"Everything" room

Overview

Acquia cofounders Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson will describe Acquia’s vision, preview the upcoming launch of Acquia’s distribution and subscription offerings, and discuss how the company functions as a member of the Drupal community.

Agenda

• Overview
• Product offerings – distribution and network services
• Support philosophy and approach
• Partner program
• Community participation
• Q&A

Goals

To provide an overview of Acquia’s business plans, the value Acquia offers to both Drupal users and Drupal companies, and how Acquia collaborates within the Drupal community.

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.

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.

Drupal theming isnt that hard (at first) - but after the first sweet feeling of geek stardom, the truth comes sneaking...
Some elements in a drupal sit can be a little tricky, unless you are willing to dig a bit deeper and get a little dirty.
so this one is all about pimping the crap outta your site, and in the process build up a libary of pure awesomeness

Agenda

• - a Ménage à trois - Theming understanding
  and theres more than one position...
• - the quest for a the nada-html template.
  Cleaning up the css & html and remain some of your sanity.
• - access all areas pass
• - this my son is the kingdom you shall inhert
  how to steal win the prince (or princes), steal the gold and get a kingdom for your self
  or how to use the build in inheritance (thank you zen)
• - forms vs. the themer
  round 1.
• - Pimping the menu
  use the source luke
  Menus and the art of theme function overwriting
  css based coolness
  imagemaps -oh yeah we old skool
  image based menus - the designers love em ...
• The land of milk & honey
  drupal6 theming

Goals
To show some of the possibilities that are hiding just under the hood of drupal, and a couple of approaches to sex up your drupal life, and give the universal answer to the question that more than once have been shouted out:
"How the F!"#" do i get this menu to look like that the designer gave me - why cant we just use plain text menus and be done!"
and go from : "aaaargh I hate designer I hate drupal I aaaaaargh" to
"woohoo Drupal is the sweatest system in the world - wheres Dries I wanna kiss that guy, and by beers for all in the community"

Resources
basic css ,html, some php & basic drupal theming knowledge, and not to offended by the words that start with F.

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

There are numerous tools to help you translate the interface and content of your Drupal websites, and there are obviously (still) missing items in the implementation. This session will show off Drupal 6's capabilities and the latest developments with contributed modules, such as i18n module and l10n_client.

Agenda

* What do you need vs. what Drupal does
* How to get closer the two with core features and contributed modules
* Translating the interface live with l10n_client, contributing to an l10n_server
* Content translation, listing, filtering and administration
* What's missing, and where projects are going

Goals

I intend to provide you with an understanding on where Drupal core and the contributed modules fit with your needs and goals, and where should you still expect some custom coding required for your top-notch multilanguage site.

Overview

The formal user tests at the University of Minnesota and Baltimore have got quite some attention. They also had a common bottom line: Drupal is quite hard to get into for novice users.

We want to improve this. But how can we make sure we really tackle the major issues? And how do we find out if improvements are really improvements?

Repeated testing is the answer. Make sure to find out how the user experiences Drupal for our own attitude cannot be but biased. How is someone who is not accustomed to the workflow and UI able to perform a given task?

And how to make user testing fun? I'll try to depict how this can be done utilizing the
Usability Testing Suite (UTS).

Agenda

• Tests in U of Minnesota and Baltimore: have there been reliable results?
• A bit of theory: how is user testing generally carried out in other projects and companies
• The Usability Testing Suite (UTS): A way to go?
• A plan how to encourage and organize constant testing

Goals

Find a way to make user testing an asset to Drupal. Just like code testing has got a key role in Code Quality.

The talk will have an ensuing BoF to discuss the further steps in user testing. If we could come up with a plan that feels feasible, this would be wonderful.

Resources

Usability Testing Suite
In dev state,
maintained by boombatower