DrupalCamp NYC #9 Session Ideas

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NOTICE: Here is the link to the final schedule of sessions for this Drupalcamp: SESSION SCHEDULE

Interested in presenting a workshop? Have a good idea for something you'd love for someone to teach? Want to organize a panel discussion?

Edit this page and put your ideas below. Please remember to list the Title; Presenter(s); and a brief description.

Title: Drupal Project Manager / Project Lead Questions
Presenter(s): mdorman
Description: Are you managing / leading a Drupal project now or soon? Make sure you get answers to all the important questions before, during and toward the end of a project. I will not necessarily be answering these questions, just giving you the questions to ask on your project. I will start the session off with my common questions I accumulated over a number of years overseeing Drupal (and other Web Platforms). The second part of the session will be more collaborative, requiring some audience participation to gather more questions. We will end with an anonymous (via email) Q&A, allowing you to ask the "dumb" questions that you aren't sure if they are valid/important.

Title: Getting D6 to D7 Upgrades with multilingual cck fields to work
Presenters: Christopher Pelham could go over what's not working yet and point to what needs to be done
Description: D7 adds a language column to each field, which CCK's migrate module is not setting, which is screwing things up and needs to be fixed

Title: How to set up and use git
Presenter: Forest Mars
(Alternate Title: GTFO: Git Theory For OpenSource)
Description: This talk will be an introduction to using Git for Open Source development in general and Drupal development in particular. We will cover both high level Git concepts as well as practical examples of the most widely needed Drupal use cases including site deployment, project development, advanced site deployment for continuous integration, and time permitting, get deep into highly collaborative complex branching and merging. We may even touch on the fact Git was not originally intended for web development and how this has necessarily led to overly complex workarounds and workflow hacks.

Title: How to set up and manage numerous sandboxes on one local machine for dev/testing purposes
Presenters: ?

Title: My biggest drupal fail
Presenters: list to come
Description: Sometimes the best learning experiences come from the worst mistakes. This panel will be a discussion of big mistakes and the lessons learned

Title: Making beautiful maps
Presenters: tom_o_t
Description: It's pretty easy to add a map to a web page, but it's harder to make these maps look different from the standard Google or Bing maps. This session will give some simple and some more advanced ways of creating customized maps that display the information more clearly and match the look of your site.

Title: Intro to Drupal
Presenter(s): List to come
Description: while the developer breakout sessions were being held in the two rooms, maybe we could do a 'noob' session in the main hall for an hour or so? We could present some information about Drupal, history, what it is, who uses it, how the community works, etc. Just a thought, I don't know how long we have the main hall for, but the veterans probably just want to 'get to it' pretty quickly on arrival whereas other newer community members could really benefit from a briefing session, maybe even some demos. I can help coordinate this with some people that wouldn't mind presenting for that first hour or two before jumping into the dev sessions...

Title: Better development processes using Features (with Drush)
Presenter(s): twom, (and anybody who want's to join in)
Description: A good development and staging process helps you in doing faster development and delivering high quality code. Drush and Features are two tools that are unmissable in your development, testing and staging process. This session will focus on the benefits of using Features, and will focus on the Drush commands to do this. The ultimate goal is to get stable and predictable builds in all your environments!

Title: Better development environments using Pantheon
Presenter(s): kbell
Description: (Perhaps presented in conjunction/partnership with twom's Features/Drush session) - Good development practices start with good development environments - dev, stage, live; drush, Git, automated backups - Pantheon has it all, supporting both Drupal 6 and 7, and makes it easy to get (and keep) your development house in order. The session will get you started with your very own Pantheon account and we'll spin up your first site. Then we'll take a trip through all the features the Pantheon crew has included for our development pleasure, plus a sneak peek at the new advanced hosting features being planned for launch this summer. You'll be amazed at how fast, easy and efficient it can be to do things right from the start using this new development system. Bonus: using Tower Git GUI client for Mac OSX will be covered as part of this session. Full disclosure: kbell does not work for Pantheon - she is just an enthusiastic beta tester for Pantheon and a process enthusiast.

Site Launch Checklist
Presenter: Jody Lynn (and possibly other Zivtechers)
I want to share the checklist we use when a site is ready to launch. It includes checks of some of the most critical points of quality control, such as security and performance, as well as the settings that should change for a production site, and catches for common gotchas that happen when a site has just changed servers and/or domains. This will also serve to teach some important best practices to increase a site's quality that are valuable at all stages of development.

Title: making module decisions
Presenters: Eric G. (and hopefully others)
Description: One of the most dangerous phrases in drupal-land is "there's a module for that."
When trying to implement a specific functionality, especially one that might be supported by many different modules, making a decision can be a difficult process -- especially for new users.
This workshop will review a general list of best practices for selecting modules and discuss the pros and cons of using contributed modules vs. implementing functionality via custom code.

