Session Proposals

BOF: DrupalCampColoarado and DrupalCon Colorado Organization

Posted by cyberswat on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 4:26pm GMT
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Organizing this DrupalCamp has been an interesting process that has taught us quite a bit about the demand for Drupal events in addition to the process of making one happen. We try our best to make everyone happy but invariably can not cover every contingency. http://groups.drupal.org/node/12720#comment-43598 has presented the beginnings of a constructive conversation related to making future events the best they can be.

The Drupal Community

Posted by bjeavons on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 11:25am GMT
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I'd like to talk about the Drupal community, the ways in which we are open and sponsor participation and the ways we've push people away. Because we have pushed people away. What do we do that is right and what are we doing wrong?

Semantic Web Technologies and Drupal - What's the Meaning of This?

Posted by davesoftdes on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 3:47pm GMT
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This is a combination presentation and BOF, covering a topic which is becoming increasingly popular in the Drupal community. Basic background and ideas behind "meaning-based" content identification versus "keyword-based" will be covered, along with some of the linguistic approaches as well as RDF and what the Drupal community has been doing with it. We'll cover the usual question - how will this affect my work or my site? - and see what ideas and opinions the group has in what continues to be a controversial topic, but one so important it has been called Web 3.0.

The 禅 (Zen) of Localization

Posted by davesoftdes on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 3:45pm GMT
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Drupal is used all over the world, and it's great for presenting content in just about any language. Your site might benefit from being globally aware, and your module development definitely will. In this session we'll talk about the languages and character sets in use, common false assumptions that English-speaking programmers make, and what you can do if your client wants you to include content that is "all Greek to you."

Drupal Estimating BoF

Posted by davesoftdes on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 3:41pm GMT
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Experience is always the key to a good estimate, and for Drupal that's doubly so. This is a session for all experience levels to share how they've done on the projects they've tackled, what was harder or easier than expected, how they might do it differently next time. Also up for discussion is whether Drupal is a good candidate for "Agile" development, a process which helps refine estimating skills and can be helpful in avoiding big schedule changes since it focuses on "bite-sized" development.

Goodbye and Site Showcase

Posted by greggles on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 1:51pm GMT
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This is the "Goodbye" session. You're going to love it.

It's also an opportunity to present the winners of the site showcase competition. Enter your recent site today or look at the current entries.

Job Fair - OR - Get Your Job On

Posted by greggles on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 1:49pm GMT
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This is a "Job Fair" session to allow folks who are hiring to hook up with people who might be interested in a new job. Let's face it, with the right fit, everyone's interested...

Tentatively scheduled as the last session on Saturday. A perfect time to flex your new skills. Or, if you're happily employed, schedule a BoF for the same time.

Wisdom of the crowds - My favorite Drupal modules

Posted by mikehostetler on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 2:58pm GMT
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This session will serve as a place to facilitate an discussion surrounding the question:

'When developing a new Drupal site, what are the first 10 to 20 modules you install and why?'

I will start the discussion by going down my list.

Drupal based E-Commerce - Ubercart Introduction

Posted by mikehostetler on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 2:56pm GMT
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Learn about how to use Drupal as a successful e-commerce platform.

BoF - Drupal Hosting

Posted by mikehostetler on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 2:54pm GMT
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Lets discuss the ins and outs of Drupal hosting. What OS is best? What database? How do you handle backups, does your hosting company do this for you?

I'm sure that will generate enough of a discussion ... :-)

Extending Drupal with Qcodo - An introduction to the QDrupal Module

Posted by mikehostetler on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 2:52pm GMT
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Learn how to successfully integrate Qcodo, a PHP5 web framework, with Drupal.

Learn which situations it's appropriate to use an external web framework with Drupal and which situations you're just creating extra work.

Installing Drupal - A Basic Primer

Posted by mikehostetler on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 2:50pm GMT
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Learn the ins and outs of installing a basic Drupal website onto a hosting account using FTP.

