Session proposals for DrupalCamp LA 2011

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
christefano's picture

Post your session proposals here. Be sure to mention if you're looking for co-presenters!

Update: Reverse proposals are good, too! If there's something you'd like to see someone else present, you can post your requests and suggestions.

Comments

Here are a few sessions I

christefano's picture

Here are a few sessions I plan to present. If anyone would like to co-present, shoot me an email or reply to this comment. See you at the camp!

1. Professional Staging and Deployment: Today's Best (and Worst) Practices

The development of large Drupal websites can pose several unique challenges when changes need to be deployed across different servers. There are as many issues to solve as there are approaches to solving them (e.g. Deployment, Features, Externodes, and so on) and this session will include a demonstration and discussion of the deployment tools and methodology used by Drupal service firms today.

  • Defining the problem
  • Brief overview of existing solutions
  • Horror stories and mistakes to avoid
  • Demonstration of selected tools and practices
  • Questions and answers

2. Drupal and Virtualmin: Managing unlimited Drupal sites with your own VPS

Take your Drupal sites to the next level with the free, open-source Webmin control panel and its powerful Virtualmin plug-in. Add as many features as you want, including unlimited domains, mail accounts, Subversion repositories, mailing lists, and more with a point-and-click web interface.

Webmin and Virtualmin are similar to cPanel and WHM, respectively, and can manage dozens or even hundreds of domains. They are the perfect tools for creating test and development sites, hosting client websites or even managing a full-blown online infrastructure for running a business.

Did I forget to mention, Webmin and Virtualmin are free and open-source? Compared to site licensing costs of cPanel, WHM, Plesk and other proprietary control panels, Webmin and Virtualmin cost only as much as a basic $10-20/month VPS account.

3. Getting Things Drupal (GTD): How the Drupal community works

Drupal isn't just a software project. It's also a growing community of individuals, teams and companies who build, design, theme and develop sites with Drupal.

This interactive session is an opportunity for newcomers to Drupal to talk with long-time members on the Drupal community. We'll talk about what it means to be a "good citizen" in the community, how to best utilize the resources available on Drupal.org and the *.drupal.org sites and where to look in the growing ecosystem of professional Drupal services in order to find the right people.

We will also hear about successes, mistakes to avoid and tips for engaging the community with well-crafted job announcements, in discussions on Drupal.org and on IRC, and ways to get the most out of Drupal conferences like DrupalCamps and DrupalCons.

Great ideas

jromine's picture

All these session ideas sound great. I'm particularly interested in staging and deployment. Start getting signups for these sessions by posting them at http://2011.drupalcampla.com/node/add/session

John Romine

Thanks for getting the site

christefano's picture

Thanks for getting the site up, John. I just copied my sessions over.

   Drupal Coworking BoF: The State of Drupal and Coworking
   http://2011.drupalcampla.com/sessions/drupal-coworking-bof-state-drupal-...

   Getting Things Drupal (GTD): How the Drupal Community Works
   http://2011.drupalcampla.com/sessions/getting-things-drupal-gtd-how-drup...

   Drupal and Virtualmin: Managing Unlimited Drupal Sites With Your Own VPS
   http://2011.drupalcampla.com/sessions/drupal-and-virtualmin-managing-unl...

   Professional Staging and Deployment: Today's Best (and Worst) Practices
   http://2011.drupalcampla.com/sessions/professional-staging-and-deploymen...

As always, I'm looking for co-presenters!

These all sound great, but

jromine's picture

These all sound great, but I'm particularly looking forward to the ones on staging and deployment, and virtualmin.

John Romine

More sessions in

stevenator's picture

I am in as well. I'd like to request that these two be scheduled back to back if at all possible.

http://2011.drupalcampla.com/sessions/power-display-suite-d7-d6
http://2011.drupalcampla.com/sessions/advanced-display-suite-–-case-study-workflow-using-features-and-git

Please let me know if there is a better place to make that request. Thanks John.

Good point

jromine's picture

Steve, good point about the special request. I added a 'notes to organizer' field to the session content type. Please add your notes (about scheduling, etc.) to your sessions.

John Romine

Great solution

stevenator's picture

Great solution John. I can volunteer to make an administrative view if you have not already put one together. I think COD has something prebuilt that you can just add the field to when beginning to approve and schedule sessions.

Co-presenter

jromine's picture

We should probably add a user reference field for co-presenters. I think there were some conflicts last year because of that.

John Romine

That also sounds like a good idea join

stevenator's picture

This has a little more of an implication on the theme but it doesn't seem like it would be a big deal. I can have christo let me into the site code and can jump in on the view if you like. Let me know what I can do to help you.

I like the idea of listing

christefano's picture

I like the idea of listing co-presenters, but I'm just one of the sysadmins (I set up the 2011.drupalcampla.com site's subdomain, database, DNS and SSL certificate but that's it). John would be the person to ask about the site code.

I think the scheduling

christefano's picture

I think the scheduling conflicts last year were because the scheduling grid only showed the name of the person who proposed the session and not the co-presenters. This meant that two or more sessions with the same presenter could be mistakenly put in the same time slot.

hooks

oseldman's picture

Kevin (@wizonesolutions) and I are planning to do an extended/revised/updated version of the Why Hooks? talk we did at the Downtown LA Drupal meetup a few months ago.