Title: Volunteering: Pluses and Pitfalls
Presenters: decibel.places and...?
Description: Helping make the world a better place without going crazy and pissing off your friends. Case studies of successes and disasters. Could be BOF.

Title: Volunteering: Catching Up with Drupal 7 Theming
Presenters: johnvsc
Description: So, we know that Drupal 7 is a game changer -> but what are those details, how do you use them and "man, are your telling me I have to learn how to use an Array?" I will be using my newly ported runVSC theme system as an example :)

Title: The Ideal Drupal Development Environment
Presenter: Kipp Elliott Watson
Description: I am interested in presenting a workshop on TIDDE, which is the acronym for "The Ideal Drupal Development Environment". This workshop would have a substantial overlap in content with the workshop entitled "Better development environments using Pantheon", but I think the presentation of two workshops with somewhat different perspectives on the topic of Drupal development environments could be of significant benefit for our fellow Drupalistas. Hopefully these two workshops can be scheduled at different times because I am very interested in attending Pantheon's workshop. I have just started a community wiki website at http://sites.google.com/site/theidealdrupalenvironment. By the time DrupalCampNYC9 rolls around, I hope to have provided on the website a complete cookbook with suitable configuration recipes for the following components of TIDDE: (1) Virtual Environments (Virtual Box 4.04), (2) Operating Systems (Ubuntu 10.10), (3) Server Environments (LAMP), (4) Integrated Development Environments (Eclipse Classic 3.6), (5) Development Tools (Drush, XDebug), (6) Version Control (Git), (7) Drupal Installations (Version 6, Version 7, Acquia's Drupal Commons) and (8) Multi-Site Installation. As the piece de resistance of my presentation I hope to demonstrate the power of TIDDE as applied to a common theming problem that occurs when a developer wants to present a portion of the "$content" variable, but not the entire variable "$content" itself.

PROPOSED PRESENTER's REVISION (4/27/2011): While preparing for this proposed presentation, I learned that fellow Drupalista Michael Cole had already done a tremendous job in developing a virtual appliance "Quickstart" which incorporates nearly every aspect of the foregoing components of a true TIDDE. I would like to suggest that those who might be interested in a workshop on TIDDE take a close look at the Quickstart project (http://drupal.org/project/quickstart) so we can all get together, compare notes and perhaps contribute further to the project that has already been established.

Title: Drupal and E-Mail
Presenters: Charles Novick
This session will examine how Drupal sends email, what modules are available to help you produce and distribute HTML newsletters. Managing mailing lists, SMTP authentication, acquiring subscribers and most important of all, what happens after you click the "Send" button will be discussed.

Title: Making your Drupal site content more usable
Presenter: Lisa Rex (anyone want to co-lead the discussion with me?)
This will be a roundtable discussion about making your Drupal site content more usable and useful. Let's talk about auditing your content, core settings, WYSIWYG, content lifecycles, user testing your content, why tags (aka freetagging) is a terrible idea, what a content strategy looks like and more.

Title: Drupal 7 Entities and Fields
Presenter: Logan Smyth & Alex Dergachev
This will be a BoF to talk about Fields and Entities. I can go over the basics of how they work, but I don't have a formal presentation to give. I can talk about uses is Core as well as some uses in contrib as well as possible uses in custom modules. Entities allow us to define our own new types of content while providing a consistent interface for loading objects and attaching fields to them. We are no longer bound to using nodes as the all-encompassing store for all things.

Title: Introduction to Module Development
Presenter: ezra-g
This session provides a fun introduction for people who want to get started writing their first module or extending an existing one. The presentation is both conceptual and hands-on, and covers topics like Drupal's hook system and the Form API. By the end of the session, attendees should have resources and a foundation to start writing or extending Drupal modules!

Agenda
- What is a module?
- What is the hook system and how does it work?
- Overview and hands-on intro to the Form API
- Basic development troubleshooting techniques
- Resources & references for Drupal module development
- Answers to your questions about Drupal development!

Take away:
- Understanding what a module is.
- Conceptual understanding of how to use Drupal's APIs to write or extend a module
- A feeling of confidence that module-development isn't beyond yourself!
- Awareness of resources to help you continue learning after the session.

I could also present about the Conference Organizing Distribution for building event websites.

Title: Create a Drupal-based material exchange site.
Presenter: Lippe (LP) + co-builders (you!)
Description: Following up on Smags suggestion of "clone-a-site", this would be an extended session (space permitting) aimed at creating a Drupal based replacement for http://www.wastematch.org, a site intended to allow for the exchange of exchange of used and surplus goods and equipment. A Drupal based version would free NYC from using licensed software, be a nice contribution back to NYC, and allow any individual to start a similar operation anywhere with relative ease.
My skill level would not include the making of an install profile, but could include bundling configuration as Features - maybe you can bring something else to the table.
If this isn't possible at camp, but you're interested in getting together to hack on this, message me.