Learn how to install contributed modules and themes, and how to update your site with security updates.

Optimizing your Drupal site for SEO

Posted by mikehostetler on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 2:48pm GMT
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This session will explain the how and why of configuring your Drupal site to put the best foot forward when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.

Advanced theming

Posted by dmitrig01 on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 12:43am GMT
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This session is a follow up to the theming session.

In this session you will learn how to make modules theme-able, how to define your own theme functions or template files (beyond customizing the default ones) in modules and themes, and template preprocessors (how to add custom variables to templates, or modify existing ones).

More miles, less gas

Posted by justin2pin on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 6:25pm GMT
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Using Drupal lets our team focus early in the process on user experience, content and design -- then pull all three together without duplicating effort. For a small design company doing big work, that kind of efficiency is important.

Theming Out of the Box: Trends in Design and Usability

Posted by prestonso on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 6:21pm GMT
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Effective theming is the way to go for a powerful, engaging website. This session offers a look at how to create a site that doesn't look like it's Drupal, as well as an overview of ways to improve usability in conjunction with theming. We'll talk about options in theming, cutting-edge trends in CSS that anticipate a facelifted web, aesthetics as applied to the web, and designing something refreshing and exemplary. Any level of ability in Drupal or web design welcome! This is a joint session by Matthew Tucker and Preston So, lead web designers at Monarch Digital in Colorado Springs.

Theming

Posted by dmitrig01 on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 11:36am GMT
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Want to learn the basic concepts of making your site look like your want? Ever thought Drupal was ugly and not know how to fix it? Attend this session and you'll learn!

Using SimpleTest to Prove Your Code

Posted by jcfiala on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 5:46pm GMT
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Ever since DrupalCon Boston, unit testing has become a big topic for development - it's baked into Drupal 7, and patches should have tests to show what is being fixed. It's just as important in Drupal 5 and 6.

I plan on talking about using simpletest as you develop to prove that the code you're writing is correct as you write it, and to keep it correct as you fix bugs and add functionality. I'll also go over how to extend SimpleTest's functionality with some simple Object Oriented Programming to make it easier to test your module.

Creating considerate Web Applications

Posted by boombatower on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 10:46am GMT
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How do we make Drupal more user-friendly? How can fine tuned interaction design and copywriting influence the adoption of Drupal? Working on the usability of a web application requires a different set of tools and understanding than the usability of a website. In this session we will talk about what major usability issues Drupal is facing and how to work on fixing them.

Workshop: Q&A With the Experts

Posted by beeradb on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 7:34pm GMT
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Do you have a local development problem?
Do you also have questions about how to solve a problem on the site you're currently building?

If so, you're in luck. Come get hands on development help from local area Drupal experts.

We'll have several experts on hand to answer questions in the following categories:

  • theming
  • module development
  • site configuration
  • hacking core
  • rolling patches
  • keeping your site up to date with the latest Drupal version

John Fiala, Kevin Bridges, Brad Bowman, and others will be on hand to answer questions.

Drupal Benchmarking and Performance

Posted by Ezra on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 12:11pm GMT
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Making sure that your site performs well under a load of heavy traffic is critical to its success.

We'll discuss the basic concepts and techniques involved in making sure your Drupal website runs smoothly and can handle a heavy load.

Some of the topics included:

- Factors that affect performance
- Measuring performance
- Different types of hosting (Shared, VPS, "Grid", Mosso)
- Techniques used to make enterprise websites scalable (ie Facebook, LiveJournal)
- Basics of Performance-friendly Drupal Module development

Flex/Flash/AIR Interfaces for Custom Content Types in Drupal

Posted by Chris Charlton on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 9:24pm GMT
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Time to stop thinking about Drupal for just pages, blog posts, and story nodes. CCK and modules provides people with custom content types but ActionScript applications sell a front-end like no other. This session will inspire others to think outside of the Drupal box and push their use of Drupal into a rich application direction. No code, just inspiration.

