Site architect

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

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/

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).

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

Drupal needs media handling, but more than that, Drupal needs a way to handle ''Social Media''. YouTube or Flikr are excellent examples of gallery-style media sites that have experienced organic community growth (Flikr more than YouTube). Facebook has fairly robust handling of photos and leverages their "social map" to deliver an exciting experience.

Drupal is already an excellent platform for building robust social networking sites and community collaboration spaces. Media handling is rapidly improving. With the current discussion on how to formalize media handling in Drupal and the continued development in the social networking space, Drupal is a natural choice for developing social media projects. All that is missing is a straightforward implementation path. The Scald platform -- first developed for a groundbreaking new project from Chicago Public Radio -- is a first step down that path.

Agenda

• What is "Social Media"?
• How "social" and "media" are currently accomplished in Drupal
• The argument for a new framework
• Scald architecture highlights
• Brief demo (Vocalo.org)
• Current Status
• Future plans & how you can help

Goals

Attendees should leave feeling that they have a grasp of how Drupal currently stacks up in the Social Media space. They should understand the basic Scald feature set, its architecture (on a high level), the rationale behind its development and some ways that Scald can be used as an effective tool in developing social media websites.

Resources

• Social Media on Wikipedia
• Vocalo.org
• Scald module page

I want to open a discussion on how to use various components and sides of Drupal to enable us, Developers to improve usability in our projects. Le us discuss how to use Form Elements, Helper Libraries, Naming conventions and Insert Your Birght Idea Here to enable the community to improve Drupal's usability.

Overview
Improving usability for project Foo might make the same software horrible to use in project Bar. That is why we could look at improving usability in Drupal by not making Drupal core more usable. But by enabling the developers to make Their Drupal project more usable for Their users in Their specific cases: enabling the community to improve usability.

Looking at Drupal as a Framework (the CMF) gives us opportunities: We can improve usability by enabling Dan the Distro Builder to put together a Blog Install Profile that is very usable for Bob the Blogger.

Agenda
* Introduction on Usability in general: Why is it so hard to get right in Drupal?
* Short introduction on why this 'enable' route might work better then the oldfashioned 'make Drupal core more usable'.
* Open Discussion on ways to achieve this.
* Putting Money where Mouth is: create code, docs and projects after the outcome of the discussions. This should be the biggest part: we must avoid this becoming a vapourware project and start off with some Real Working Code and Good Resources.

Goals
Setting up and initial infrastructure that will help people who want to contribute to the usability of Drupal.
Get a message out about this initiative and to enthuse developers for this usability project.
And, in the very end: to allow you to build a perfect site for your specific users.

Resources
Please collect any nice code (form elements) nice ideas (the back of a beermat) or good designs (like That One CSS Trick to align forms) on your laptops or servers. So that we have some real working code and ideas to start off with.

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

At Drupal for NGOs in London, UK, strong interest was expressed in sharing development practices for Drupal development.

So let's do it!

We'd like to share some of our experiences and ideas with you, and find out how you guys deal with things like auto-deployment, developmen-staging-live syncing issues and the use of version control systems to protect and distribute your work.

Agenda

* We'll share with you our workflow and development best practices
* Hopefully you guys will share yours!

Goals

We hope everyone will walk away with more tools and techniques for deploying, and maybe come to some kind of agreement on best practices for Drupal workflow.

All in all I think this could be a very productive session.

Resources

We require no resources, but we might print out a little write-up regarding our experiences and techniques to hand out during the session.