 6, the UX team returned to the University of Minnesota in May 2011 to uncover usability issues and patterns for Drupal 7. After making broad changes in D7, it was critical for us to validate if we are inching forward in our goal. With this aim in mind, we tested eight participants and asked them to perform some tasks. All the participants were site builders with no experience with Drupal.

The intent of the session is to share findings from the study, and discuss how the community can take this initiative forward to make a more usable Drupal 8.

Intended Audience:

Attend this panel presentation if you are interested in usability, understanding the user experience and the usability road map for Drupal 8.

Questions answered by this session:

How was the study conducted?

What was tested?

What works well and what needs improvement in D7?

How was the overall experience for our users of using D7?

What does this mean for Drupal 8?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 10:30 - 11:30

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Slides:

DCL-UMN-Usability.pdf

OG7 - This Time It's On!

Amitaibu — Thu, 05 May 2011 14:14:28 +0000

Amitai Burstein

OG7 - the one that should have been in Drupalcon Chicago, but this time, I'll even be there!

Learn about all the new stuff OG7 has.

Intended Audience:

Humans.

Questions answered by this session:

How OG uses fields and Entity API

How OG leverages Panels

What is OG's group-membership concept

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 13:30 - 14:30

Room:

Concert Hall

Of Constraints and Capabilities: Applying Systems Thinking to Design the Ideal Experience

dantemurphy — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:33:10 +0000

Dante Murphy

Angel Brown

In software design and development we often overlook the role of our customers in applying their own capabilities to achieve their goals, often creating solutions that are bloated, complex, and inefficient. We are also prone to look at constraints as obstacles rather than opportunities to bound and clarify the services we offer. By applying systems thinking, designers and devlopers can create idealized designs that deliver the most value to customers and businesses alike.

Here are the presentation slides and speaker notes:
http://london2011.drupal.org/sites/default/files/of_constraints_and_capa...

Intended Audience:

Those who design, plan, architect, and evaluate software and digital services.

Questions answered by this session:

What is systems thinking, and why is it important?

How does an idealized design differ from other types of design?

How can a mental model help in designing and architecting software?

Why are constraints good?

How do I know what my audience can and will do for themselves?

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 13:30 - 14:30

Room:

Maple Room

Slides:

of_constraints_and_capabilities_v2.pdf

Forensic Theming: Key Techniques to Building Effective Drupal Themes

emmajane — Fri, 06 May 2011 13:50:50 +0000

Emma Jane Hogbin

The theme of your website has the capacity for beautiful, semantic markup...and also the hacky HTML soup. You can build a new theme by downloading a free theme and tearing out its guts--or you can learn how to become a theme surgeon.

In this session you will learn two key techniques needed to build a successful theme: crime scene investigation (identifying Drupal page elements in your design files) and power tools for copy-cat theming (things you need to recreate your design using Drupal). From start to finish we will transform a design file into a Drupal theme. With special attention given to your all-important questions: how do I save time with grid-based design? Should I use Panels? How do I make this bit of stuff appear next to that bit? Yah, but how do I start?

About The Presenter
Emma Jane Hogbin is well known in the Drupal community for her engaging presentations and kickass theming book, Front End Drupal. She is currently working on her second book, Drupal: A user's guide which is due out shortly after DrupalCon. Through her training company, Design to Theme, emmajane has empowered thousands of people to create the Drupal site of their dreams.

Intended Audience:

Small business site builders who partner with graphic designers but have no idea how to make Drupal look like a design file. Intermediate themers who start with a free Drupal theme that looks "close" to the final site and then start hacking to make their theme. The audience currently does not use base themes and are frustrated at how complicated all of the code is. They are looking for shortcuts and some quick-fix solutions to make theming faster and more profitable.

Questions answered by this session:

What are the key tools I need to use to make themeing Drupal easier?

How can I make Drupal markup less yucky?

Where should I start when building a new theme?

Yeah, but how do I theme *that thing*?

I want to see how you build a theme: show me!

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 14:15 - 15:15

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Slides:

forensic-theming-drupalcon-london.pdf

Theming API

Rolf van de Krol — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:10:35 +0000

Rolf van de Krol

When you are actively working on theming in Drupal, you definitely know how should theme an item list or a table. But, there is a big difference between being able to theme most things in Drupal and really knowing what you are doing and why you are doing it. This is like mathematics. Understanding the logic behind your tools, helps you with creating solutions for problems you've never seen before.

This session doesn't focus on making things beautiful or useful; it focuses on the code behind those beautiful designs. We take a look under the hood of Drupal and find out how we can use the Theming API to its maximum possibilities.

The focus will be on Drupal 7, but differences between Drupal 6 and 7 will be mentioned occasionaly.

Intended Audience:

Themers, who already know what they want to do, but do not always know how, and more importantly, do not always know why.

Questions answered by this session:

How does the Theming API work under the hood?

How can I use the Theming API the best way?

What is the role if the theme engine in the whole theming process?

What cool stuff can be done using process and preprocess functions and how do they work?

How does the concept of base and sub themes work in the API?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 15:45 - 16:45

Room:

Fairfield Room

Slides:

Presentation v2.pdf

Easy Drupal Hosting Lifecycle: Local Dev, Production Deploy, Cloud Scale, and Sleep Well.

bjaspan — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:00:50 +0000

Barry Jaspan

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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 13:00 - 14:00

Room:

Concert Hall

Slides:

Dev-Deploy-Scale-Sleep.key.pdf

Design in the Open: Collaboration Models in Open Source Design

Jeff Burnz — Tue, 10 May 2011 11:39:11 +0000

Jeff Burnz

This session discusses the contribution designers are making in the open source world and how they are doing this - and how Drupal can learn from this and adopt a better collaboration model for designers and developers.

I will examine a number of highly successful open source design projects, extract the essential points out these projects and then look at how Drupal might be able to use similar tools and ideas to fuel designer participation in the Drupal project.

As part of the work on the Design Initiative I've been delving heavily into the question "what motivates people in open source" and what collaboration models are the most successful and why. This session will attempt to shed some light on this and hopefully spearhead changes in Drupal.org to help accommodate designers and their needs.

About Me:

Hi, my name is Jeff Burnz and I am the Drupal 8 Design Initiative owner - you can read more about this core initiative here: http://drupal.org/node/1089096 or read the official launch post: http://buytaert.net/design-for-drupal-8

I've been around the Drupal traps for about 5 years and was a heavy contributor (top 30) to Drupal 7 and am currently the maintainer of the Seven theme and co-maintainer for Bartik.