Both Flex and Drupal are both free platforms and frameworks that are taking the web by storm. Join the future.

Drupal Association - How Can We Help You?

Posted by greggles on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 2:06pm GMT
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The Drupal Association was founded in 2006 with a set of goals stated as:

The purposes of the Association shall be for providing support in developing,
communicating, promoting, distributing the Drupal project and in deploying
an infrastructure in support of the Drupal project.

That goal can be interpretted in a broad or a very narrow way. In the past 2 years the Drupal Association has acted cautiously while still trying to support the Drupal project as much as possible.

Advanced AHAH: Modifying Forms

Posted by jcfiala on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 1:00pm GMT
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With Drupal 6, AHAH comes baked into the pie, but the existing documentation just uses it to display messages to the user. However, it is possible to use AHAH to dynamically change forms to respond to the information the user is entering in, and during this session I'll go over the steps to take, the pitfalls, and what to do if your user isn't using Javascript.

Drupal Multimedia

Posted by aaron on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 4:30pm GMT
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EDIT: Live Session Outline & Summary!

Aaron Winborn, from Advomatic, will remotely present an overview of the multimedia options for Drupal. We'll examine best practices for handling Images, Video, and Audio on your sites. We'll cover the modules best suited to specific tasks, with some hands-on examples and site recipes.

Aaron Winborn will be presenting from a code sprint in Portland, with one of the aims being to put media handling into Drupal core!

He has just completed writing Drupal Multimedia, to be published in September. (Read the announcement at Drupal.org.)

AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)
Drupal Multimedia (book)

Drupal Lightning Demos

Posted by bjeavons on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 9:17am GMT
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Rapid-fire demonstrations of modules, themes, Drupal-powered sites, fancy Drupal code snippets and anything else Drupal related that can be demoed in 5-10 minutes. These are quick, 5-10 minutes including time for questions, demos of something you've built on or with Drupal. Unless we have very few demos there probably won't be time to go looking at code so just show how it works or what it looks like.

Anyone is welcome and encouraged to participate in these demos. Please add a comment on this session if you'd like to demo something. We'll work out the order and logistics of demos soon.

Zen and the Art of Theming

Posted by JohnAlbin on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 7:51pm GMT
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1-zen.png

The Zen theme is both a good learner’s theme for beginners and a powerful launch pad for advanced themers.

In this session we’re going to be discussing “The Power of Base Themes” and why even Theming-Fu Masters would be wise to use a base theme (even if they decide to roll their own.) We’ll also discuss some of the goodies that make Zen a flexible, pluggable, well-documented, feature-rich, minimally-styled, well-structured, CSS-powered über–theme.

This will be a remote session — coming to you all the way past the Four Corners from Phoenix, AZ.

Introduction to Drupal

Posted by denverdataman on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 10:50pm GMT
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In this session we will introduce Drupal for users with little or no experience with Drupal. The seminar will focus on things that users of Drupal need to know to start building successful sites.

Come with any questions you have and we will answer them or help you in the right direction.

Contributing to Drupal

Posted by bjeavons on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 11:53am GMT
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Want to give back to the Drupal community but not sure where you can help? Found a bug in a module and want it incorporated in? Figured out how to configure and use a module and want to provide a write-up for all to see? This session covers the various ways you can help out, contribute back, and make Drupal better for everyone.

Geared primarily to coders and themers though we'll cover ways of giving back through patch review, documentation, and support.

BoF: Marketing Open Source

Posted by beeradb on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 3:41pm GMT
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Let's have a conversation about our approach to selling clients on the idea of open source software. Most of us, at one point or another, are faced with the task of selling clients on using open source technology such as Drupal, MySQL, Apache, and more, so let's exchange ideas on selling open source software over their oft better known closed source alternative.

