Programmer

Overview

Since the drupal world is constantly growing with more and more (non-)commercially oriented projects and people starting off, I thought it was time to come up with a platform that tries to connect projects (as well as staffing requests), people (drupalists) and knowledge. As of now I am in the final stage of launching this non-commercial platform, called drupaleo, as a beta version.

Agenda

Goals

Resources

clear mind required

Overview

A "Cloud" offers a virtualized datacenter infrastructure that allows you to build your own network applications. In this session, we'll cover an approach to implementing Drupal in the cloud using the popular Amazon Web Services as the cloud service.

Agenda

What with this cloud stuff?

An overview of what clouds are and what they're good for.

Drupal on Amazon Web Services

APIs, tools, and techniques.

Persistence issues and solutions

Where to store /files & database backups.

Cluster management overview

Clusters go great with clouds. Here's some cluster tools and services, some cloud specific some not.

High availability in the cloud

The issue of reliability in the cloud, and an overview of deploying redundancy and failover

Auto-scaling in the cloud

Killer app of Clouds is being able to grow your site on demand; here's some popular ways to do it.

Future of clouds

Providers other than Amazon, DIY clouds, and more.

Goals

After this session you should have a good idea of the possibilities available to you when deploying Drupal in the cloud, and a good enough technical understanding to deploy a Drupal server in the cloud.

Resources

You can get a general understanding of cloud-based deployment with only a general understanding of the LAMP stack; to get the most out of this session you should be familiar with setting up Drupal on a fresh linux install using only the command line.

Overview

Relational databases store, index, and retrieve data using using predictable patterns. Indexing data well -- but not excessively -- requires understanding indexing overhead and usage by query execution planners.

But, even the perfect indexing plan layered on top of existing tables cannot satisfy all needs: relational databases have significant limitations for indexing data. Particularly, they cannot index data across multiple tables. While Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server provide some in-built tools (materialized views and indexed views) for alleviating this limitation, users of open-source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL must consolidate and preprocess data to scale popular services.

The Denormalization API streamlines the process of consolidating node data into tables structured for radical scalability.

Agenda

* How is Drupal data stored?
* Overview of indexing tables
* Index data structures
* Query execution plans and indexes
* What is denormalization, and why is it necessary?
* Typical hurdles for implementing denormalization
* Using the Denormalization API

Goals

Attendees should leave with an understanding of the benefits and caveats of indexing and denormalizing data. And, if they choose to denormalize, how the Denormalization API can streamline the work.

Resources

Attendees should be familiar with Drupal's node system, SQL, and basic database administration.

Overview

The stock Drupal core has a number of bottlenecks and limitations for high-traffic and enterprise deployment. Many of the top Drupal sites maintain internal, patched versions of Drupal. While each of these internal versions is custom-built, the patches applied and techniques used to maintain the patches are consistent across these sites.

Agenda

* Popular patches used by high-traffic sites
* When these patches will be in core (or why they're not in core)
* Patch conflicts to watch for
* Deployment strategies to eliminate or minimize downtime caused by necessary changes to support the patch changes
* How to use version control systems to efficiently maintain a patched core without falling behind when the standard core applies security and bug patches. The demonstration will be using bazaar-ng (bzr).
* Other community resources for making this work easier
* Case studies in patching core for performance

Patches/modules considered

* Master/slave replication
* memcached
* Cache Router
* Removing LOWER()
* Database lock removal
* Possibly others

Goals

Attendees should leave with the following capabilities:
* How to decide whether patching core is worth the trouble
* How to maintain a patched core

Resources

Attendees should be familiar with applying patches and using version control systems.

A community effort to help a NGO get some ass-kicking internet presence

On the first weekend of October 2008, in only 2 days, the Drupal French Community will build a complete and live website for a selected NGO. All free. Free as in free beer, and free as in free speech.

A lot of the organizational details have been ironed out.

Though we have discussed a lot the question of "how the hell do we pull this off?" and have a detailed an action plan... there must be a million things we forgot.

Who should come?

So we are calling on all that have experience in organizing Codesprints/ Hackathons/ Mashpits and generally community events to join us and share their experience and thoughts.

What should come out of the session?

We would really like to hace constructive criticisms on our plan to adjust and augment it so we can put all the chances on our side to pull off this event.

Overview

The Drupal community is jumping in the Semantic Web bandwagon. Semantic Web Applications built with Drupal are starting to emerge from the different use cases of the community.

The Neologism project is one of the applications that benefits from the power of Drupal, but also constitutes a building block for the Semantic Web.

Neologism is a lightweight web-based vocabulary editor and publishing tool built with Drupal. It makes vocabulary authoring easy and fun. Just create a vocabulary, add classes and properties to it, and your vocabulary is instantly published and available online! Several formats are supported via content negotiation: HTML, RDF/XML and N3. All the term URIs are dereferenceable and point to their human readable description.

Some other Semantic Web projects could also be presented in this BoF.

Agenda

* What is the Semantic Web
* Neologism use case: how Drupal helped us
* Why a Vocabulary editor?
* Other Semantic Web projects built with Drupal
* The future of the Semantic Web and Drupal

Overview

The rules modules allows site administrators to define conditionally executed actions based on occurring events (ECA-rules). It's a replacement with more features for the trigger module in core and the successor of the workflow-ng module.

It opens new opportunities for site builders to extend the site in ways not possible before.

Agenda

* Module overview - What is it and why do I need it?
* Usage example: Build a simple workflow with rules and CCK.
* Advanced features: Rule Sets and scheduling
* How modules can use the rules API to extend it.
* Comparison to the trigger module and drupal actions
* Outlook

Goals

By the end of this session attendees will be familiar with the capabilities of the rules module and will know how to make use of it to speed up site development.
Module developers will know how easily their modules can be extended and how to obtain better code reusage by developing with rules.

Resources
You should be familiar with popular drupal modules like CCK and Views. Coding skills are not required but beneficial for a better understanding of the short part about the API.

Overview

Memetracker is an exciting new module being written as part of Google Summer of Code. The module can be used to build news aggregator sites similar to Techmeme and Google News and also can serve as an excellent conversation tracker within online communities.

Agenda

* What is a memetracker (define terms, show examples)?
* Why would I want a memetracker?
* Different ways memetracker can be deployed or how to integrate memetracker into a Drupal site
* Future direction for Memetracker

Goals

That session attendees understand what a memetracker is and when and where memetracker is appropriate to use. The session is intended for newcomers to the memetracking world.

Resources

Ideally, session attendees will have installed and used the memetracker module. Failing that, session attendees will have read the memetracker handbook page (yet to be written btw, but will before Drupalcon).

Overview

We'll discuss ways to develop reusable and flexible JavaScript components by leveraging JavaScript's full potential and using Drupal's lightweight JavaScript frameworks. We'll look at several JavaScript components and see how they were implemented and how they interact with each other.

Agenda

* The JavaScript widget skeleton
* Bootstrapping components with Drupal.behaviors
* Interaction with delegates
* Managing events
* Talking back home
* Making it themable and translatable

Goals

The session aims to create a better understanding of how JavaScript components can be built in a more modular and extensible way.

Resources

You should be familiar with JavaScript and jQuery.

SESSION OVERVIEW

This lecture-style session will present and discuss various approaches to improve front end performance. While server side performance has an impact on the speed websites are delivered, the vast par of loading time is spent on retrieving CSS, JavaScript and image files. For a truly zippy website, it is therefore vital to drastically lower the amount of time spent here. In his book “High performance websites”, Steve Souders discusses various ways to accomplish this. This session is based on that book but contains additional Drupal-related information and strategies.

AGENDA

* Anatomy of a web page
* Measuring the non-obvious and identifying bottlenecks
* The Hypertext transfer protocol
* Reducing HTTP requests
* Configuring Apache
* Additional optimizations
* Content delivery networks
* Related Drupal modules

GOALS

You should get a feeling for what “front end performance” actually means and where the main problems are located. You will also learn how to tackle these issues in a structured manner, measure the effects and get to know the basics of the foundation technology of the web, the Hypertext transfer protocol.

RESOURCES

You should be familiar with how a website is structured and know basic Apache configuration. Being familiar with HTTP is a bonus.