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

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

Views Demystified

rainbreaw — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:43:09 +0000

Views are one of the most valuable tools for building a fantastic Drupal site, so much so that the module has become part of core in Drupal 8.

As a newer Drupal developer, however, you might be wondering why you need Views and how they work. You might be hearing about arguments, contexts and relationships, or simply trying to figure out the ideal display or sort method for your particular needs.

This session is targeted for the beginner, and perhaps some intermediate users interested in another approach.

We will stick to the views UI, delve into basic strategies for using views, and explore how the simple, non-code based tools within views can be used to create sophisticated results.

This presentation will show views in Drupal 8 as much as possible. Where modules may not be exactly ready at the time of presentation, we may occasionally jump to Drupal 7 for example. The concepts that will be reviewed, however, will be easily transferrable across versions.

Questions answered in this session:

1. When do I use a View?

2. How can I make use of filters, basic arguments, sorting, row style and fields to make the results exactly what I want them to be without knowing any PHP?

3. How can I customize the look of my fields and field result displays without getting into the site theme or knowing any PHP?

4. What are some best practices with setting up Views?

5. What are some simple, easy to use, additional modules that can take my Views to the next level without much effort? Additionally, what are some key modules and/or core Drupal concepts that I need to understand in order to make the most of Views? (e.g. tokens, image styles, taxonomy)

Slides:

veiws_demystified_dcc.pdf

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

rainbreaw

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Must Have Modules

meltonml — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 20:36:14 +0000

Learn about a few modules that will add valuable functionality for your site editors and end users. Often times, useful modules are not discovered until you hear about them from other Drupal users. Online searches sometimes yield useful results, but there are so many modules to choose from. How do you determine which ones are best? How do you avoid pitfalls of installing and configuring certain modules? In this session, we'll review some of our favorite contributed modules, setting configurations, and implementations of those modules.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

meltonml

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Hi My Name Is Average Joe

meltonml — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 20:43:25 +0000

Learn how to deal with the challenges of designing and building a website for site editors with no design or web building experience. As a CMS, Drupal offers a significant number of benefits. A primary benefit is that it allows site editors with no design or HTML experience to update and maintain content on their websites. This results in websites that are more frequently updated with better content, because it puts control of the content in the hands of the content editors. However, theming and building a website that is both flexible enough to grow the site, while also being protected from inexperienced site editors' poor design and usability decisions, can be challenging. In this session, we'll discuss ways to design and build an Average Joe-proof website and overcome these challenges.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

meltonml

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

45 MODULES IN 45 MINUTES – Kickstart your site building with introductions to essential modules, and where to go to learn more

Michael Hofmockel — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:04:02 +0000

Want to build good Drupal sites? Go study all ten to twenty thousand modules in the contributed module repository on Drupal.org! Should only take you a few ... oh ...

Get on the right track faster in this session: I have cherry-picked 45 or so modules that you should know about and a few you can't live without.

You'll see and hear rapid-fire, one minute descriptions of essential site-building, SEO, site-administration, accessibility, architecture, utility, and other modules. I will also give you links to a list of key modules to investigate, a handy "list of lists" of more resources, tips on selecting modules, and more.

This session has grown out of a new Acquia podcast series for site-builders, which begins with several episodes of essential modules for new site builders to investigate.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

Michael Hofmockel

horncologne

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Features for Team Development and Deployment on a Single Site

rainbreaw — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:20:50 +0000

The Features module is a powerful tool that are often used by developers to turn views and content types that they frequently establish site-after-site into their own custom module, making new site development far more efficient. Mrconnerton's talk, Rapid Drupal Development using Features, shows this process very successfully and is a must-view for anyone working on multiple Drupal sites.

Features, however, also offers us a powerful solution for developing a single site with a team and, even more notably, maintaining a single site long-term, and using features to safely, efficiently and seamlessly push changes (in views, content types, and more) up stream onto a production site. This talk will focus on this solution.