Intended Audience:

Designers, developers, themers

Questions answered by this session:

How do designers collaborate in other Open Source projects?

What motivates designers to contribute to Open Source projects?

What can we learn from other successul design projects?

What can we do to increase designer participation in Drupal?

Making Your Theme Scale With Your Brand

tkoleary — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:25:26 +0000

maartenverbaarschot

Terrence Kevin O'Leary

Brands grow organically and often undergo complete re-design. How do you prepare for change and build a scalable brand? Our session will show how, when you theme effectively, Drupal has the power to grow with a brand and make design changes simple.

We will talk about:

Tools and processes for envisioning the brand and the theme
Creating smart markup
Thinking in systems rather than ‘pages’, and building sustainable software
How the right tools can help you (CSS libraries, base themes, helper modules)
Finding balance between theoretical purity and practical solutions
Collaborating with themers, module developers and designers
Documenting the process and sharing assets

Intended Audience:

Experienced themers, module developers, designers, project managers.

Questions answered by this session:

How to get more control over templates, and for instance, prevent tons of overrides when you have many views that require custom markup

How to make CSS systems (Or: why Drupal’s HTML is actually awesome)

How do I ‘design for Drupal’?

How can I use Drupal to manage brand assets?

How do I as a project manager, get the most out of my team?

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 14:45 - 15:45

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Bridging the Gap Between Desktop and Mobile Publishing with Drupal

twom — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:12:45 +0000

Tom Deryckere

While mobile websites are becoming a commodity, many developers still struggle with the task of connecting their Drupal sites with the mobile and tablet world. Thousands of desktop focused sites have been build in the past years, and many of them are now facing the challenge of adding a mobile strategy. The fact that Drupal is at this point primarily a desktop focused CMS, the technical solutions for adding this mobile layer are not always straightforward. The question can be asked if the Drupal CMS is holding us back or can we use Drupal to our advantage?

To date, several of ad hoc techniques have been developed to make the transition easier. Many of them are being bundled within the Mobile Tools module, and other techniques make use of already available modules such as context, panels, views and services.

After building several mobile websites, and native apps, we learned that several mobile strategies that can be chosen:

Lowest common denominator sites that run on the widest range of devices.
Mobile websites optimized for the latest browsers.
Mobile apps that can be purchased in app stores.

All of these strategies have their place in the current web ecosystem, but have different requirements.

This session will focus on the underlying mechanisms of Drupal that can help you in extending your current desktop offer mobile or to create a new Drupal strategy that incorporates mobile from the start.

This sessions will cover following topics:

What is a mobile content strategy and how to choose one.
Creating (scalable) architectures with Drupal that support your mobile strategy.
Drupal core functionality and contrib modules that help in creating a mobile website or native app.

This session would be highly complementary with any theming oriented session that discusses mobile design, user experience and javascript frameworks.

About the author:
Tom has been dealing with Drupal and mobile sites since 2008 and has seen the focus shift from transcoding desktop sites that work on low end devices to creating HTML5 and CSS3 based webapps that run only on the latest browsers. In an effort to bring Drupal closer to the mobile web, Tom has maintained the Mobile Tools module and blogs about mobile on mobiledrupal.com. Currently Tom is Senior Consultant at Northpoint Solutions where he continues his focus on mobile web development.

Intended Audience:

This session is targeted to Drupal architects and developers.

Questions answered by this session:

What is a mobile strategy?

How to choose a mobile strategy?

How to use Drupal as a mobile CMS?

What functionality is provided by mobile tools?

Which challenges are ahead?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 17:00 - 18:00

Room:

Concert Hall

Slides:

Bridging-gap-mobile-desktop.pdf

Living, Breathing, Drupal: The Biology of the Request

webkenny — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:29:09 +0000

Kenny Silanskas

Taken in its simplest form, Drupal is a linear system that starts at line 1 of index.php and executes its code line-by-line until it outputs what a user asked for. What if we could visually explore that process to help us understand exactly how Drupal core actually works? Join webkenny and his zany cast of explorers as we take this journey together and learn the inner workings of the drop.

During our journey into the belly of the beast we'll learn exactly how the system executes a request from the moment a user requests foo.com to the end result displayed in the browser. We'll take an in-depth tour through the rivers of the hook system, explore the caves of the theme layer, traverse the sands of update.php, and tear apart the world's best CMS until it's nothing but totally approachable and easy to extend.

We will also take a detour along troubleshooting cove to learn how our journey can benefit us in our day-to-day debugging and site building.

Warning: Travel at your own peril!

While this talk will focus primarily on Drupal 7, most of the material will be applicable to Drupal 6.

Intended Audience:

Existing Drupal developers who want to understand the system and graduate from roadie to rock star.

Questions answered by this session:

What is the bootstrap? Laying the groundwork in index.php

What is the hook system and how does it work?

How does a preprocess preprocess its preprocessors? The theme system.

What is update.php and how does it "know" what to do?

Who cares? Using this information to build better sites.

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 10:45 - 11:45

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Slides:

DCL2011-BIO-KS.pdf

Workbench: Managing Content Management

agentrickard — Wed, 11 May 2011 23:51:43 +0000

Ken Rickard

George DeMet

Our clients often come to Drupal with expectations about the features of a content management system (CMS). In many cases, Drupal handles the features they expect. However, not all editorial tools are a part of Drupal Core, and Drupal has addressed these tools with various contributed modules. As a result, Drupal’s editorial space generally lacks a consistent workflow and interface.

At DrupalCON San Francisco, Palantir.net outlined the opportunities we saw for improving content management workflow in Drupal 7. This presentation introduces the outcomes of that work.

Workbench incorporates contributed modules and has some new features of its own:

- Hierarchical permission inheritance by “Sections” not just content types
- Extensible workflow states
- Single repository for media management
- Modify live content without publishing changes immediately

Workbench provides a unified interface for managing content. In effect, Workbench hides Drupal from you and makes content management about your institution and your website, not about Drupal.

Intended Audience:

Site builders, architects, user experience designers, people evaluating Drupal.

Questions answered by this session:

How do you control content access beyond content type settings?

How do you find the content that relates to each user and that user’s job (which is not necessarily the same as the hierarchy of the site)?

