Session ideas

I can't speak as a presenter, but as a hopeful - participant and Dnewbie: i would love to see a clear overview of how to begin with CCK and Views, which seem to be the most powerful modules in Drupal. Also, an intro to theming.

Basically, the basics of really leveraging the power behind Drupal as a CMS.

Thanks!
(im SOOO excited!0
:)
cass

The NYC group had a well formatted wiki to handle proposals and "wish list" items.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/332/drupalcamp#-0-2

If you aren't a member of the group, let me know and I'll paste in the tables...

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

So my thought was to first gather ideas, topics, and speakers, and then get a group together in person, maybe at IndyHall, and formulate the final schedule.

Plus I like threads for brainstorming because you can see thoughts evolve over time. Wikis show you the current state only.

But I think as we draw closer we'll definitely want things formatted as tables so we can observe time conflicts and plan our day, etc.

Originally the wiki was just a list of suggestions, then it was the table where people who wanted to present put their ideas in a slightly more "formal" way.

As it was an unconference, the actual sessions weren't put into time slots until the conf. started, at which point the schedule was added to the wiki as well...

But either way- sounds good to me.

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

We definitely will need to have a full day intro to Drupal path, since I'm guessing nearly half the attendees at the NYC Camp were looking for intro level stuff. Here are some items I think could be on that path:

• Intro to Drupal and the Drupal Community
• CCK and Views 2 (and maybe Nodequeue?)
• Intro to theming

Depending on when the conference is, Aaron Winborn will likely join us, and if he does I'd love to do the joint session on Drupal and Media that we did at the NYC Camp (based off of his upcoming book). I could also do the aggregation using FeedAPI and the FeedAPI Element Mapper, since that was also pretty popular and people seemed to enjoy it (I basically did a live demo of the howto I have up on our site: )

I'm guessing I could pester Jody into presenting the advanced Theming session that she gave at Szeged.

I think a Panels 2 session would also be good, as I don't think that many people utilize the many powers that it offers.

--
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

I was thinking of doing a class on how to pitch Drupal to a client, but it strikes me that it would also be good to talk about working with an Open Source community, the difference between open source and free, how to market your services, etc.

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

Sounds like a great session. I think this might be a good one to offer as a facilitated discussion format, where people can talk in a more roundtable style, since there will likely be people with some experience selling, if not Drupal services, then open source services, in the past.

Thoughts?

Nate

That's what BOF means to me. I presume it means something else to you. :^) Please explain.

I've been mostly lurking on these conference related threads, but am extremely interested in participating.

FWIW, I'd like to see some sessions for folks that are sophisticated users, but not programmers (like me). I can work through most of my problems cutting and pasting snippets from the forums, can work out most of my CSS, and fix bad HTML, but don't really have the time to code from scratch, or diagnose and recode modules or themes that aren't quite right.

I'm also interested in the business of community online organizing. I have a half dozen or so paid sites up and running. but would like to expand that. My biggest problem is that I sell myself short. My clients so far are local Dem committees and a candidate and issue group or two. Most of whom don't have a technically savvy person that can effectively monitor and maintain content, so I set them up cheap to get them started.

I could talk about or participate in a theming session. I'm not sure how this would overlap with Jody's talk tho. We do some cool stuff with the Blueprint CSS framework that really speeds up our template building. It's not 100% Drupal but it's pretty valuable in our workflow.

What I'd really like to learn and explore are:

1. techniques for making the UI friendlier for clients and content owners
2. how to integrate with outside web services (twitter, flickr)
3. time-saving techniques in dev. That would by nature need to be an open discussion I think, but we could talk about how to bypass the UI when it slows you down with php or cli techniques or hacks.

I think it would be great to discuss key differentiation points when selling drupal based solutions. I am doing it everyday now so any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Jeremy Lundberg, MSSW
DLC Solutions

if we do part of the Camp as a BoF, I would be interested in a round table to discuss what people do to manage development -> production changes.

• Auto Pilot
• Deployment API
• hacked up some form of DB replication
• Just doesn't by hand.

--
Christian

I think I'd like to do a session on views and/or panels especially related to arguments.

Happy to present on anything else people want to hear about.

I haven't read all of the posts, so I apologize if I missed something and am just repeating others...

I'd love to see CCK, Panels2, and something from the veteran drupal wiz's along the lines of "best practices". that last one is more anecdotal, but we all have best practices in what we do, not matter what the project or language.

Thanks!

I presented this at NYC Drupalcamp. Folks are happy to understand a bit of the how, when, where, why of integrating a CRM for a Drupal site. This bridges the skill set of the Drupal person with the requirements of nonprofit groups focused on fundraising, advocacy, member services.

Hoping to attend myself!

Charles Lenchner, Democracyinaction.org

Maybe this is wishful thinking but I'd love to hear how other people are managing their drupal site deployments...like: migrating changes from dev -> test -> production, keeping databases and code in sync and the like. Maybe this falls under the Project Management BoF but could also be its own thing.

I had a conversation with someone recently who's just starting to get into Drupal and told me about how he hacked core to achieve something that was simple to do by implementing hook_form_alter(). Does anyone think there would be interest in a BOF that focused on discussing why it's not a good idea to hack core (or contrib modules), common ways to do things that might seem to require hacking core, and what practices to use if you find that you absolutely must hack core?

If this would be worthwile, I'd be willing to lead the discussion and come with examples, etc.

--
Josh Benner
http://jbenner.net

I would love a session or BOF on being a Drupal Freelancer --particularly addressing issues such as

-- pros and cons of being independent vs. joining (or starting) a shop
-- managing work loads and clients
-- partnering with designers and design firms
-- subbing out work -- to other independents or shops
-- retainer agreements
-- what to charge, how to determine rates

I'd be willing to facilitate such a discussion if need be.

Sam

Hi folks,

Thanks for all the hard work you've done on pulling all this together, it looks fantastic!

I was thinking it would be interesting to have a presentation or panel on Drupal for Nonprofits. I worked for a nonprofit for a few years and built a series of Drupal sites for them, and since then I've been doing freelance work, mostly Drupal sites and mostly for nonprofits. I also wrote an article at the beginning of this year, "Drupal for Nonprofits, or, How to Build Social Networks for Change" which talked a bit about some of the ways I've seen it be successful. So I would be interested in presenting some of that information, as well as some more specific case studies from this year of work I've done for nonprofits as well as other well-done nonprofit Drupal sites.

If no one else feels compelled to present on that topic, I'd be happy to do it myself. But I also think it might be interesting to have a panel of folks, including shops who have done Drupal sites for nonprofits and/or nonprofits who have built/gotten built successful Drupal sites.

What do people think?

My secondary secret ulterior motive is to find out if there's some critical mass of folks who might be interested in doing a similar presentation for Philly NetSquared, an organization I co-organize that brings together nonprofits and techies interested in using the social web for social change. A lot of the projects that get presented are or involve Drupal, so it seems like at some point in the future it might be worth having a Drupal for Nonprofits event with that group.

Would be great if someone did a session on Organic Groups and subdomains.

From a graphic design viewpoint, learning more about these would be really helpful:

"techniques for making the UI friendlier for clients and content owners" (from pp)

Panels 2

time tracking

version control

Excited about Views, CCK and Multimedia!

...please don't skip over nodecomment!

And I second spending some time talking about OG. Oh, and CMS!

Thanks for doing this, folks.

... seriously, is that bad?