"The Universe" room

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

Leslie Hawthorn from Google will be coming to Drupalcon to talk to us about various open source stuff.

Agenda
In this talk, Leslie will explore the past, present and future of the Google Summer of Code program, with an emphasis on Drupal projects. She will also cover the genesis and results of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest and future plans for this initiative. She will also briefly cover Google's use of Open Source software, the role of Google's Open Source Programs Office and how & why Google supports Open Source.

Leslie does not speak Magyar, but will definitely make up for her lack of domain expertise there with amusing anecdotes and, possibly, shadow puppets.

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

Online Presentation Slides

Accessibility should not be considered an option or an add-on. It is the responsibility of the entire team, from the designer, to the coder, to the writer, to the themer, and even to the business development team.

Agenda

1. Accessibility Guidelines & Drupal
   • WCAG
   • PAS 78
   • Section 508
2. Themes & Accessibility
   • HTML
   • CSS
   • JavaScript
3. Modules & Accessibility
   • For administrators
   • For end users

Goals

Fortunately, Drupal has a solid foundation for coding standards and separating its data, logic, and presentation separate from each other. This has greatly contributed to the ease in which to make a Drupal site accessible. But is it enough and could it be better?

Resources

• WCAG
• WCAG 1.0
• WCAG 2.0
• PAS 78
• Section 508
• Drupal Accessibility Group

Link to the slide:
http://quiddities.com/presentations/2008/08/drupalcon-accessibility/

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.

Overview

Drupal is very modular "horizontally". You can add modules that inject themselves all over the place to add to the workflow of the page request. However, too many subsystems are inter-related, making it very difficult to separate out and modify one part of the system. Drupal is simply not as modular as it could be, nor as it needs to be.

Better separation between systems would allow for more rapid development, easier testing, greater flexibility, and at least 23% more awesome per square meter.

This hybrid lecture/brainstorm session will examine one proposal for further modularity, Handler objects. Working module code will be included.

Agenda

* Discuss the benefits and limitations of Drupal's hook architecture.
* Introduce a new extension mechanism, handler objects.
* Demonstrate existing uses for handler objects, including inspiration from Views and Panels.
* Discuss a broader vision for where Handler objects could go to transform Drupal.
* Open discussion.

Goals

This session is essentially a meat-space RFC. If all goes well, attendees will come away with lots of new ideas and the presenter will come away with lots of feedback. Best case, we'll have an awesome new roadmap for Drupal architecture. Worst case, attendees will get to see a nifty new module they can use.

Resources

Handlers as discussed in this session are an evolution of the concept documented in this article, after further discussion with other Drupal gurus. Familiarity with that writeup is encouraged, but not required.

The module is now available if you want to look it over before the session!

Overview

Local and regional communities are mostly raised and supported by a handful of people or even a single individual, while the Drupalcons are the result of many (not so mythical) man-months of planning, lobbying and teamwork.

We'll use this session to explore how people around the world are building the Drupal community on a local, regional, national and international level. Wel'll take the Parisian/French community as a starting point for our group discussion.

Next, we'll explore the different kinds of community events that are held around the world: their strengths and weaknesses, goals and results. We'll discuss how to start organizing these different types of event from scratch: the hows, the whys, the whos and the whens.

We invite you to show your battle scars and share your ideas and lessons learned. We'd love to find out from you how your environment, culture, religion or language influences your community and how it can inspire others.

Goals

* discuss the process of community building around the world
* learn from other cultural perspectives, and different forms of social interaction
* distill best practices, help avoid common pitfalls
* lower the barrier for new initiatives by demystifying the organizational process

Audience

Developers, testers, end-users, marketeers, analyists, ... anyone who wants to help grow the Drupal community on a local/regional/national/internation level.

References
Kristof talked about a great resource for management resources, you can find them at:
http://manager-tools.com/

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

Over the past few months, we've seen a number of major drupal site rollouts that make extensive use of Panels2 (See, for example, http://drupal.org/node/241344 and http://drupal.org/node/242993). We've also seen a few modules implement the Panels API in rather different ways - most notably, Advanced Profile Kit and Organic Groups Panels - that hint at how flexible Panels can be.

We'll start this session by highlighting these different Panels implementations and providing a birds-eye view of how Panels' moving parts work. We want to make sure attendees have a good sense of what Panels2 can do now - because the second half of the presentation is all about the future of Panels - otherwise known as Panels3.

Panels3 isn't so much about changing the data model (that part already works pretty well) as changing the API and interface. One good way to think about this difference is to consider Panels2's limitations on who can use it. Right now, it's very difficult to scale down the power of Panels to a level that's appropriate for normal users. Panels3 aims to break down that barrier. We'll spend the remainder of the session overviewing some of the current plans for how Panels3 might do that, as well as noting attendee suggestions for some of the large-scale directions we might consider.

Agenda

* Briefly overview Panels2 to bring everyone up to speed on the most recent developments.
* Provide some concrete examples of ways that the Panels API is currently being implemented.
* Present some of the current plans for the future development of Panels
* Gather participant reactions to the proposed ideas, and take general input on possible directions to go as well

Goals

Participants should expect to leave the session with a grasp of Panels' capabilities in the present, and a sense of what to expect in the future.

Resources

None needed. Just bring yourself!