Can you simplify Drupal’s use for content authors, editors, and publishers?

Can you find that file you just uploaded and re-use it?

What framework exists that allows you to extend functionality for your content authors yet still providing a unified user experience?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 15:45 - 16:45

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Slides:

Workbench-London.key.pdf

Free Software and You

pwolanin — Thu, 12 May 2011 00:16:52 +0000

Peter Wolanin

Larry Garfield

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.

For example, by being licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) your contributions of to Drupal core and any contributed projects become parts of a "common good" that can be freely shared and re-used, but which cannot be turned into a closed-source product. This helps build trust and a sense of collaboration even if we work for companies that sometimes compete for clients.

This session will introduce the advantages of Open Source development models, and compare Open Source and proprietary consulting models both from the developer/consultant side and from the client side. That includes what it means to work in a trust-based economy rather than a fear-based economy.

We will cover the concepts and principles behind Free Software and Open Source Software, how those impact how code gets written (and what code gets written), and guidelines to keep in mind to maintain your or your business's standing as a good citizen of the open source community. In addition, we will touch briefly on how you may wish to make agreements or contracts with clients so that the work you perform can later benefit both you and the broader community.

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.

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 12:30 - 13:30

Room:

Fairfield Room

Slides:

Free_Software_garfield_wolanin_london2011.pdf

I'm Leaving You: The Risks of Dumping Your Old CMS for Drupal and How to Manage Them

Nicole Lind — Thu, 12 May 2011 01:23:13 +0000

Nicole Lind

In the old days, moving to Drupal often meant converting static pages or templates to Drupal nodes. Today, it is rare that we get to build a site from scratch. Reality is that most major Drupal projects are now migrations from other content management systems.

Taking on such a migration is not a trivial decision for an organization. There is a great deal of complexity in the reasons for migrating, but the decision is often not understood well amongst the various stakeholders.

This session is not a workshop about why to choose Drupal. Rather, I will discuss what to expect after the decision is made and techniques for managing the change given the various reasons you may have for doing so.

Intended Audience:

This session is geared toward project managers and managers dealing with significant risk associated with migration from a legacy CMS platform to Drupal.

Questions answered by this session:

How to set realistic expectations with stakeholders?

How to document an appropriate risk analysis and mitigation strategy in regards to a migration to Drupal?

You got "attitude" from legacy CMS users? Strategies on how to best deal with them.

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 12:30 - 13:30

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Slides:

nlindLondonSessionV2-notes.pdf

This Code Stinks!

Crell — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:17:01 +0000

Larry Garfield

"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..."

Recognizing code smells is also an important skill in Quality Assurance, code review, and evaluating potential modules to use. It can help identify code that will be difficult to unit test, and therefore easy to break.

This session will provide a practical overview of a number of key "code smells", anti-patterns, and other bad things to watch out for, in both your own code and in someone else's. Along the way we'll learn about aspects of good coding patterns and how to avoid stinky code in the first place.

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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 14:15 - 15:15

Room:

Concert Hall

Slides:

Code Smells.pdf

Drush Deploy

msonnabaum — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:23:22 +0000

Mark Sonnabaum

Moshe Weitzman

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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 14:45 - 15:45

Room:

Concert Hall

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

tobby — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:39:41 +0000

Tobby Hagler

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. I'll cover how to successfully write to different databases (MySQL and MongoDB) while still use Drupal's APIs and to cover pitfalls and successes.

In addition to scalability, data sharding provides other capabilities. Applications may be developed using Node.js or with other technology, but still needs access to the same data. With smart data sharding, this becomes possible and even easy.

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 <em>in</em> 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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 15:00 - 16:00

Room:

Maple Room

Slides:

Slick-Data-Sharding.pdf

Hollywood Storytelling and the Drupal Development Process

gdemet — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:40:22 +0000

George DeMet

Finding the best way to approach Drupal site development can be a daunting task. Not only do projects vary widely in size, scope, and team composition, but there are also several different development process models to choose from. And with the size of Drupal projects growing larger every day, the cost of failure has never been higher.

In this session, we'll look at the lifecycle of a Drupal development project through the lens of Hollywood storytelling. We’ll examine how the narrative structure of various films compares to different process models for Drupal site development. And along the way, we'll talk about some best practices for delivering successful projects that are on time, on budget, and meet customer expectations.

In addition to a comparison of the Drupal site development process to the three-act Hollywood screenplay structure, we'll also examine how other narrative structures like non-submersible units and the Hero's Journey relate to iterative development of Drupal platforms and helping customers achieve their goals.

Not only will you come away with a better understanding of how to approach your next Drupal project, but you’ll also gain a greater appreciation for the life lessons taught by some of your favorite Hollywood films.

Intended Audience:

This non-technical session is targeted at those looking to learn about different approaches to the process of developing Drupal sites. It's great for freelancers and developers/principals at smaller Drupal development shops, as well as those who are considering Drupal for use within their company or organization and don't know where to start the process. It's also useful for those who might be collaborating with someone else on a Drupal project. And of course, it's a must-see for anyone who enjoys storytelling and the movies!

Questions answered by this session:

Why is having structure and process important to the success of a Drupal development project?

What are some best practices for delivering Drupal projects on time and budget that meet customer expectations?

How can I successfully incorporate agile processes into Drupal projects?

What are the elements of a successful Drupal platform?

How can I apply lessons from some of my favorite movies to my Drupal development project?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 10:45 - 11:45

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Slides:

drupal_as_screenwriting.pdf

Drupal On a Dime

jhorocks — Fri, 13 May 2011 02:03:09 +0000

Jennifer Hols

Benjamin Koether

You already know Drupal is capable of doing almost anything... for a price. But what about those looking to leverage Drupal on a tight budget and timeline? Is it possible to build a kick-butt site on a dime and deploy it at warp speed without sacrificing quality? (i.e. “Can I have my cake and eat it too?”)

The goals of this session are threefold:

1. We will debunk some of the common myths about Drupal design and development. For example, we’ll debunk the idea that custom built is always better.

2. Borrowing a page from Lean Manufacturing, we’ll present a new way of thinking about web design and development that will allow you to achieve higher quality, at lower costs and record speeds.

3. We’ll provide you with some practical tips for planning your next project. For example, “How do I decide what features I need?” and “How can I make the most efficient use of my designers time?”

Intended Audience:

This session is intended for people who are planning a project using Drupal and are looking for cost and time saving strategies.

