Posted by OpenChimp on March 5, 2008 at 4:32pm
DrupalCon is about half way through and has been amazing! I'm suffering from a little information overload ... and loving it.
The purpose of this post is for people from the LA group who are fortunate enough to have attended DrupalCon to share their thoughts about things that they've discovered and want to share with the rest of the Los Angeles Drupal group. Jest tell us a little about what you learned or new modules you've discovered - give us some links to explore.
These notes can be used to help organize for the March LA Drupal Meeting - Tue., 3/25, 7-9pm in which we will present and discuss some of these things in a more detailed and open manner.
Comments
patterns to evolve install profiles, website migration, and more
This came out of a BOF (birds of a feather) session, so only about a dozen people got direct exposure to this new exciting approach to install profiles.
I love the concept of install profiles but I've always had concerns about the serious limitations associated with using it, especially the fact that it's only used to set up new sites, and can't be used to add functionality to sites that already exist. Fortunately I wasn't alone in these concerns and people smarter and more talented than me have been working on solving these problems.
A project called patterns has been created to address these issues, and the scope of the project actually goes beyond just being used for install profiles. Basically, a pattern automates the setup and configuration process for nearly any conceivable task. All those hours that you spend setting on redundant tasks (installing modules, creating cck types, creating views, configuring imagecache, changing site admin settings, ... add what you want) can all be automated by having these thing defined as a pattern. This means that if you have a certain setup that you like using for image galleries or events on your sites, you create a pattern that describes it and then run that pattern the next time you want to use it and it does all the work for you. 3 hours of work done in 3 seconds!
As I said, the scope goes beyond this, but I don't need to write all about it. They've already made this great extensive post about it. Read more about it and Join the discussion:
Site architecture patterns, Install Profiles, & automated site configuration
It sounds like they've talked with Dries about this and their hope is to get this into core for 7 as a replacement for install profiles. I hope that the community can help them accomplish this.
various drupalcon thoughts & notes
I was amazed at the shear madness of the event. I attended DrupalCampLA - and with ~110 people, found it difficult to meet as many people as I would have liked. Drupalcon Boston - 800 paid registrants, plus approx 150 more with sponships, etc. Oh man, 950 people in five days. WOW! I'm sure I met 50, I have their cards. And to think, I didn't think I exchanged cards with that many people.
Even though the majority of the sessions were awesome, there was sooo much going on I kept feeling like I was missing something. Most of the sessions I attended, I had at least some familiarity with the subject. Drupal in China was not one. Crazy how much is actually going on worldwide.
One the things that caught my attention and imagination was Dries keynote / future of Drupal. You can see at least part of it here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/9363 - worth 5minutes of your time - watch it! Thankfully usability was also high, HIGH, HIGH on his list of Dr7 features.
Another attention grabber was sun SolR. I think was also mentioned in his keynote, but somehow I don't recall it. But I saw a BoF with Robert Douglas, and wow! SolR has the potential to be huge for scalability, and searching.
Here's some really links I gathered from the sessions. This is a partial list, I'm out of time:
* http://drupal5.xcarnated.com/node/22/s5 - a few awesome links contained within.
* http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/job-fair - did you notice how many companies are hiring?!?!
(ok, kids telling me time for bed. I'll finish the post later...)
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mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Last night I discussed some
Last night I discussed some of the Solr search work that has been done as well as work that has been done to extend the feature set of Drupal's core search. The module I discussed was called Faceted Search and it can be found here: http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search. I think it might be a great topic for a full 1 hour session at an upcoming meetup. The module is very user friendly to site users and admins alike. Some of the cool functionality include related categories to filter out results, creating different search interfaces that limit the searcher to particular content types, publishing search results through a view (this is great if you know how to theme output from the views module and wish to theme your search results in a similar fashion) and much more.