"Everything" room

Overview

The DROP program is an ongoing program that aims at helping people learn Drupal through small, bite-sized tasks that are never too intimidating. This session will discuss the DROP program, including past achievements, future plans, and how you can help and/or participate in it.

Agenda

* Past achievements: what has been done through DROP?
* How can I participate in DROP as a mentor?
* How can I participate in DROP as a student?
* Where is the DROP program going in the future?

Goals

You should leave this session knowing what the DROP program is and how to participate in it. As a result, the DROP program should receive a boost of attention and effort, and many new Drupallers will have an easier time learning Drupal.

Resources

http://drop.cwgordon.com/

Overview

This session presents a replacement for the existing aggregator module in Drupal 7 core. It is not just geared towards coders but to anybody who's dealing with aggregation in Drupal. We'd like to show you what's exciting about the new aggregator, talk about new possibilities it opens up and ask you for your feedback.

Background:

Drupal core's aggregator module wasn't designed with a wide range of use cases in mind. It supports aggregation of RSS and Atom feeds to a configurable set of categories on your Drupal site. But there is much more that users want to do with aggregation in Drupal aside from simple news aggregation, e. g.:

* Import iCal feeds to events
* Import to complex content types with custom fields
* Support workflow, access control or commenting on feeds or feed items
* Import special feed formats like NewsML

These and other demands have lead to a plethora of aggregation modules in contrib land: aggregator2, leech, simplefeed, aggregation and feedapi are just some of them. Most of them satisfied specific use cases and failed to cover the wider field of scenarios, hence none of them made the breakthrough to being the prevalent solution.

After a first attempt with FeedAPI in 2007 Aron Novak did it again for Google Summer of Code 2008: he took on the task to come up with a solution fit to replace ye olde aggregator. The result is a simple yet extensible and efficient architecture that should serve us well as a basis for the coming years.

Agenda

* Give an overview over existing aggregation modules in Drupal and its properties
* Explain why a new aggregator in core is better than the module-that-fits-best out there
* Present architecture of new aggregator for D7
* Present important features and explain specific design decisions
* Real world examples of what the new aggregator does or enables us to do:
** aggregate lightweight feed items or nodes
** lazy instantiation of feed items
** high performance setups
** (more to be announced when presentation is ready)

Goals

* Give you a good understanding of what's in the box
* Get your feedback on specific design decisions
* Do another step away from "many similar incompatible modules that do the same thing but slightly different" towards "many compatible modules that give you more flexible and better options"
* Inspire you to think beyond the current boundaries in aggregation

Resources

This is not mandatory by any means, but if you want to prepare for this session, we recommend to

* Test drive the new aggregator: http://drupal.org/project/new_aggregator or http://drupal.org/node/236237 (patch)
* Read the architecture outline http://groups.drupal.org/node/12772
* Have a look at the code

Overview
The MySQL Server is a very widely used open source database system and often used as the storage backend for Drupal sites.
Creating backups and maintaining a secure installations are two very common tasks for any Drupal administrator.

In this talk, Lenz will provide useful hints and suggestions on how to improve the security of a MySQL installation and how to properly perform backups of the databases and tables. The session will cover both tools that are included in the MySQL server/distribution as well as common tools/facilities provided by the operating system (Linux in particular).

Agenda

• Improving MySQL Server security
  • On the server side
  • On the OS level
• MySQL Backup methods
  • Logical
  • Physical

Goals
Users attending this session should take home some useful hints on how to secure their MySQL installations and how to perform proper backup.

Overview

iwanttospeak.net is a worldwide language learning community. From the initial idea to its beta launch only a few weeks passed. This shows Drupals power and flexibility in "rapid prototyping". The goals were: Possible support of all world languages (managed by the community itself), Private messages, Custom User Profiles, easy but failsafe geographical tagging of users for a worldwide proximity search, ...

Agenda

* Rapid Prototyping to speed up developement
* Customizing Themes and Modules
* Multilingual support
* Geotagging of Users and worldwide proximity search
* Usability improvements

Goals

During this session we want to share our experience using Drupals army of contributed modules for „rapid prototyping“. We also would like to discuss, which contributed modules are essential for developing websites with Drupal. We think that knowing a number of contributed „keymodules“ is absolutely essential for developing websites with Drupal.