What will be covered:

Use cases for features on single-site development, citing the examples we use at Cherry Hill (including ICANN sites and Foss4lib.org)
A general workflow for using features for team development and single-site maintenance
What can be featurized
Reviewing a featured element to determine what might have changed
Updating and reverting features
Using features to put things like your views and content types, etc. into code, and then into git
Using features for safely deploying configuration changes to your production site

Who should attend?

Anyone who works with a team to develop large sites, and who doesn't already use features as readily as using git for site work
Site owners who need to come up with safe methods to update aspects of their site traditionally changed in configuration (views, content types, etc.)
Anyone who puts their hands into site configuration but doesn't, yet, use features

Drupal 7 vs. Drupal 8

As much as possible, we will also discuss the differences between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. The examples in this talk will focus on Drupal 7, and the concepts are useful in both versions. Drupal 8, however, has more built-in tools for deploying site configuration, reserving Features for more specific use-cases.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

rainbreaw

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Drupal 7 Multisite Solutions

mikemiles86 — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 14:08:10 +0000

Drupals multi-site capabilities are among its strongest features built into core. There are a number of ways to implement a multi-site solution in Drupal, given the platform’s flexibility and extensibility. The problem for first time multi-site developers is knowing which solution to choose for a project and how to correctly implement it. Choosing the wrong solution or implementing one incorrectly can be costly and time-consuming.

In this session we will talk about common multi-site solutions for Drupal 7. We will go over the differences between each solution,each solutions strengths and weaknesses, configurations and common pitfalls. The session will also identify development situations each solution is best suited for and how to implement in Drupal 7.

The three solutions this session will focus on are:

One codebase - One Database (a.k.a the domain access or groups method)
One codebase - Many Databases (a.k.a Drupal native multi-site)
One codebase - Shared Database (a.k.a the last-resort method)

This session is aimed at developers who are familiar with developing in Drupal 7, but who are new to implementing multi-sites in the platform. By the end of the session, attendees should walk away with an understanding of the different multi-site solutions available in Drupal 7, how to identify which solution to use for a project and possess the skills needed to correctly implement each one.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

mikemiles86

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Start to export and learn Jenkins to cook!

Nick_vh — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:44:45 +0000

In my region we have a "Start to run" program that guides you on your journey to help you run longer distances guided by motivational music.

This session will guide you through the Drupal isles of Export and will try to teach you something new. And no, this something new is not Features, it's back to basics with the aid of the Ctools exportables toolkit and a nifty small module formerly known as Knapsack. This module is different when we compare it with features as it exports "all the things" into 1 module. There are some use-cases where you do not need to re-use your exports, and this fits module is your solution for that use-case.

So once we waded through this Isle of Export, we will continue our tour to the Isle of CI where we will use a build process and a make file, in combination with basic Drupal profiles, to make sure that no other human being makes human being mistakes and tries to modify a module without properly patching it.

As every site has a unique recipe for success (read: a number of specific versions or dev-versions of specific contrib modules) and to ensure that our recipe to our new site stays known and that a dev version of a module not suddenly is updated without knowing the change we will monitor our site-codebase with the outcome of our recipe.

So, this might sound very cryptic but in the end it lets you sleep better at night as you know what is going inside your site. Knowledge is power.

I hope this will be of interest for many.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

Nick_vh

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Not Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Multi-headed Drupal

Crell — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:20:45 +0000

One of the strengths of Drupal is that it's not just a tool for building a single website. It can be used equally well for managing multiple companion sites together. This capability has existed for many years, but is not always well understood. And in true Drupal fashion, modern Drupal has several different options available for users looking to run a series of Drupal sites together, each with its own trade-offs.

This session will explore several leading ways to handle a multi-headed Drupal installation, including Domain Access, Organic Groups, and Multi-site. It will also ask the question of whether a multi-headed Drupal is necessary in the first place; often it is not. Attendees should come away better-armed to evaluate how, and if, to roll out Drupal for a multi-part site.

Schedule info

Status:

Proposed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

Crell

Track:

Site Building

Experience level:

Intermediate