Questions answered by this session:

How can we make the most out of Drupal’s functionality on a small budget?

What are some strategies and best practices for selecting features?

When is it wrong (and possibly unnecessary) to pay for custom development?

What can I do to get the most value from a web designer?

Low-price, high-quality, fast. I’ve heard you can only pick two, is that true?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 10:30 - 11:30

Room:

Fairfield Room

Slides:

Drupal_On_a_Dime_DRAFT.pdf

Eating the Elephant - Managing a Big Drupal Project

CS_Axis12 — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:10:25 +0000

CS_Axis12

Al Croston

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.

Our session is confirmed for 1:30pm on Thursday 25th August. We can talk for days about our experiences in this area, but given the limited time slot we have available for the session, the key areas we plan to cover are:

- How do I scale a Drupal team for an enterprise project?
- How can I keep agility and provide a waterfall wrapper for the client?
- Hiring: how to find the superstars
- Building team cohesion
- Selling Drupal to nervous clients

We'd really like to know what questions you'd like us to answer so we can tailor the session to provide the most benefit to you.

So email us via our contact page at http://www.axistwelve.com/contact with "Drupalcon session" in the subject with your questions. We will do our best to cover everyone's requests within the limited time available to us.

We have to finalise the session by 30th June, so contact us now.

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

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 13:30 - 14:30

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Scaling the Drupal Community

heyrocker — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:10:33 +0000

Greg Dunlap

Angie Byron

The Drupal ecosystem is changing ... a lot. We have venture financed startups, we're powering 2% of the interwebs, and our community has already seen exponential growth–in 5 years Drupal.org has gone from ~25,000 to ~1,000,000 members–and it can be baffling (and a little terrifying) to think of the community growing bigger still. And yet, the community of contributors is what drives Drupal, and so in order to grow Drupal, we must also grow ourselves. What does this look like, and how can we protect what brought us here in the first place, while still creating smooth onramps for those who are new? How do the changes to the ecosystem around Drupal (major governments leaning on it, Fortune 500 companies building whole business off it, money flying everwhere) affect the work we do?

This session will analyze some of the growing pains the Drupal community has already experienced and those that it is actively thrashing through. It will also attempt to impart some tips and guidance on how to make it through our project’s next decade without us all stabbing each other. ;)

NOTE: We gave this in DrupalCon Chicago as an unstructured interview format. This time we will explore some new angles as well as use some actual slides and stuff. Woah. ;

Intended Audience:

Sounds cliché, I know, but hopefully everyone. Those outside the Drupal community wondering "How does that all work?" those within the Drupal community who are passionate about continuing the awesome, those within the community who are pissed off and looking for answers, and those "formerly" of the Drupal community who are skeptical about the whole hippie open source love thing. Hopefully even someone without any familiarity with the Drupal community who is interested in general information about how a website filled with opinionated, perfectionistic, multi-cultural people holds itself together.

Questions answered by this session:

What is the history of the Drupal project and some demographics about its community?

When disagreements in the community arise, what are some good and bad ways to handle that?

How has the Drupal community sustained such massive, massive growth without splintering and forking?

What are some major "mine fields" we've encountered as a community, and how have we/are we working around those?

If I implement Drupal for a Fortune 500 company's intranet am I still changing the world?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 15:45 - 16:45

Room:

Concert Hall

Drupal as Base System For Your iPhone Android iPad Apps

sumitk — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:13:00 +0000

Sumit Kataria

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!!)

What will be covered

An introduction to Titanium Framework to develop iPhone/Android apps using Titanium API, web technologies like javascript etc
Introduction to ServicesAPI and web standards [json,xmlrpc]
How to manage your application's data (content, tables, views, users, menus, taxonomy etc) using Drupal.
We will build a live app ... introduce you to some code here (ServicesAPI, YQL, jQuery and Titanium API)
Photo gallery apps, Video uploading, Geo apps, user data apps, creating nodes on the go!
Demo of some apps we built for Android and iPhone platforms
Questions!

This session is about building native iPhone/iPad/Android applications using opensource web based technologies (http://www.appcelerator.com) with Drupal as base system to manage content, users, views, permissions etc.

Some iPhone/Drupal stuff I wrote in past: http://civicactions.com/blog/sumit

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"??

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 15:00 - 16:00

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Slides:

Sumit Chicago Presentation Mobile apps and Drupal stripped.pdf

Entities - Emerging Patterns of Usage

ronald_istos — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:18:42 +0000

Ronald Ashri

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.

This session is about taking a step back and analysing what the community is doing - what solutions are emerging in contrib and what lessons can be learned. We try to pinpoint commonalities and differences in approach alongside an identification of the relative pros and cons so as to inform further development.

As such, the session is very practical in purpose aiming to give coders information they can use directly in their own projects and it is very pragmatic in approach - basing claims of what is best practice from the usage patterns that emerge in contrib and their analysis rather than potentially subjective opinions.

We will also present the Model Entities project - a drupal.org project whose purpose is to act as a living example of what constitutes best practice and allow developer to kickstart entity development in their own projects.

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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 15:45 - 16:45

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Slides:

entities-session-drupalcon.pdf

The Rules Way of Life

fago — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:34:44 +0000

Wolfgang Ziegler

Klaus Purer

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.

Update:
You'll can find the slides as wells the presented notification feature module here.

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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 17:00 - 18:00

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Slides:

praes.pdf

Multilingual Drupal Solutions: Use Cases and Modules

floretan — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:49:35 +0000

Florian Loretan

Jose Antonio Reyero del Prado

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.

In this session, we'll look at five cases of multilingual websites, starting from the general assumptions and going down to module selection and configuration details.

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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 10:30 - 11:30

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Slides:

Multilingual_Drupal_solutions.pdf

Aegir-Based Business Models

ergonlogic — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:43:42 +0000

Christopher Gervais

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.

For our "classic" web development practice, Aegir provides for a streamlined development-staging-production workflow, as well as scalability and flexibility. I won't go into extensive detail on this model, except to point out the abundant resources already available on community.aegirproject.org and elsewhere.

With the introduction earlier in the year of .deb packaging for Aegir, we've begun to put in place an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering. While various automated install scripts have existed for years, they've tended to be somewhat brittle. Now proper configuration management (Puppet, Chef, etc.) can set up and maintain virtual servers with Aegir pre-installed in an extensible templated fashion.

