DrupalCon DC 2009

DrupalCon DC 2009 Post-Conference Thoughts Jeff King Trevor Flexhaug Joshua Schroeder March 12, 2009 http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/scatteredsunshine/3333295475

Session highlights

Building APIs That Rock ✤ Lullabot’s Jeff Eaton shared the stage with (and was heckled by) a puppet ✤ Best practices for allowing modules to talk to each other ✤ Valuable for building extensible custom modules http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/a-barth/3329591615

Keynote: The State of Drupal ✤ Dries Buytaert (Drupal’s creator) talked about Drupal’s history and where the project is headed ✤ Highlight was a graph showing the exponential growth of the project and the community http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/chrys/3329431387

T Limitations of Theme Layer ✤ Young Hahn (Development Seed) talked about Drupal’s Theme layer the ever-growing need to separate presentation and data ✤ Great for designers and developers. He spoke on techniques for working together to create great Drupal themes. http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/kcolwell/3329221505

Drupal in the Newsroom ✤ Panel discussion/Q&A among Drupal developers from the New York Observer, the Miami Herald, and Mother Jones Magazine ✤ Discussion on workﬂow, user permissions/security, and engaging the public with social features ✤ High relevance for the type of work we do with Communications

Handling Asynchronous Data in Drupal ✤ Presented by Josh Koenig, who looks like John Krasinski and talks really fast ✤ Example-based presentation with practical AJAX applications ✤ Valuable information for building highly interactive sites without requiring extraneous page loads

Using Intelligent Web Services for Semantic Drupal Web Sites ✤ Thompson-Reuters initiative Open Calais ✤ Automatically tag content ✤ Ability to display additional dynamic content within the context of the page contents ✤ Calais service is totally free of charge, even for commercial use

Business Analytics in Drupal ✤ Presentation by Irakli Nadareishvili of Phase II Technology ✤ Discussed integrating charts and graphs in Drupal using data from the Views module ✤ Abstracted to allow choice of various charting libraries http://www.slideshare.net/irakli/drupalcon-dc-busines-analytics-with-views

Installer Profiles ✤ Presented by 13-year-old Dmitri Gaskin ✤ Opportunity to speed up deployment of sites when there is a common architecture ✤ We already use this sometimes, but it was impressive to see Dmitri’s knowledge of it http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/kcolwell/3330072874

SEO and Drupal: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices ✤ Perhaps the most useful and easily applicable talk we attended ✤ Panel discussion on SEO-building techniques ✤ Drupal adheres to a lot of best-practices out of the box ✤ Some general SEO practices, as well as Drupal contrib modules to help with adhering to them

Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care ✤ “Math is hard. Let’s go shopping.” (this was a practical session) ✤ Discussion of RDF and RDFa standards ✤ How to implement semantic standards into XHTML ✤ Drupal’s trend towards being semantic ✤ We can enable growth of the semantic web from the bottom up

Building Advanced Social Networks at a Large University ✤ Discussion of the components of social networking sites ✤ Demonstration of island.byu.edu ✤ Unfortunately this session was high-jacked by academics who wanted to debate the merits of online learning

Drupalcamp: How-to and Q&A ✤ Panel discussion from those who have run DrupalCamps in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York ✤ Tips for selecting a venue ✤ Discussion on controlling costs ✤ Multiple tracks and scheduling considerations ✤ Plenty of good ideas for us to consider in planning DrupalCamp Alberta 2009

Drush: Command Line Drupal Productivity ✤ Set of scripts and contrib module that allow for command line control of Drupal sites ✤ Install modules, perform updates, and run cronjobs without having to log into a site ✤ Continuing development makes this a very powerful tool http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/macprime/3278352991

T Search in Drupal ✤ A panel discussion involving 5 participants ✤ Discussed 5 possible 3rd party Drupal search options to replace the standard search, including: ✤ Apache SOLR: Java based, faceting, drilldown, hooks (more on this in another session) ✤ SearchLucene: PHP (no Java), Easy Install (run Cron), API ✤ Xapian: Fast, but not as featureful as SOLR ✤ Sphinx: Very fast, but not community supported. Used for a newspaper site

Apache SOLR Search ✤ Makes use of Apache SOLR Java-based product combined with Apache SOLR Module ✤ Can run on own server, or use Acquia hosted solution ✤ Indexes content + Metadata, so user can drill down ✤ Filtering, Sortable, Facets ✤ Can search for word variations (“moderator”, “moderation”, etc) ✤ Used by Netﬂix, CNET, Gamespot...

