Drupal core, contributions and trends track

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Drupal is awesome. But that is old news. In this presentation, I will be going over some of the more awesome things people have done with Drupal - you know, those crazy ideas that use Drupal in ways it might not have been really meant to be used in - with varying degrees of success.

Agenda

* The Bot module - a Drupal-based IRC bot.
* The Guitar module - generate guitar chord diagrams using CCK.
* The RickRoll module - I'm still not quite sure what the purpose is.
* Drupal as a gaming framework - tic-tac-toe anyone?
* The Chessboard module - bring chess to your site by simply adding a new input format.
* Your awesome module here - if you maintain an awesome module, share it! :)

Goals

This session will leave you with a strong impression of how powerful and flexible Drupal is as a framework. From IRC bots to tic-tac-toe, Drupal can do anything, and Drupal will clearly take over the world.

Resources

A fresh mind and an enthusiasm for awesomeness.

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!