Longer-term, and more ambitiously, we are developing a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, that will enable site developers and designers to create and manage their own custom Drupal instances and platforms from within a managed Aegir system. This will allow for not only automatic provisioning, and management of sites and custom platforms, but also the secure, automated set-up of SFTP, SSH, etc. This opens the door to a variety of interesting reseller program possibilities.

Finally, leveraging e-commerce integration and other contrib modules, we are deploying a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. This allows clients to purchase subscriptions to pre-built sites (whether pre-packaged profiles such as Open Atrium, or custom-built profiles based on the best websites you've created), which are then provisioned for them by an Aegir system. This model presents some interesting challenges, which I'll explore in more detail by presenting a case-study of Koumbit's own Aegir-based SaaS service on AlternD.com. I'll demonstrate going from a bare-bones Aegir install, though to a basic, but functional SaaS service, ready to be themed and extended.

Aegir Training Available at DrupalCon London
For in-depth Aegir training, Koumbit Networks is presenting a Pre-Conference Training session on Aegir: Aegir Hosting System: Deep Dive. Sign up today!

About the presenter
Christopher Gervais (ergonlogic on d.o) is a geek and sometimes marketing guy at Koumbit. He is also a documentation manager and webmaster at community.aegirproject.org, and author of a couple Aegir contrib modules.

Koumbit Networks (est'd in 2003) has been building high end Drupal projects for quite some time, primarily in the non-profit sector, and is leading development in the Aegir Project.

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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 13:00 - 14:00

Room:

Fairfield Room

Slides:

DrupalCon London 2011 -- Aegir Based Business Models.pdf

Doing Drupal Security Right

Gábor Hojtsy — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:40:46 +0000

Gábor Hojtsy

Drupal strives to be a very secure system by design, but it comes with responsibilities for the site architect, maintainer and even the sysadmin to take into account. This session aims at providing an overview of the main responsibilities and fallacies of the respective roles.

We will cover Drupal setup best practices, suggested modules and some coding guidelines as well.

Intended Audience:

Trying to cover all grounds. The focus mostly is people setting up sites, but some coding and backend content will also be included.

Questions answered by this session:

What are the most common mistakes Drupal coders make?

How can I avoid dangerous permissions and settings?

Are there any modules to secure my site with?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 14:15 - 15:15

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Slides:

DrupalSecurity2011London.pdf

Content Staging and Deployments in Drupal 7

dixon_ — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:14:45 +0000

Dick Olsson

Katherine Bailey

Content staging and deployment strategies are something that many site builders are fighting with. Publishers wants to preview and optimize content or whole sections of a site, before publishing it live. Another scenario is where publishers wants to deploy content from one site to a network of sub sites, or similar. It's a complex problem to solve.

In this session you will learn how the Deploy module for Drupal 7 solves these problems and how you set it up to meet your requirements. We will also look quickly into what's going to change for content staging and deployments, with the Configuration Management Initiative for Drupal 8.

Do you want to push content from one site to many other sites over a REST API, or with a PubSubHubBub feed?
Do you want Views to filter your deployment plan or manually flag pieces of content that you want to deploy?
Do you want to schedule deployments, do them manually or script them with Drush?

The Deploy framework will provide plugins that you can combine to create very simple, or very complex deployment plans.

About the presenters

dixon_ is a developer at NodeOne and maintainer of the Deploy module. Also, he is the main architect behind NodeStream, a Drupal distribution for publishers.

katbailey is a lead developer at Affinity Bridge and co-maintainer of the Deploy module. Also, she is well known for her Quick Tabs module.

Intended Audience:

Site builders and configurators. Basic Drupal knowledge will help.

Questions answered by this session:

How do I preview pieces of content or whole sections of my site, before publishing it live?

How do I set up an environment that supports content staging?

How do I configure the Deploy module for Drupal 7?

How will the Configuration Management Initiative help content staging and deployments in the future?

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 11:00 - 12:00

Room:

Concert Hall

Slides:

Content_Staging_and_Deployments_in_Drupal.pdf

Don't Design Websites. Design Web SYSTEMS!

Todd Nienkerk — Fri, 13 May 2011 20:47:06 +0000

Todd Ross Nienkerk

Adam Snetman

Update 2011-08-25: Slides can be downloaded here. Due to file size restrictions, we had to remove many of the image-heavy slides. You can download and view the full slide deck on SlideShare.

Drupal's theme layer is very flexible and can accommodate just about any web design. It's important for designers to remember, however, that they're not really creating a page — they're building a complete system to house the all of the site's content. By creating the sitemaps, wireframes, and mockups, designers are actually outlining a site's feature set. Designers, not developers, determine a site's purpose and functionality.

In this session, we will talk about the importance of understanding a CMS during the initial design phase of a project, as well as how to create a Drupal-optimized design. Standard practices, tools, and Drupal-specific shortcuts will be discussed in detail.

All too often, however, projects begin the design phase prior to choosing a CMS. In these cases, it's important for the stakeholders to understand that their choice of CMS may alter their design. To demonstrate the steps necessary to complete a successful Drupal "conversion," we will present a detailed, real-world case study of the Expeditionary Learning relaunch. Four Kitchens co-founders Todd Nienkerk and Aaron Stanush and Thinkso design director Adam Snetman will describe how they translated a thorough but CMS-unspecific design into Drupalspeak — all while minimizing cost and meeting the client's high expectations.

Intended Audience:

This session is intended for anyone who has had to create or implement sitemaps, wireframes, and mockups. Those unfamiliar with Drupal will learn what Drupal "wants" to do and will be able to more easily prepare these materials, and those who already work with Drupal will learn tips and tools for managing the expectations of clients whose designs haven't been optimized for Drupal.

Questions answered by this session:

What should a designer know about a project before architecting a site or creating its look and feel?

Why are sitemaps, wireframes, process flow diagrams, and mockups important, and what are they supposed to communicate?

What happens when you're given a design that wasn't created with Drupal in mind?

What are the challenges a design firm faces when they aren't the ones implementing their design?

What tools and techniques can be used to accelerate the design process in Drupal?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 13:45 - 14:45

Room:

Fairfield Room

Slides:

design-web-systems-final-2011-08-24.pdf

Aegir: One Drupal to Rule Them All!