Drupal + SMS Data Collection ✤ SMS Framework Module ✤ SMS isn’t going away any time soon: places with little to no internet or poor cellphone reception can still use SMS ✤ Biggest hurdle is ﬁnding an SMS Gateway; several options exist ✤ SMS Framework can be conﬁgured to receive data and process it, or send messages

Why I Hate Drupal ✤ Compared to Wordpress, Joomla, and (ugh) Sharepoint, Drupal is still insigniﬁcant ✤ Drupal still has some usability issues, especially for new users ✤ In some ways, the community is getting too large too quickly

T Advanced Drupal Security ✤ A session designed for guys like Darren ✤ Demonstrations of developer security problems and their solutions ✤ Demos, explanations and how to avoid: ✤ Cross-site scripting attacks ✤ Cross-site request forgery ✤ SQL injection ✤ Menu access checks ✤ Node access checks

Promiscuous Drupal: Building Your Site With Web APIs ✤ There are some tasks that you just don’t need to bother doing in Drupal ✤ Example: You will NOT have fun building a video transcoding site in Drupal. This is why YouTube and blip.tv exist ✤ Consider using services like YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter to add functionality to your site rather than having to build it ✤ http://www.programmableweb.com is a good source for ﬁnding these services

Advanced Übercart ✤ Complex item conﬁgurations in Übercart ✤ Selling downloadable content ✤ Selling event attendance ✤ Selling site memberships using user roles ✤ Internationalization considerations

T Making Dates & Calendars Rock! ✤ A common problem ✤ How to create, use, and display dates and calendars within a Drupal environment ✤ Date, Date API, Date Repeat, Calendar, Views, CCK, Panels, Signup, Feed API, Timeline modules were all discussed and used

Intro to SimpleTest ✤ That 13-year-old again ✤ SimpleTest allows us to automate functional test cases (not unit testing) ✤ Is part of Drupal 7 core and is used by the core development team ✤ There is a bit of a learning curve to using SimpleTest and it will only be of value to those who are already familiar with the code they are testing

I wish I’d gone to... ✤ Module Development Kickstart ✤ Drupal Multimedia ✤ JQuery ✤ Deploying and Maintaining Drupal Sites Using the Aegir Hosting System ✤ Drupal CDN Integration: ✤ Luckily we can watch almost Easier, More Flexible and every session at archive.org! Faster! ✤ Migration Is Not Just for Birds

3 of 1400 ✤ Largest DrupalCon ever! ✤ Community is growing exponentially ✤ Can you spot the U of L guys?

Other highlights

SWAG! http://www.flickr.com/photos/diggersf/1417470136 http://www.flickr.com/photos/trevorflexhaug/3331724597

Foosball Thanks to the guys at Development Seed

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/trevorﬂexhaug/3331717987 Hockey with 19 other Drupallers

Being tourists Visits to the White House, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and Smithsonian

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/trevorﬂexhaug/3336164289 Obama We didn’t see the real Obama, but his face is everywhere!

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jjeff/3342416464 Parties with robots

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jjeff/3342429120 @eaton-inspired Drupal memes Ponies and kittens, mostly

Where to next? ✤ Greater involvement in the community ✤ New contacts ✤ IRC ✤ Contrib submissions ✤ DrupalCamp Alberta ’09 ✤ DrupalCon 2010 (hopefully somewhere on the west coast) http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/chrys/3328194197

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/a-barth/3329605885 Any questions? Jeff will answer them now.

DrupalCon DC 2009

by Joshua Schroeder on Dec 23, 2009

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DrupalCon DC 2009 — Presentation Transcript