Site administrator

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

What is 12seconds.tv?

12seconds lets you create and share short video updates with your friends and family.

Why Drupal for 12seconds?

Because it's a solid framework that just works well. Really.

What is the YUI?

The Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Library is a collection of JavaScript and CSS resources that make it easier to build richly interactive applications in web browsers.

Agenda

1. Using the YUI Grids
2. Compressing the CSS
3. ???
4. Q & A

Goals

• When building with the YUI it's important to know where to put it with all the other CSS files that Drupal spits out.
• Attendees ought to walk away knowing how to use and customise the YUI Grids for their Drupal sites.

Resources

1. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/

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

There are many developers who can't stand working with CSS, but are occasionally forced to, and many site administrators who are asked to make small changes to a site's design, but don't know where to start. This session aims to cover the basics of CSS and how to use it to make alterations to your site's theme.
If there's interest, I'll follow up this session with a BoF to help tackle specific problems on your own sites.
Please let me know if there's something I've missed from the agenda.

Agenda

* What is CSS?
* I don't get the cascade: please explain it again.
* Using the cascade to target different areas of your page.
* FireBug to the rescue!
* Take apart page.tpl.php and put it back together the way you want it.
* Using template.php to make your life easier.
* Modules that can help.
* Dealing with Internet Explorer.

Goals

This session aims to cover the basics of CSS and how to use it to make alterations to your site's theme.

Requirements

Familiarity with Drupal, perhaps a rough idea of what's in a theme.
Some knowledge of HTML.
We'll be copying and pasting a little PHP, too.

Overview
Usability is a big factor in the success of a website or a web
application. With some usability knowledge developers can improve their
modules.
I will show what changes have been made (and will be) to Simplenews and
Header Image modules (the modules I maintain). Along the way I will share
my thoughts and considerations regarding contributed module usability.

Usabiltiy is no rocket science, just applied common sense.

Agenda

* What is usability and why do we need it
* Common mistakes
* Simplenews and Header Image usability past, present and future

Goals

To make module developers, users and decisionmakers aware of usability
aspects of module development.
Resources

* Common sense
* Books: Don't make me think by Steve Krug

Report as inappropriate:
http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/mollom/contact/d6913aa9de19dc61

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.

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.

Overview

I've been asked to give a talk on the specified topic by the track co-chair. Since I am now running large scale Drupal installs for over two years (mainly drupal.org) I have learned a few tips about making your Drupal code run fast and not give your server a hard time which I want to share.

Agenda

* Drupal caching in core
+ Drupal 5
+ Drupal 6
+ Drupal 7
* Mistakes to avoid when programming Drupal
* Tips and tricks.
* Different cache backends.
* Other stuff (basic server config)

Goals

I'd like attendees to gather an understanding for why caching is important and the pitfalls that may occur.

Resources

General familiarity with Drupal is going to be helpful.