Business

Overview

Installing and maintaining a Drupal site is a relatively straight forward process, even if most of the work required has to be done manually. Which is entirely sufficient when you have a single site, or even a small number of sites.

But what happens when you have ten, a hundred or even a thousand sites? These simple tasks literally become the 'death of a thousand cuts'. You don't even need to have a hosting company to become overwhelmed by this situation, the simple fact is that manual interaction can only scale so far.

Aegir is a new set of contributed modules for Drupal that aims to solve this very common problem. it does this by providing you with a simple Drupal based hosting front end for your entire network of sites. To deploy a new site you simply have to create a new Site node. To backup or upgrade sites, you simply manage your site nodes as you would any other node.

In Norse mythology, Aegir was the god of the oceans and if Drupal is a drop of water, Aegir is the deity of large bodies of water.

It is a complete rewrite of the Hostmaster system that has been running the Bryght hosted service for nearly four years, and has many years of research and development behind it.

The system was designed from the ground up by Adrian Rossouw (author of both PHPTemplate and the forms API) to be a first class Drupal citizen, allowing for integration into a wide variety of configurations, and has been sponsored by Raincity Studios, a well known face in the Drupal community, who acquired Bryght in 2008.

Agenda

* History - A system 5 years in the making.
* Goals - Guiding principles in the development of Aegir.
* Installation walkthrough - We show you how to install the system.
* User walkthrough - We show you what you can do with the system once installed.
* Under the hood - An overview of the system's architecture.
* Status - What's ready today? Can I start using it NOW?
* Roadmap - Where to from here? Extendability.
* Integration - Ecommerce, White boxing and more.
* Discussion - Questions and possible future features.

Goals

This session will help you understand the Aegir system, how the different pieces fit together and how it can help you or your business save time and money on tasks that are easily automated.

Work smarter, not harder.

Resources
* Ægir workgroup
* Overview
* Goals
* Design and terminology
* Roadmap
* Installation wizard slide show
* User tour slideshow

Overview

I would be talking about how drupal supports the RIA like Flex based applications.

Agenda

* Introduction to RIA
* Introduction to Flex
* How drupal supports Flex based applications
* Difficulties involved
* Future support

Goals

To make the people aware of the support provided by drupal to use RIA.

Resources

Flex based drupal modules.

Overview

A panel discussion, that walks through the countries in the region and makes a short sum up of the current community status: the events that are being organized, the localized resources, the member bases and the events that will be hold in the near future.

Agenda

Goals

Get an overview of the "state of Drupal" in Central Europe. Open a dialog between the different communities that might lead to concerted efforts to grow Drupal.

Resources

An interest in growing Drupal.

If you are interested in being part of this panel, please send me a message using my contact form.

Overview

Everytime I work on a drupal based project, I am thinking about users how they are going to add content, set up taxonomy, maintain site and perform other tasks without getting lost on their site. This session will try to showcase best practices in admin interface and I will try to show where rootcandy (http://drupal.org/project/rootcandy) project is at the moment and where it is heading.

Agenda

* Several scenarios how to make administration easier
--* TBC
* RootCandy theme/module project
--* RootCandy for developers
--* RootCandy for users
* Available modules that can improve administration

Goals

By the end of this session, attendees will see more possibilities in improving admin section and benefits of making admin section userfriendlier.

Recap of the conference, farewell until the next Drupalcon.

Overview

The formal user tests at the University of Minnesota and Baltimore have got quite some attention. They also had a common bottom line: Drupal is quite hard to get into for novice users.

We want to improve this. But how can we make sure we really tackle the major issues? And how do we find out if improvements are really improvements?

Repeated testing is the answer. Make sure to find out how the user experiences Drupal for our own attitude cannot be but biased. How is someone who is not accustomed to the workflow and UI able to perform a given task?

And how to make user testing fun? I'll try to depict how this can be done utilizing the
Usability Testing Suite (UTS).

Agenda

• Tests in U of Minnesota and Baltimore: have there been reliable results?
• A bit of theory: how is user testing generally carried out in other projects and companies
• The Usability Testing Suite (UTS): A way to go?
• A plan how to encourage and organize constant testing

Goals

Find a way to make user testing an asset to Drupal. Just like code testing has got a key role in Code Quality.

The talk will have an ensuing BoF to discuss the further steps in user testing. If we could come up with a plan that feels feasible, this would be wonderful.