BoF: Usability Testing

Posted by beeradb on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 3:16pm GMT
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Let's sit down and have a chat about usability testing. Do you do it for your sites? Why or why not?

We've started doing usability testing on our sites in the last couple months, and we'd love to talk about the methods we're using and compare notes with others.

Integrating with YouTube

Posted by beeradb on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 2:44pm GMT
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With the release of the YouTube public API in march, developers may now begin integrating with YouTube for video storage, delivery, and a host of other uses. This session will cover the YouTube API module I've written and how developers can use it to integrate with YouTube.

The Dao of the Drupal Community

Posted by greggles on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 4:20pm GMT
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This could probably equally go under Beginning Drupal, but...

One of the hardest things about using Drupal the software is knowing how to interact with the community itself.

  1. Where do I find the roadmap?
  2. How can I help?
  3. Why are there major changes to the API with every release?
  4. Why isn't FeatureX in Core?
  5. I found this bug, why doesn't anyone care?
  6. How can I get help with my problem?
  7. What are the new developments with the project?

Answers to these questions and more will be provided in this session.

jQuery, AJAX, and JavaScript in Drupal 6

Posted by mbutcher on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 9:52pm GMT
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JavaScript: It's not just for calculators and image rollovers.

Drupal 6 is loaded with new features, and not all of them are implemented in PHP. This session will look at what can be done with JavaScript (and especially with jQuery) in Drupal 6. While the presentation will be geared toward those with development experience, JavaScript is often used in themes. For that reason, theme developers may find the track useful, as well.

BOF: Project workflow, management, and client expectations

Posted by cyberswat on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 4:40pm GMT
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Let's discuss Project Management! What does it take to deliver a successful project that meets client expectations and is delivered on time and on budget? How do you extract client requirements and turn those into successful deliverables? Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, UML, Process Diagrams, Wireframes, Design Comps ... how does it all fit together into a clearly defined purpose? What systems do you use to manage your projects?

Drupal 6 - Introduction to Module Development

Posted by cyberswat on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 4:04pm GMT
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This session will be geared towards beginning and intermediate developers interested in understanding the mechanics of building a module in Drupal 6. This topic will be approached from a team development perspective to illustrate best practices for integrating with Drupal internal mechanisms such as blocks, permissions, breadcrumbs, search and the theme layer.

Views2 - The Most Popular Contributed Module

Posted by greggles on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 1:16pm GMT
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Views, the most popular module for Drupal 4.7 and 5.x, is something every site builder should know how to use. Views2, rebuilt for Drupal6, takes the Views module to new levels of usability and flexibility.

Drupal Security For Admins and Coders

Posted by greggles on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 2:55pm GMT
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Drupal core provides features which enable developers and site admins to be secure without any additional work - but it also enables you to create huge gaping holes in your site's security.

So, is your Drupal site safe? Are all of your contributed modules safe?

The most important thing to keeping your site secure is for you to be knowledgeable about potential security issues in web hosting and in Drupal. This session will arm you with the knowledge necessary to keep your site protected.

About Greg Knaddison

Token Module: How I Learned To Use the Token API and Stop Re-Implementing Dynamic String Replacement

Posted by greggles on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 5:32pm GMT
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Come one come all and hear a tale of the Token module. From its humble beginnings buried in the belly of Pathauto to its triumphant trip to the top ten of modules (highly integrated, oft downloaded).

RESTful Web Services and Drupal

Posted by Greg Hines on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 11:59am GMT
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An introduction to web services, REST, and RESTful web services in Drupal.

Drupal is usually used to create web sites for humans. But Drupal can also be used to create web sites intended for machines (e.g. web services) and this session would

The session will be divided into three parts:

  1. Introduction to web services
  2. Introduction to REST
  3. Using Drupal for RESTful web services

The first part will cover web services in general: what they are, why you'd want to build one, and the various types of web service architectures out there.

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