Proposed Sessions

Welcome to DrupalCon Barcelona 2007!

Dries — Thu, 6 Sep 2007 09:18:21 -0700

Welcome message from the Drupalcon Barcelona 2007 organizers.

Asset Management

csevb10 — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 11:15:30 -0700

Asset management, particularly the management of audio, video, and image content, tends to be the cornerstone of most of our large-scale projects.
While we've had nominal success with a variety of the image management tools for Drupal, every module tends to have weaknesses:
- image-only support
- duplicating work already in core
- poor architecture
- SLOW
- lack of organization or file-system-like structure

While the work we've begun on the am project will likely not be the final say in Drupal asset management, we would like to use it as a forum to discuss strengths and weaknesses of various asset/image management tools available for Drupal, and how we can better leverage Drupal to create a truly powerful, easy, and fast asset management module.

The state of Drupal

Dries — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 14:03:59 -0700

Exact topics to be defined. Please take part in our State of Drupal survey to help fuel this presentation. Thanks!

I18N information architecture: how to organize global websites

Peter Van Dijck — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 02:48:42 -0700

Let’s say you are localizing your Drupal install. How can you create an alphabetical ordered list in Chinese, which doesn't have alphabetical ordering? Your taxonomy might have problems: “Public schools” means almost the opposite in the US versus the UK – now what? How do you handle sites with 2, 4 or 50 languages or locales? What to do if an article hasn't been translated?

This talk looks at localization from an information architecture angle - I hope it can be useful for Drupal developers now that i18n is becoming more and more important in Drupal. It'll discuss the many ways to structure global websites, and which approaches make most sense when.

Building High Traffic and Scalable Businesses with Drupal

michaelemeyers@drupal.org — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 23:31:47 -0700

Can Drupal meet the needs of my fast growing business?

More and more startups and high traffic sites are evaluating Drupal as a development platform. I get A LOT of inquires from startups and existing large internet sites interested in switching to or using Drupal and most of theses people have the same questions and concerns that I had 3 years ago when we selected Drupal as the platform for NowPublic. This talk aims to provide an overview and discussion of the common questions and concerns that come up when evaluating Drupal as a platform for developing high traffic, scalable, business and the issues that these businesses face in using Drupal.

It is my hope that this presentation will help people at the conference who are evaluating Drupal or interested in it’s potential as a highly scaleable application framework, and that the Drupal community will gain insight into the concerns of businesses, the topics and concerns often covered in the evaluation process and in using Drupal for business, and that NowPublic and other businesses will get a chance to learn from the community and help themselves by participating and getting more involved.

Furthermore, I hope that this will form the foundation for a set of resources and documents that we can build out over time to facilitate the evaluation process so that individuals or business evaluating Drupal have a solid starting point from which to address their concerns, and so that we encourage more companies to use Drupal!

There is a ton of information and topics one could cover and only a short amount of time for the presentation - below is an outline of some of the areas and questions that I hope to cover, highlighting success stories and analyzing failures or problem areas.

If you have areas you’d like to see covered or specific questions please contact me. If you have evaluated Drupal, are a Drupal success story, or if have had problems using Drupal as a framework I’d love to hear from you too. I’m also looking for folks who want to help in collecting and building out resources on the topic, and I’d like to invite others to participate in this talk and be on hand for the discussion.

I can be reached via drupal (at) michaelmeyers (dot) com or add your comments/information below.

SCALABILITY AND PERFORMANCE

This is the #1 question or area of concern. The vast majority of Drupal users are currently individuals or small sites. Few people question if Drupal can power a personal web site where traffic is low, or if it can be used to run an intranet – but…

Can it serve millions of pages in a day?
Can it deal with large traffic spikes and increases in load?
How easily and cost effectively can this be done? Will it require a ton of hardware?
Does it do this out of the box? What are the roadblocks or changes required to make it scale?
What roadblocks have others run into in this area?
What techniques are folks using to make it scale?

COMMUNITY AND SUPPORT
What kind of support is there? Will people help me for free? Can I and where do I go to purchase support?
What should I expect from the community? What does the community expect from ME?
What about backwards compatibility or support for older versions?
Do I have a voice? And what can I do to be heard?
Is the community business friendly?

RESOURCES AND TRAINING
Are there developers available who know Drupal? How do I retain these Developers?

There are many other topics including: MATURITY, HIGH AVAILABILITY, SECURITY, etc.

FormAPI 3: The Adventure Continues

Jeff Eaton — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:40:26 -0700

The next generation of Drupal's FormAPI offers cosmetic improvements for casual users, with major changes under the hood for developers building complex forms. This session will cover FormAPI's evolution since Drupal 4.7, a refresher for those who are just learning the API, details on how to use the new Form State system to control complex workflow, and a variety of esoteric topics. The session will (of course) conclude with a rowdy Q&A time.