Steven Jones — Fri, 13 May 2011 20:47:52 +0000

Antoine Beaupré

Steven Jones

This session will illustrate the use of the Aegir hosting system to simplify the life of developers and administrators, by automating the common tasks involved in deploying and managing sites.

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. It's built on Drupal itself, so that your user interface to the system becomes a 'meta-drupal' site, with nodes representing all of your hosted sites and all of the components of your hosting environment.

In this session we'll be introducing the Aegir project and the functionalities shipped with the latest release. We'll demonstrate the one-line Debian package installer, site install and upgrade management. We'll also outline the progress made since the last presentation in Copenhagen (1.0!) and upcoming roadmap (2.0!!) and answer any question you may have about the project.

Aegir Training Available at DrupalCon London

For in-depth Aegir training, Koumbit Networks is presenting a Pre-Conference Training session on Aegir: Aegir Hosting System: Deep Dive. Sign up today!

About the presenter

Antoine Beaupré (AKA anarcat) is a long time Drupal developer that is one of the core Aegir developers, handling release engineering, Debian packaging, crazy late night coding splurges, and is the general goto guy for everything in Aegir.

Koumbit Networks (est'd in 2003) has been building high end drupal projects for quite some time, primarily in the non-profit sector, and is leading development in the Aegir Project.

Steven Jones (darthsteven) is an experienced Drupal developer that has recently joined the core team of Aegir developers, being specifically responsible for documentation. He has a passion for getting people involved and demonstrating all things Drupaly.

ComputerMinds are the UK's Drupal specialists with offices in Bristol and Coventry. They offer a range of Drupal services including Consultancy, Development, Training and Support - which means they can help with all phases of your project.

Intended Audience:

* Drush users wanting to take the next step * Any Drupal developer having more than one site to manage * Anybody concerned about maintenance and security of their Drupal sites * Custom niche application developers needing to roll out new sites quickly and efficiently * Anyone tired of wasting time on the tedious manual tasks associated with running a Drupal site

Questions answered by this session:

What is Aegir, why should I use it and how the heck do we pronounce it?

How do I do security upgrades on all my Drupal sites without being stressed out (e.g. how could we maintain all those Drupalcon sites for security upgrades)?

How do I deploy my custom Drupal distributions and sites quickly?

Who uses Aegir and how?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 12:30 - 13:30

Room:

Maple Room

Slides:

aegir-session-slides.pdf

Developing with Drupal Commerce

rszrama — Sat, 14 May 2011 00:33:38 +0000

Ryan Szrama

Peter Philipp

Jamie Wiseman

Jakob Torp

Some of the earliest and most complex deployments of Drupal Commerce have been developed in Europe, including Eurocentres for global language course sales, SubHub for subscription management, and traditional physical product sales at augustes.com. These sites' developers have worked their way through the dark corners of the Commerce APIs and really blazed a trail through Drupal 7 site development in general, contributing patches and knowledge upstream to the project and community.

Join us for a panel discussion moderated by Ryan Szrama that explores the experience of these developers and Commerce Guys' own integration team to find out what it's like to develop with Drupal Commerce in preparation for your next big project. Questions will focus on building sites with complex requirements, integrating with third party services, and using Drupal Commerce in Europe.

Along the way, you can expect topical introductions to specific features of the core and contributed Drupal Commerce modules, such as:

Understanding and interacting with the pricing system
Using the core tax system to properly display and collect VAT
Collecting shipping charges during checkout
Best practices for payment gateway integration and recurring payments
Creating customized Add to Cart and Checkout forms
Working with custom line item types

These topics have been chosen based on real world projects delivered by Commerce Guys and the companies represented by developers on the panel. Introductions and questions will be scripted, but the discussion will be free flowing with opportunities for attendees to ask follow-up questions.

Intended Audience:

Developers who need to know how to plan and deploy Drupal Commerce sites that integrate with a variety of e-commerce web services and / or require custom solutions based on the core Commerce components and systems.

Questions answered by this session:

How does the core product pricing system work?

How can I customize the buying experience for non-physical product sales?

How should I best integrate with the payment and line item systems?

What should I keep in mind when quoting complex Drupal Commerce projects?

Where can I go for development support and how can I give back?

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 11:00 - 12:00

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Slides:

Developing with Drupal Commerce.pdf

Data Migration into Drupal

moshe weitzman — Sat, 14 May 2011 11:59:16 +0000

Moshe Weitzman

update: slides posted to Slideshare

So, your client has seen the light and is tossing out their old CMS in favor of Drupal. Their existing content, in the form of square pegs, needs to fit into nice round Drupal objects.

Learn about the Migrate module, from Moshe Weitzman, a maintainer of Migrate and Drush. Migrate module is a native Drupal solution for sucking in content from many different sources and saving it it cleanly into Drupal.

Intended Audience:

Folks who need data moved into Drupal, or developers who are tasked with this challenge.

Questions answered by this session:

How can I move my site to Drupal

How can I robustly migrate data into Drupal

How do I build an application on top of Drush

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 13:00 - 14:00

Room:

Maple Room

How to Have an Open Relationship... With Software (and Still Make the Paper)

JacobSingh — Sat, 14 May 2011 14:39:28 +0000

Jacob Singh

You love Drupal. You love Linux. You have a pet penguin and you recompile your kernel daily. So what, at the end of the day, you've got to pay your mortgage, and last time I checked, the bank doesn't take patches.

Like many of us, we have to balance the real needs to earning a living and spending time with our families (or going out drinking) with our desire to be contributors in the Drupal community.

I've been a Drupal developer for 5 years, 4 years as a contributor. I've worked for consulting shops, freelanced, started a business and I now work for the largest Drupal company, Acquia. In all these situations, I've had real deliverables which are always behind schedule and over budget.

In the process, I've learned some simple techniques that allow me to contribute to the community while still meeting the bottom line.

Super powers discussed:
- Architecting your code to make contribution simpler.
- Blogging: Keep it regular, keep it simple
- Structuring "community time" for developers
- Networking and building a support coop
- How to talk to your clients about contribution
- Managing version control between Drupal projects, patches and deliverables.
- Integrating contributions into your agile process.

Intended Audience:

Developers and Site builders Project managers

Questions answered by this session:

How do I make a name for myself in Drupal community?

How can I convince my clients to pay for open source contributions?

What is the value (monetary) of contributing to Drupal?