Resources

Usability Testing Suite
In dev state,
maintained by boombatower

Overview

Come up with a plan how to encourage and perform constant user testing in Drupal. The BoF continues on what has been said in the Session "User Testing in Drupal".

Agenda

• User testing is tedious, what can we do to make it more fun?
• The main problem is that in a test, you question your own work. This is unpleasant, because you might find out it has issues. Or is this no issue?
• One needs testing persons. How can one make it easy for them so they may participate in testing Drupal again? Who are the people we need for that?
• Generally two ways of testing can be done: completely remote, or with you directly watching the Tester. Which one is better?
• There is also the "big solution" (formal Studies like in Minnesota and Baltimore. We also need those. What role do they play, and what role play smaller ones?
• How can we utilize existing Infrastructure to minimize redundant work? Maybe the DROP program can be used and extended? Do the issue queues help?

Resources

Usability Testing Suite
In dev state,
maintained by boombatower

Overview

Running a Drupal business, especially with responsibility for staff and balance sheet, requires a shift in the way you support Drupal open-source.

There is less opportunity to focus on drupal.org, and the result is that SME Drupal enterprises are often in the dark about is happening in similar businesses - even though the attitude towards open-source (knowledge sharing) has not changed.

To be effective, a company must make compromises: the move to D6 will come later, employees are not always open-source enthusiasts, and the lead developers need to justify what they consider best-practice (and document it) rather than 'just doing it'.

This session is based on a review of Em Space's current practices. We seek up to 2 additional companies (5+ employees) who are willing to share and compare.

Agenda

* Preferred contrib modules
* Using a code repository
* Managing live sites
* Ready for Drupal 6?
* Design and theming best practices
* Working with Design and Advertising companies
* Support and training
* Contributing back to Drupal

Goals

To get a clear sense of how other Drupal houses are using Drupal, to un-earth many varied and successful techniques.

Overview

Drupal's growth is exploding and business and organizations are struggling to meet the growing demand. This panel will discuss best practices on attracting & retaining Drupal talent during this time of rapid growth.

Agenda

*Tiffany Farriss from Palantir*
Tiffany will share stories about how Palantir's core values of transparency, collaboration and "fit" have enabled the firm to grow and embrace change over the course of its 12-year history. She will talk about how Palantir made the transition from a CMS-agnostic firm to a devoted Drupal shop. Topics will include: project selection, company culture, recruiting, professional development and community engagement.

*Robert Scales from Raincity*
Most drupal shops come to life out of the collaborative desire of a few people working together with hopes to build a stable work place! Raincity Studios is no different.

Scales will be speaking about growing Raincity from small collective to a multi-national firm with operations in 3 countries and a growing team of nearly 40 staffers.

A reflection on Raincity's past 5 years; from startup to building our Chinese operation, working with the community and acquiring Bryght in 2007... What can you learn from our mistakes and experience to help you become a more successful drupal service/product provider.

*Eric Gundersen on: make mistakes faster*
From two guys in a basement to a team and clients spread across two content, Development Seed has taken a MBA crash course over the past years. co-founder Eric Gundersen will share a 20 minutes brain dump covering how Development Seed has grown and grown and retained it's awesome team by being able to quickly learn form it's mistakes after each project. Eric will cover communications, management, and business process that help to make an awesome working environment, specifically:

* Finding work: How to position for the projects that people like to work on and the art of turning down work

* Doing work: Constantly refining the process from agile development and GTD systems to benefits of sitting around the same table

* Getting paid for work: contracts, client communications, and cash flow

This talk specifically targets anyone starting their own Drupal shop.

Goals

This presentation is intended to help build capacity among shops looking to grow or people starting their shops.

Resources
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus
http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/01...

Overview
We propose to show you the making-of boucheron.com, an e-commerce Drupal website we've built for two years, with a full Flash front-end. We'll also present some bits of the specific backoffice and how in/out dataflow works.

Agenda

* Flash and drupal, how to make them talk together
* Used modules for ec-commerce
* Creation and extension of e-commerce modules
* Creation of the backoffice
* Integration with others informations system : ERP, CRM, AS400

Goals

Understanding the building parts by parts of a successful e-commerce service in an international context using flash for a luxury user experience.

Resources
* ecommerce website
* company data flows