Aggregation and Drupal

alex_b — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 17:05:21 -0700

With over 8 different modules that deal with feed aggregation in Drupal, this area is ripe for consolidation of at least some of the central elements - whether that's the actual feed parsing, rapid bulk node creation techniques, or another overlapping issue. Aron Novak, Ken Rickard, Ted Serbinski and Alex Barth, among other developers, are presently looking at how to make a successful aggregation API for Drupal 7 to allow contributed modules to tap into the same framework.

This presentation will focus on what went in to the aggregator API, while sharing challenges and approaches to feed aggregation on the Drupal platform. We will look at what a robust parser can handle and how this can work well with Drupal, to allow for high performance parsing of many feeds, creation of content based on those feeds, how a contrib module can extend or replace existing functionality, and what the road map looks like.

Planned structure of the session:
- development experiences while working on aggregator API
- current result of the development
- open discussion about the improvements / suggestions

Background
There are at least 8 different modules used for feed aggregation in Drupal. The features of these modules vary, some include node creation for feed items, some use external feed parsing libraries like SimplePie, and other solutions use code from projects like MagpieRSS. A breakdown of these modules exists on http://groups.drupal.org/node/3418.

Speakers: Aron Novak, Ken Rickard, Ted Serbinski, and Alex Barth
Moderator: Eric Gundersen

Closing session.

Dries — Thu, 6 Sep 2007 09:20:15 -0700

"Until next Drupalcon" message.

Scaling the Drupal.org infrastructure

amazon — Thu, 6 Sep 2007 08:09:52 -0700

Drupal.org has been scaling steadily from 6 million to 18 million users per month. Then we hit a wall. This session will explain what happened, and how the Drupal association, the Drupal infrastructure team, and OSUOSL worked together to buy, build, and borrow our way to grow our way to 30 million page views by August 2008.

Drupal as business application platform

kratib@drupal.org — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:19:13 -0700

Drupal was built to be used as a CMS for community web sites. But because of its Lego-like architecture, it has evolved into a platform that helps build web-based business applications, although in a very non-traditional way. That's how OpenCraft has been using Drupal and we aim to share our experience, insights, and future directions with you.

The elements of Web business applications: information, business logic, horizontal features, presentation
The standard approach: building on Web application frameworks
The Drupal approach: composing functionality
Concrete examples
Things we wish Drupal could do and what we're doing about it

Panels 2 API

merlinofchaos@drupal.org — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:02:01 -0700

Learn how to write modules that utilize the Panels 2 API to add page layout capabilities to your modules.

Multilingual Drupal

Jose A Reyero@drupal.org — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:12:45 -0700

This is a two-part presentation and will focus on the new multilingual features of Drupal 6, what's left for Drupal 7 and beyond, and get into some detail on workflow support and Computer Aided Translation as well as i18n module addons and extras. The idea for covering both core and contrib. aspects will help illustrate how core and contrib. work together to build truly powerful and flexible multilingual Drupal websites. The session would preferably span 2 hours, with equal time for part 1 and 2.

Multilingual Drupal and Core (Part 1, 1 hour)

Changes to core to support a multilingual Drupal
Road map of what's remaining and possibilities
Computer Aided Translation demos

Contributed modules and Multilingual Drupal (Part 2, 1 hour)

Where contributed modules step in
Examples of multilingual sites and breakdown

Well before the Drupal 5 official release, work on what would be Drupal 6 and multilingual Drupal was underway in the form of research and planning. The push by Gabor Hojtsy and Jose Reyero on multilingual support for Drupal core started with an assessment of the current state, a large research undertaking by Gabor, and assessment by Jose of where to start based on what's already possible and what's difficult using the i18n module at the time, and what makes more sense to handle in core. Several community members ranging from developers to users joined in on the important discussions on groups.drupal.org/i18n and Drupal.org issue queue to iron out the issues and scenarios.

A summary of patches leading up to the Drupal 6 code freeze and summary are available at http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/node/494

Speakers: Gabor Hojtsy and Jose Reyero
Moderator: Ian Ward

The future of nodes

Jeff Eaton — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:22:45 -0700

The flexibility of Drupal's node system and the strength of its underlying architecture have served Drupal well for several years. As the community leverages new APIs and technologies, however, several funamental limitations in the node system are becoming roadblocks.

A new plan is emerging for the future of nodes, driven by schema data and Drupal's renderable array structures. This session will be a tour of proposed solutions to the node system shortcomings, and a discussion/Q&A time for interested developers.

