Proposed Sessions

Your CMS is not your website: Site building for high-scale, fragmented sites with Drupal

tobby — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:08:27 +0000

A modern, high-scale Web site is a composite of decentralized fragments that are assembled on the edge, in just-in-time fashion as the content is being delivered to users. Sometimes, a load-balanced PHP environment just can't serve the traffic you have, but you still want to build it in Drupal.

Drupal is a great Content Management System, and a powerful Development Framework. But the Drupal instance that runs the show is not always the end-all-be-all website that users will ultimately interact with. In a world of web-scale and high-availability, it becomes increasingly important to build your Drupal instance with the bigger picture in mind.

Integration with Varnish, CDNs, and other caching systems help Drupal scale. This also prevents users from ever reaching the "origin", which means all users see the exact same page. If users never interact with Drupal directly, then how can you customize the overall user experience?

With ESI, JavaScript/AJAX, and integration with third-party services, it's all possible. It just takes a shift in thinking and how you approach the site build.

This session will explore how to build a Drupal website that will interoperate with other web components, live behind CDNs, and make heavy use of caching layers, yet still maintain a positive custom user experience (complete with "Hello username" links and "your comments" blocks). It will focus on the pitfalls that many Drupal developers never even consider (eg, device detection for mobile), and how to overcome them.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

tobby

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Responsive Web Design with Sass+Compass

Snugug — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:14:55 +0000

Mobile matters. There are more than 4x the number mobile devices activated each day than there are babies born and the question of how to effectively deliver your content to everyone, regardless of how they get there, should be the most important question for product owners and developers today. Enter responsive design.

Responsive design comes from the idea that there is not a mobile web and a desktop web but instead a single, unified web. The most obvious new design paradigm to come from this new thinking are websites that are not built on a fixed width grid but rather one that expands and contracts depending on how much screen real estate is available to the current user. To be able to do this, however, you want a powerful set of tools at your disposal in order to aid in you in the large amount of work needed to build a responsive design. Enter Sass+Compass

Sass 3.2 introduces a number of new features designed specifically to aid in responsive design including the ability to modularize your media queries and call them on-demand or to write media queries based on calculations in your Sass files. Compass v0.12 improves upon Compass's already impecable mixin and function libraries with a large update to Compass's Image Sprite functionality, a traditionally hard technique made drop-dead easy and essential to the Mobile First Responsive Design philosophy that should be taken when designing websites.

Compass also allows us to tap into all a community of extensions to make your lives easier, including some that are specifically designed to help us with the hard parts of Responsive Web Design. There are Susy and Singularity for semantic, responsive, custom fluid grids, Breakpoint and Respond-to for managing of your media queries, and Toolkit to provide responsive and progressive enhancement tools as well as helpers to get you up and running with a responsive web design stack quickly.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

Snugug

Track:

Frontend

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Advanced

Taming Views with Themes, jQuery, and CSS

jrowny — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:13:55 +0000

With jQuery and Views you can create a wide array of useful widgets, blocks, and pages. From advanced "spreadsheet" style tables to implementing beautiful galleries, jQuery and Views is the way to go. In this session we'll expect beginners and build up skills in CSS, jQuery, and PHP to where you are comfortable customizing any view, even if you've never done it before.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

jrowny

Track:

Frontend

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Beginner's Guide to Performance!

jrowny — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:20:19 +0000

This session is for people who want to make their sites fast. REALLY FAST! Even if you're running on a leased 486 in your neighbor's basement, we can still have you serving up pages faster than you can say "PHP."

Now there's about 82,000 things that can affect the performance of your website. We may not have time to go through all of them, but here's what's on the agenda (don't worry if you don't know what any of these things mean, that's the point of the session):

* Hosting Options
* Drupal's Cache Mechanisms
* Content Delivery Networks
* APC
* Memcached
* Varnish
* Static Caching (boost)
* ETags, gzip-compression and other various server tweaks
* Front end techniques such as sprites, compressing images, and minifying code
* Benchmarking (are we going faster yet?)
* We'll also cover some case studies such as a Drupal site that delivers over 1tb of video throughout the world.

Some of the things on this list are so easy to implement that you'll kick yourself for having a slow site. When you're done with this session your website's visitors and search engines will thank you for the blistering fast speed.

Slides:

Beginner's Guide to Performance.pdf

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

jrowny

Track:

Coding + Development

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Drupal Bit by Bit: Quest of the Request

webkenny — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:15:22 +0000

Taken in its simplest form, Drupal is a procedural system that starts at line 1 of index.php and executes its code line-by-line until it outputs what a user asked for. What if we could visually explore that process to help us understand exactly how Drupal core actually works? Join webkenny and his zany cast of characters for the greatest Drupal story ever told as we explore the request in a way like you've never seen before.

