Drupal Developers' room News

Presentations

The presentations are scheduled for saturday. The first talk starts at 13:30h and ends at 14:00h (20 minute presentation + 10 minutes for questions):

• The state and future of Drupal - Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and PhD student at the University of Ghent
  A brief introduction to Drupal. The talk will focus on Drupal's past, its current state and its future.

Drupal architecture

From 14:00h to 16:00h, 4 x (20 minute presentation + 10 minutes for questions):

1. Module development - Moshe Weitzman, Drupal consultant
   Join us as we build a Drupal module from scratch. We will first poll the audience for module proposals and then start coding together. The final part of the presentation will highlight key steps in interacting with Drupal.org, the key spot for publicizing our new module.
2. Theme development - Steven Wittens, Drupal developer and engineering student at the Catholic University of Leuven
   No Drupal site is complete without a fitting theme to show it in. This talk will discuss Drupal's flexible theme system which puts control in the hands of the designer. We'll take a look at the PHPTemplate engine and study a real-life PHPTemplate theme, Bluebeach, used on Drupal.org itself. We'll show that Drupal is perfectly suited for modern techniques such as tableless layouts and semantic XHTML, and see how to solve some common issues in them.
3. Metadata-driven workflow - John VanDyk, Systems analyst and Assistant Professor at Iowa State University of Science and Technology
   Workflow management is essential to a content management system. Flexible workflows can be customized to fit the varied needs of the Drupal community. The workflow module in Drupal integrates with different content types using metadata-driven behavior. Drupal's open callback framework provides the backdrop for the inter-module notification necessary for workflow to be useful.
4. The content construction kit - Jonathan Chaffer, Software developer for Structure Interactive
   Drupal's existing node system can be used to organize structured information of any type, but programming is required to achieve this. After surveying the ways in which other content management frameworks address this problem, we will explore an architecture for allowing administrators to define arbitrary new content types without any programming knowledge. We also examine how this architecture could bring about customized search interfaces, simpler generation of content listings, and a sleeker code base.

Drupal use cases

From 16:00h to 18:00h, 4 x (20 minute presentation + 10 minutes for questions):

1. Multimedia in Drupal - James Walker, Drupal consultant and Bryght guy
   Images, audio and video clips are taking an increasingly prominent role on the internet - from personal photos to artist communities to "podcasts". We will begin by taking a look at the options for media handling that are currently available for Drupal, followed by a look into options for the future.
2. Drupal as an e-commerce platform - Matt Westgate, System support specialist at Iowa State University of Science and Technology
   Drupal can be a storefront, an auction site, or a subscription management system. These configurations and more are possible with Drupal's e-commerce module. Learn from the module's author how to create stores that are easy to maintain. Case studies will be used to introduce the potential of this important module.
3. 100% availability, scalability and security with Drupal - David 'Kat' Monosov, Business development and ICT consultant, IP engineer, social entrepreneur
   David will be talking about how to ensure 100% availability, handle scalability to millions of users, and ensure the security of a mission-critical Drupal setup. In fact, we will mostly be talking about how Drupal is flexible enough to allow for known, well documented methods in network and system administration to be applied to it in order to reach the goals mentioned with (nearly) no modifications.
4. Drupal as a contact relationship management platform - Neil Drumm, Lead developer at CivicSpace Labs
   Finding out who is logging into your campaign or non-profit website, subscribing to your email lists, and donating to your cause is essential. Drupal is increasingly able to fulfill these needs without going to third party software. Take a tour of the new CRM module with one of the module's architects.