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 14:45 - 15:45

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Slides:

OpenRel.pdf

Taking Inventory of Drupal Products and App Stores

robertDouglass — Sat, 14 May 2011 18:09:24 +0000

Robert Douglass

We now live in a world of Drupal products. The first "app store" was announced and launched, and more companies than ever are building (or want to be building) Drupal products. It's time to take a look and see what's working, and why. Who is succeeding with Drupal products, and what should newcomers to the market know and pay attention to for their products to succeed?

We'll be asking hard questions:

What products are doing well?
What ingredients make them succeed?
How does the GPL help us? Does it hold us back?
Are distributions and app stores the future of Drupal products?
What APIs and technology platforms are important?

Intended Audience:

C Types, business minded developers, analysts, and decisions makers of all stripes.

Questions answered by this session:

What products are doing well?

What ingredients make them succeed?

How does the GPL help us? Does it hold us back?

Are distributions and app stores the future of Drupal products?

What APIs and technology platforms are important?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 13:45 - 14:45

Room:

Concert Hall

An Introduction to Form Builder - A New Interface for Fields

quicksketch — Sun, 15 May 2011 00:18:41 +0000

Nathan Haug

Through the history of Drupal, there have been several different modules that allow the building of forms: Profile, Flexinode, Survey, Webform, CCK, and D7's Field. All of these set out with specific purposes in mind, whether collecting surveys or creating node content. The task of actually building the form was secondary to the task of using the form. This is where the Form Builder project comes in. Form Builder provides a single, universal interface for creating form structures. Once the form structure is created and tweaked to the liking of the user, the changes are then sent to the providing module (whether Webform, CCK, Profile, or others) and that module then deals with changes to its internal settings and new fields in the database.

Form Builder represents a major jump in the administrative user interfaces for Drupal. Utilizing jQuery UI and AJAX-based editing and previews, Form Builder can speed up the process of building a form dramatically. But the fun doesn't stop there, with Form API's array-based structure now in every part of Drupal (commonly called "Renderables"), Form Builder may be used to edit not only forms but the actual display of the page.

In this talk Nathan Haug (quicksketch) will give an introduction to the Form Builder interface and show how it can be used currently. Some modules like Webform are already fully compatible with Form Builder. After an introduction to the front-end of the module, the talk will go into the API and show how any Form API element or renderable may be made editable through Form Builder.

If you're interested in hot new APIs, better UX, or you just think the current Fields UI sucks, come check out Form Builder!

Intended Audience:

This talk is intended for primarily for developers interested in developing using Form Builder. Users interested in user interface design and experience may also be interested.

Questions answered by this session:

What is Form Builder?

How is it useful right now?

How can it be used for in the future?

How do I prepare for Form Builder?

How can I implement my own functionality using Form Builder?

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 13:30 - 14:30

Room:

Fairfield Room

Slides:

form-builder.pdf

Successful Communities & the New Breed of Drupal Events

segments — Sun, 15 May 2011 05:51:38 +0000

Ivo Radulovski

Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire

Jens Beltofte

Kristof Van Tomme

The Drupal community landscape is changing. A host of new events is springing up: Design Camps, Dev Days, Business Days, Gov Days, CxO summits, and more. The success of these events in bringing together new communities of experts and professionals to facilitate growth and exchange in their areas of common interest is key to Drupal's continuing success.

This session will discuss how Drupal communities–local-, interest-, or vertical-based–are growing and changing. We are looking for insights into what is working, what needs more work and what best-practices are emerging.

This session is for you if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of community, running events, helping yourself and others get the most out of Drupal, or taking Drupal to the rest of the world and showing them what we've got!

Intended Audience:

Community Members, Community Leaders, Media, Analysts, Business Leaders

Questions answered by this session:

Why organize events?

What kind of Drupal events are happening? How do they differ?

What motivates people to join or leave the (local) Drupal community? Why are some more active than others?

What kinds of goals and objectives can communities set for ourselves? How do we measure our success against those goals?

Why do connections with other Drupal user groups, open source projects, and local communities matter? How can we better evangelize Drupal in all these areas?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 10:30 - 11:30

Room:

Maple Room

Slides:

Drupalcon_Community_Session_London.pdf

Drupal Mergers, Acquisitions & Alliances

segments — Sun, 15 May 2011 06:07:52 +0000

Ivo Radulovski

Robert Douglass

PLAIS

Karen Borchert

Drupal is a growing and maturing industry. The typical Drupal business is no longer just a small sole proprietor, trying to make ends meet. There is now a wide range of businesses working with Drupal, from well established large integrators, to well funded venture-backed startups seeking to revolutionize the way websites are built. Mergers and acquisitions in such a landscape are to be expected, and recent history shows that consolidation is already happening.

What are the benefits of a merger?How do you position your company to be acquired? How does the resulting entity get the most value from the deal, and what problems can arise as a result of the merger?

The key principle behind these strategic M&A is that a strong and experienced Drupal providers will buy or merge with a smaller one to create a more competitive or cost-efficient company. Ultimately the companies will come together gaining a greater market share or achieving greater efficiency.

This session will be a panel including several C-level executives from Drupal companies who have recently been through a merger or acquisition.

Recent examples of M&A in the Drupal world:

1.) Companies
Lullabot acquires Rapid Waters Development
Propeople acquires Segments
af83 and Commerce Guys joined forces by creating a new venture dedicated to e-commerce
Hosting Metro Acquires Drupal Value Hosting

2.) Products
Examiner.com acquires NowPublic
Phase2 Technology acquires Open Atrium & Managing News

Intended Audience:

The intended audience for this session are Drupal shops (small & big ones), business leaders, Drupal experts, project owners, business evaluators, strategy planners, business consultants, & Drupal start-up companies

Questions answered by this session:

Which successful examples exist and what are the motives behind Drupal Mergers & Acquisitions?

How can I profit from a Merger, Acquisition or Acq-Hire?

How Drupal companies benefit from economies of scale?

How to create synergy through mergers/acquisition or alliances that makes the value of the combined companies greater than the sum of the two parts?

When is the right time to merge, acquire or form an alliance?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 14:15 - 15:15

Room:

Fairfield Room

How Do You Know that Gal Knows Drupal? Towards an Open Source Curriculum and a Community-Based Accreditation Scheme for Drupal

techczech — Sun, 15 May 2011 09:04:18 +0000

Dominik Lukes

Heather James

As Drupal grows, so do the challenges of identifying and developing Drupal talent. Gone are the days that a look at the issue queues of various projects could identify all the key talent available let alone all the talent needed. It's not even clear what the different Drupal roles are, what different organizations need, and how a Drupal newbie becomes a Drupal rockstar. And at the same time, it is becoming increasingly important to assess Drupal skills of and provide training for those for whom Drupal is a 9-5 job rather than a passion.