Led by our hero, 8-Bit Dries (making his triumphant return in 16-Bit for Portland), we will explore the bootstrap bit by bit, traveling the configuration and cache phases, while traversing the grass plains of the variables phase. On our quest to save the Crystal Node, we'll battle form alters, sanitization of our input, the dreaded caves of Themeria, the treacherous rivers of the update system, and the castle of the evil Kitton himself to learn how to solve any problem with our knowledge of the journey!

This session is for developers looking to take their understanding of how the system works to the next level and those who have an interest in solving complicated Drupal issues.

Some of our hero's lifelong questions will be answered such as:

What is the bootstrap and its phases? Laying the groundwork for an epic journey.
What is the hook system and how does it really work?
Why do render arrays hate me? Learning to debunk the complexity of the Render API.
How does a preprocessor preprocess its preprocessors? The theme system.
What is the update system? How does it "know" what to update?
Who cares? Using this information to build better sites.

(A special thanks to Andre Moinar of BeCircle whose blog post not only helped me learn this topic but was an inspiration for the beginning of this session.)

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

webkenny

Track:

Coding + Development

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Secrets to Awesomizing® Your Editor’s Back-end Drupal Experience

mherchel — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:19:33 +0000

Click here to watch Secrets to Awesomizing® Your Editor’s Back-end Drupal Experience.

Show your content editors some love- Drupal style! In this session I’ll walk the intermediate site-builder through real-world modules and techniques that dramatically simplify and de-clutter content management/creation within Drupal 7. Your content editors will thank you!

Numerous little-known modules and techniques will be covered and demonstrated, and we'll also discuss the bright future ahead of us with Drupal 8

Slides:

Secrets to Awesomizing® Your Editor’s Back-end Drupal Experience.pdf

Schedule info

Status:

Accepted

Time slot:

Tuesday, May 21 - 03:15pm-04:15pm

Room:

OR 201 - Phase2

Session Info

Speaker(s):

mherchel

Track:

User Experience (UX)

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Drush for humans: a practical guide

FluxSauce — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:48:35 +0000

Learn how site building and maintenance can benefit from Drush, the Drupal command line shell and scripting interface. Join Jon Peck, author of the lynda.com course Simplified Drupal Sites with Drush as he describes what Drush is, demonstrates how to install it, and how to use it effectively for everyday tasks.

Drush is a fantastic daily-use tool without the overhead of the full Drupal GUI and bootstrap, but it has some drawbacks in terms of approachability. The documentation for drush, while thorough and improving, can be intimidating and obtuse for people who don’t live, breathe and code Drupal. drush.org the home page is an example of this; it’s a very useful source of information, but it’s literally dozens of commands and all their arguments displayed on one page. Where should a new Drush user start?

This session begins with a high-level overview of what Drush is and why it’s useful. With that foundation, Jon will demonstrate:

Installing Drush
Site installation and inspection
Downloading and managing modules
User management
Controlling the cache and cron
Archiving and restoring sites

With this knowledge, site administrators and developers can immediately start using Drush, the Drupal standard tool for managing sites from the command-line.

This session is an introduction for developers and site administrators who have installed and managed a Drupal site; no Drush experience is assumed.

Jon Peck is a lynda.com author, Zend Certified PHP Engineer, and owner of FluxSauce, a web application development firm in Upstate NY.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

FluxSauce

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Varnish In Action

ThijsFeryn — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:07:46 +0000

Having trouble scaling your website? Is that new marketing campaign killing your performance? Are you using a frameork or a CMS that causes too much overhead? Give Varnish a try !

Varnish is a reverse proxy that serves cached pages to your visitors instead of hitting the backend servers all the time. It's an insanely powerful tool that will rescue your site from getting crushed and is considered to be an industry standard.

Cache is stored in RAM and there's a domain specific language that allows you to hook into your caching logic. There are tools and rules and it's essentially your primary tool for when you're site is "at load".

Did I mention it works great with Drupal?

Slides:

varnish_in_action.txt

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

ThijsFeryn

Track:

DevOps

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

CLI, the other SAPI

ThijsFeryn — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:13:47 +0000

Most developers use PHP in a web context and run their code via Apache. The command line interface (CLI) is another approach to run PHP without the overhead of your webserver.This talk not only illustrates the usage of the PHP binary, but also some use cases for which the CLI is the better tool. Keywords: I/O, forking, signals, configuration, batch tasks, syntax validation, documentation, piping…

Slides:

cli_the_other_sapi.txt

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

ThijsFeryn

Track:

Coding + Development

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Reverse caching proxies: Varnish or Nginx?

ThijsFeryn — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:16:29 +0000

In a world full of scalability challenges, a reverse caching proxy has become an essential tool to protect your backend servers. This talk is dedicated to that and compares Varnish to Nginx as the 2 tools for the job. We'll be talking about setting the up, playing around with config, making them serve cached Drupal or PHP content and do some advanced tricks such as ESI

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

ThijsFeryn

Track:

DevOps

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate