Server administrator

A short meeting to prepare for the road map of the French Drupal Community post Convention

Agenda

* Training, Training, Training !
* DrupalCon Paris ???!!!
* Association, no Association?
* Newsleter to the whole of the community
* Schedule work on Drupal'n'GO

Join us for a real life examples and a panel discussion around CSRF with Amanda Giovanni, Director of Enterprise Risk Management of CommonPlaces, Erich Breyent, VP of Engineering of CommonPlaces, Matthew Nash, Cyber Security Consultant of Katalyst Strategies, and Arian Evans of Whitehat.

Overview

A survey of open source tools for improving efficiency of Drupal coding, deployment, testing, and system resource utilization.

Agenda

In this session, we'll walk through some typical uses of:
* NetBeans PHP and Drupal plugins
* Deployment to cloud computing service (Network.com)
* DTrace PHP and MySQL probes
* OpenSolaris Zones, ZFS, and integrated AMP stack

Goals

Attendees will get a good intro to the open source technologies coming out of Sun that are most relevant to Drupal.

Overview
This talk gives an introduction to Bazaar (bzr) - the distributed source code revision control system developed by Canonical Inc.

Agenda
In this session, Lenz will provide an overview about the general concepts of distributed source code revision control and how Bazaar (bzr) fits into this picture. The bzr terminology and most useful commands will be explained as well as examples on topics like:

• Creating a repository
• Adding files
• Editing files and commiting changes
• Branching
• Plugins and extensions, Interoperability with other SCM systems

Goals
Attendees will have a better understanding on how distributed revision control works in principle and how it can be utilized with Bazaar. The basic commands needed to get going will be covered, so users can get familiar with the concept by themselves.

Resources
Some basic understanding of source code revision control systems (e.g. CVS, Subversion) is probably required to make the most out of this session and to understand why Bazaar (or any other distributed revision control system) is superior to these.

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

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.

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.

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

In this BoF, we will discuss practices for securing PHP from the Server Administrators view. This includes various web server settings, php.ini settings and demonstrations of less-known attacks.

Agenda

* Web server settings for PHP security
* See for yourself - demonstrations of weird attacks
* php.ini settings
* Discussions

Goals

After you walk away from this BoF, you will know more about PHP settings, how to secure it and most importantly: How to sleep better at night.