DrupalCon London 2011 - Code & Coders

Continuous Integration Will Solve Everything

Botto — Sun, 15 May 2011 20:57:24 +0000

Martin Eskdale Moen

Continuous integration(CI) is the process of which a system is integrated on a continuous basis, leading to multiple integrations in a development cycle. This provides a means to monitor the quality of code, test it and receive quick notifications of errors.
It provides a quick overview of the current state of a project, from both a managers stand point and a programmer's.
It can turn integration from a multi day process to a non-event done on an hourly basis.

Intended Audience:

Drupal developers and Drupal architects intending to build sites who wish to know on a frequent basis when their complete integration fails.

Questions answered by this session:

Setting up a CI server to build a drupal site

Setting up a basic build script

Packaging a site into a single deployable file

How it can help team size issues

Schedule info

Time slot:

25 August 14:45 - 15:45

Room:

Maple Room

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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..."

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

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.

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

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?

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