As the demand for Drupal talent grows, so does the supply of training. It's not just Lullabot or the DrupalDojo anymore. Acquia's impressive database (http://training.acquia.com) lists some Drupal training event for almost every day. But this does not seem to be enough. We still need to answer questions like: How do we assess the quality of training provided? How do we assess the quality of learning individuals take away from training? Where does an individual training event fit into the knowledge/skill needs of an individual? How do we assess the knowledge/skills? Etc.

This session will review current initiatives and efforts towards a Drupal curriculum and/or certification like Acquia Training, DrupalKata or its offshoot, the Drupal Open Learning Initiative. We will review other solutions in other open source communities, such as Mozilla Dev Community, Typo3, Zend and more.

Evaluating the usefulness of each initiative from the perspective of the needs of the Drupal ecosystem, it will propose a framework for an OpenSource curriculum that will build on the strengths of the Drupal community. A reputation/community-based (rather than test-based) system of certification will be outlined based on the Web of Trust analogy. Such a system could be both pedagogically sound and palatable to organizations hiring Drupal talent. Moreover, it would make it easier for organizations to identify their Drupal skills needs and outline the needs of their staff for professional development. Finally, the session will ask the question of what part e-learning should play in Drupal training. It will review different demo sites: Drupalize.me, LearnByTheDrop, MasteringDrupal, BuildaModule.com etc. and suggest how a Drupal curriculum and certification system make these sites more valuable to their users and allow these sites to draw greater value from their investments.

Earlier versions of parts of this proposal were outlined here and here.

Intended Audience:

Drupal trainers, Companies hiring Drupal talent, Consulting companies

Questions answered by this session:

How to identify Drupal talent

How to train Drupal talent

What skills are required for Drupal

What do companies need to look for when hiring

What should the Drupal curriculum look like

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 14:15 - 15:15

Room:

Maple Room

Slides:

DrupalCert-FinalPresentation.pdf

Building and Maintaining a Distribution in Drupal 7 with Features

pescetti — Sun, 15 May 2011 10:51:44 +0000

Antonio De Marco

Andrea Pescetti

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.

Then you will learn how to use Code-Driven Development to store all settings in a sustainable way: use the Features module to easily describe configuration in code, a proper separation between Features to make your code reusable and extendible, a well-thought design of Features to create easier development patterns, CTools and Exportables to put your configuration in code even when a module does not support it natively.

Last, we will see how the distributions update mechanism allows you to create a new version of your distribution for easy and painless configuration updates of a live site.

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?

Schedule info

Time slot:

24 August 10:30 - 11:30

Room:

Concert Hall

Slides:

nuvole-drupalcon-london-2011.pdf

Web Typography & Drupal: Putting Arial Out To Pasture

jpamental — Sun, 15 May 2011 16:45:15 +0000

Jason Pamental

Arial's days are numbered, and we should all celebrate. Come learn about the evolution of web font embedding, how it works, what it can do for your site and your users, and how to make the most of the biggest advance in design for the web since the deprecation of the blink tag.

Drupal's evolution has drastically changed the way web sites are made and managed. But we're still looking at a million pages of Arial - completely undermining the money and effort invested in developing brands and identity. Between Windows, Mac and the various flavors of Unix and Linux it leaves us with about a dozen fonts we can reasonably rely on being present. iPhones have more, but still only represent a fraction of the web browsing public, and the fastest growing segment of the market is Android... which has only 3 fonts resident in the system. Enter: web fonts. With thousands of fonts that can easily be embedded and work in virtually all modern browsers from desktops to mobile devices, the opportunities abound to provide vastly improved experience with more consistency and quality than ever before.

Numerous web font services have launched in the past year, and enormous effort has gone into improving the quality of fonts from many vendors specifically for on-screen use. Some even support API's enabling development of modules for Drupal to enable font selection and assignment to CSS selectors right in the browser interface. We'll also cover topics like how to manage the appearance of your site while the fonts are loading (it's easier than you think).

Find out how the platforms work, how to most effectively integrate them and learn about performance, tuning and even what you can do for devices that can't load them at all. We'll even cover some advanced features for non-Latin character sets like font-subsetting from http://webfonts.fonts.com (this is a big one).

Intended Audience:

Designers, design directors and front-end developers - we'll cover why we should use web fonts and how to make it easy to incorporate in our workflow

Questions answered by this session:

Why should I use font embedding?

Where does it work (or not) and on what?

How do I do this in Drupal? (To module or not to module)

I'm a developer - how do I make this not kill my page load time?

Should I host or use a service for embedding?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 13:00 - 14:00

Room:

Arnhem Gallery

Slides:

WebTypeDrupal_JPamental.pdf

Product, Framework, or Platform? What They Mean, And Why You Should Care

eaton — Sun, 15 May 2011 17:05:01 +0000

Jeff Eaton

As Drupal's popularity has grown, its core audience of hobbyist developers has exploded into an international community of businesses, nonprofits, independent developers, startups, and governments. Bubbling under the surface is a recurring debate: Is 'Drupal' a product for people who build web sites, a framework for web developers, or a platform that other products are built on?

Often, we've given the easy answer: Both! As Drupal grows, however, tough choices about experience design, software requirements, and system complexity can no longer be ignored. What principles will guide the next decade of Drupal, and how will we reach agreement? There are no easy answers, but understanding the nature of the questions before us is essential for anyone who cares about our platform's future.

Intended Audience:

Core developers and decision makers looking to understand the history and motivations of the 'smallcore' movement; developers looking to shape or participate in the development of Drupal's APIs; business stakeholders considering the future of Drupal for their web applications and web projects.

Questions answered by this session:

What's the difference between a product and a framework?

How has Drupal's evolving community shaped the software's priorities?

What parts of Drupal are hot spots for this debate today?

Is it possible for Drupal to be both at once?

How can we answer these questions and build a stronger, more resilient ecosystem?

Schedule info

Time slot:

23 August 13:00 - 14:00

Room:

Ashcroft Theatre

Slides:

product-framework-drupal.pdf