We will show how we used the Bio module for collecting all user related information during the registration process and storing this information as nodes.

A key feature of iwanttospeak.net is the worldwide proximity search for users. We will show how we used Googles API for the geospatial information and how we use this information to calculate the distance between users worldwide.

iwanttospeak.net is currently available in 9 languages (including Russian, Hungarian, German, Italian). All translations were contributed by members of the iwanttospeak.net language community with little technical knowledge and no Drupal experience. We will demonstrate how we used i18n module and a slightly modified version of the Localization client Module to let users directly translate the interface.

Resources

www.iwanttospeak.net

Overview

Media RSS (MRSS) is an RSS module used for syndicating multimedia files (audio, video, image) in RSS feeds. It was designed in 2004 by Yahoo! and the Media RSS community, and adds several enhancements to RSS enclosures. PicLens is Browser extension which reads in such an rss feed and provides your visitors with an immersive slideshow experience for rich media on your website. If you don't have the plugin installed, PicLens Lite can be enabled to use a flex application.

Agenda

* What is MediaRSS and what's the format
* Showcase of PicLens extension
* Introduction to Piclens Module and sub-modules and API
* Plan for the future: mediarss api in core or separate contrib?

Goals

Cool demo of piclens and getting more media maintainers interested to implement hook_media_rss_items into their projects.

Resources

http://drupal.org/project/piclens : piclens module
http://realize.be/image-galleries/drupalcon-boston-2008 : piclens module in action
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss : mediarss specification

Overview

This session will be presented by the maintainers of the Location and GMaps modules. Updated, stable versions of these modules will be released this summer, and we will talk specifically about the capabilities of these modules. We will also address the roadmap for growing these modules into a broader GIS/mapping platform for Drupal.

Agenda

• GMap and Location updates--stability, new features, api features
• current GIS/Mapping capabilities with GMap and Location--what we can do with Drupal right now
• GIS/mapping platform goals--what we want to be able to do with Drupal
• technical roadmap--a clear technical plan to meet those goals

Goals

The goal of this session is to engage people with the current evolution of Drupal mapping by sharing what is currently possible, and to get community buy-in on Drupal as a GIS/mapping platform by presenting a clear set of goals for the near future.

Resources

The State of Geospatial in Drupal:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/12485

Drupal mapping group:
http://groups.drupal.org/mapping

Location module:
http://drupal.org/project/location

GMap module:
http://drupal.org/project/gmap

Geo module:
http://drupal.org/project/geo

OpenLayers module:
http://drupal.org/project/openlayers

Overview

Drupal is often compared with other CMS products, but the true power of the platform is realised when you compare with web application development frameworks. Drupal, as a set of APIs, is a viable choice as a framework for developing powerful web apps.

Agenda

* Web Framework features overview
* Drupal APIs and Modules for Web Application development
* Case studies: present two web apps developed using Drupal

Goals

Explore Drupal as a framework for Web Application development with a couple of Case Studies.

or How To Build a Stock Exchange in Three Months With Zero Knowledge, 9,000 Euros, and a Big Supply of Slovak Beer, errrr, Motivation.

Fusu is the Domain Stock Exchange that allows domainers to trade derivative interests in premium, high value domains. At launch, the value of domains on the Exchange exceeded $1.5 million USD. The initial prototype was built in three months by three developers that had basically zero knowledge of Drupal.

Agenda

* From zero to hero - prototype in 3 months
- Drupal as RAD framework
- Drupal as framework
- Closed beta with invites made easy
* Overview of a complex system:
Custom modules: financial backend, accounting, auctions, notifications, graphs, management
Modules used: invite (get users), affiliates (get paying users), dhtmlmenu (oh), cronplus (why not core?), buddylist (everything is social), cacheclear (ah the pain with cache), glossary (nice), faq (also nice), casetracker (for bugs)
* Challenges and lessons learned:
Deployment and development cycles
Scalability
Core hacking
Module hacking
Menu and caching
Drupal 6.x

Goals

We present how we built a relatively complex application in Drupal, describe the challenges we faced or are still struggling with. The goal is to show to the audience that using Drupal can be an efficient solution to create applications and not just content sites.