Code Review is not just for Standards

douggreen — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:07:24 -0700

The Code Review Module is a Developer Module that assists with code review and version upgrade. It is best known for coding standards review. But Coder also has reviews that assist with Drupal upgrades, performance, and security checks. This session is for module developers. I'll talk about Coding Standards and I will demonstrate how to use coder to make your module coding standards compliant. I'll talk about the 6.x API changes and demonstrate how to use coder to upgrade your module from Drupal 5.x to 6.x. I'll also give a tour of how coder works, the coder review file syntax, and brainstorm ideas for better performance and security reviews.

State of e-Commerce

sime@drupal.org — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 06:44:30 -0700

e-Commerce module has undergone a transformation under the lead of Gordon Heydon. Some of the topics that will be covered are:

Product modules are being killed off, replaced by configurable features that can be added to any node type.
The transaction system has been revamped, with invoicing and receipting to boot.
A flexible charge module gives fine-grained control over the who/what/where/when of adding charges to the transaction.
Customer management, like tracking anonymous purchases as well as users defined in related systems like CiviCRM.
Code diet. Non-essential modules are being evicted into their own contrib namespace.

"Enterprise" Drupal

agentrickard@drupal.org — Sun, 5 Aug 2007 06:48:01 -0700

Thinking about using Drupal? Work for a large company or agency? Some practical applications of Drupal in large settings.

This discussion will center on the following topics:

1) Drupal and Intranets. How open source can replace vendor systems.

2) Drupal, LDAP, and remote authentication: an overview.

3) Integrating Drupal with external data: an overview.

4) Calculating the hidden costs of "free" software.

5) Common obstacles and objections to using Drupal inside an existing IT infrastructure.

drupal booking system brainstorm

fronbow@drupal.org — Thu, 6 Sep 2007 06:21:59 -0700

I want to do this session to see whether it's possible to have a booking system
api for drupal. My thoughts are that thru' the use of an api, contributed
modules could then be created that would provide 'objects' that can be booked,
eg; room booking, flight booking, hire car booking, etc
Also, to have the option of hooking into ecommerce if required (my requirements
are for a room booking system that only takes reservations, payments are done
thru' another system).
I think this is possible by reusing some of the existing core and contributed
modules, but I would like to get other developer's ideas on what else might be
needed.

(The idea to try and do this in drupal came about because every so often someone
posts on d.o requiring a room booking system and they invariably get directed to
the meeting room booking system on sf.net or to use a combination of events,
views, cck, and other modules. So it would be nice to get a proper solution in
drupal)

From HTML to XUL, Web to Desktop

mixedpuppy — Thu, 6 Sep 2007 03:43:56 -0700

The next generation of technologies are targeting the desktop in a way never before possible. Network enabled applications interact with rich datasets provided on the web, using techniques and technologies common on most advanced websites; user interfaces will be static and dynamic, data will be local and remote, online/offline. How will this evolution happen and what does it mean for the web?

Are you a web developer that knows dynamic HTML, JavaScript and CSS? You are 80% of the way to developing applications in XUL. I'll provide you the resources and knowledge to jump start your entry into XUL and give you directions on where to go for learning that last mile. I'll also cover the ups and downs of the XUL "platform" to help you decide whether it's the right technology for you.

Translating Drupal (the new way)

Gábor Hojtsy — Mon, 6 Aug 2007 02:44:22 -0700

Brief summary

This session aims at answering the following two questions:

How to make a module or JavaScript file translatable?
How to translate Drupal projects with the new web interface?

Description

This session will introcude the new Drupal project translation interface developed by myself with support from Google Summer of Code 2007. The new web based localization server changes workflows of how Drupal projects (the core itself, as well as contributed modules, themes and install profiles) are translated.

Translators can finally forget about CVS and possibly even working with Gettext files, if the web based interface is enough for their needs. Drupal.org hosted projects automatically get their translations interfaces on the localization server, so translators can provide their text for different releases of these projects easily.

We will also discuss how translatable modules are made, and will cover best practices, so translators know how modules are supposed to be written and can help module builders if their modules are not up to expectations.

Target audience

This session is aimed at people interested in providing translations for Drupal core, modules, themes and install profiles. Those who would like to use these translations on their site should check out the Multilingual Drupal presentation (which offers a lot more). We will also cover some module development and Drupal API details for PHP and JavaScript translations.

Image handling in core... for real this time.

walkah — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 09:02:18 -0700

It's one of those often discussed, but never completed things. Everyone knows Drupal core could do a better job with images... so why doesn't it?

Well, it's time for things to change. If you've ever thought Drupal should do a better job out of the box manipulating images and making it easier for users to upload images and embed them in their content... and you're willing to help do something about it. This session is for you.

We're gonna come up with a plan, and we're gonna make it happen.