He presented it at Drupal Camp Sacramento, and you can see the session description there. http://sacdrupal.org/program/sessions/why-drupal-uses-hooks-and-why-you-...

There's also a screencast of the original talk. http://blip.tv/ladrupal/why-hooks-4914335

Performance, Migrations, Typography, and Sprints?

BTMash's picture

I was planning to do two performance sessions - one on Frontend Performance and another on Backend Performance like the past few years and I'd be happy to co-present with others on this :)

I was also thinking of holding a Migrate BoF (or present on the Migrate module what I had back in February). And maybe something on the typography modules.

Finally (and this is not really a presentation), I was thinking we could have code sprints running through the camp (A concept from DrupalCampUtah that I really liked was 'sprinting with mentors' - if we get enough of the 'seniors' to agree to it, we can show the ropes and maybe upgrade some issues with the folk that haven't gone through the issue queue before). I'd be happy to try and organize it.

Drupal Gardens for beginners and non coders

Benno Sebastian's picture

If there is a beginners track. I can do a Drupal Gardens Session. This will enable people new to Drupal and new to web coding to create websites right away. Rather then spending weeks and month of learning all the basics before they are able to create a website.

Tracks?

oseldman's picture

Benno, this is a great suggestion for a beginner session.

You bring up the idea of tracks and I think it's a good one. I think the camp needs tracks, or minimally, a beginners track. I think it is essential to provide some guidance to new members and beginners. At a camp/con it can be hard to figure out what sessions to attend and whether they're appropriate, so providing a beginners track for new members to follow will improve that part of the experience.

Having several tracks would be preferable, something like Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced are the obvious examples (depending on how many and what type of sessions are proposed). There are other tracks we could consider too, and I'm hoping others will make suggestions. Here are a few examples of possible track ideas:

Design/Theming/UX
Business/Strategy
Site building/Recipes/Showcases
Coder/Developer
Performance
Community/Ecosystem/World of Drupal
Site Administration/Workflow/Content Administration
Commerce

I realize some of these may not be appropriate, or are overkill, but I just wanted to throw some suggestions out there to see what everyone else thinks. As I said, my main hope would be that we could at least provide a Beginners track.

Love to have a beginners track

jromine's picture

Great idea, create your sessions and tag them 'beginners track' and we'll do our best to schedule them together in one track.

John Romine

Theming

ishmael-sanchez's picture

I was gonna do a theming session. It can be theming from scratch or a drupal and mobile theming (responsive themes, media queries, mobile tools stuff) and I'm down for co-presenting with others and what not.

Advanced Display Suite and Features Workflow

stevenator's picture

I am thinking of a case study presentation showing some of the more advanced features of the sibling/contrib modules to Display Suite (Node Displays and Views Displays). I will spend time on reviewing how to use code to build custom fields, bring views into the game by using views attach and the Views Display module, and how to manage a large set of DS customizations with Features. If I get through all of that in the time allowed I will switch focus to making updates through Features.

In conjunction with all of this, I will concentrate on actual code rather than clicking through the browser. I will use a case study site and show some of the workflow that helped to build a large site driven by 10+ ND Buildmodes.

I am open to sharing this topic or jumping ion on someone else's as I know both DS and Features have been recently presented on.

I'm there

oseldman's picture

Sounds like an awesome session idea. I'd definitely like to attend this one.

Split up the two

BTMash's picture

I think there is enough for 2 presentations between Display Suite and Features. For the latter, you can show how the features deployments come through. I was already thinking of presenting on Display Suite (though it would be for 7 so I wouldn't be touching ND or Views Display) so maybe the two can be combined (or you can take over ^_^).

Open to anything

stevenator's picture

That's fine with me @BTMash. I am thinking that my presentation would be more directed at a workflow approach using my latest site as the case study. I agree with you that this topic can span two sessions and one can roll right into the other if the organizers schedule like that. We can bend the learning curve betweeen the two sessions as well to move through a beginner->advanced track from session 1 to session 2. I would be willing to co-present on DS taking a back seat to your D7 presentation (though I would love to make sure custom tpls get touched on) and pepper it with any extending D6 knowledge of vd and nd modules that would only be necessary additions to what you are presenting...above I was referring of course to your presentation from 2 months ago as to not step on your toes...but when you didn't mention it above I thought you might be passing it by.

I would then suggest moving into session 2 and using whatever session 1's examples were to show the Features module in a live workflow scenario using git/svn and standard .module practices in conjunction with a features export...I've got a nifty little example using the Mediaelementjs library on a D6 site (module is for D7 only) that I had to build with a combination of Features and module techniques.

I'll PM you in a few days and see what you are thinking. Please vote this up if anyone thinks they are interested in seeing how all of this would go together.

I'm cool with that

BTMash's picture

Though I would like to see YOU in the driver's seat for Display Suite material as well. I know certain things regarding the D7 version but closer to nil on D6 (and I can imagine you doing a LOT more in the D6 version than I have in the D7 version) so having you drive it (and me chiming in where D7 differs) could also be a way to go.

Could help out too

chellman's picture

I don't want this to get into a too-many-cooks situation, but I've been DSing it up a lot in D6 (and have some prior knowledge of the site Steve's talking about), so if you happen to want any extra hands or brains for this, let me know.

notes to organizers

jromine's picture

Be sure to add your back-to-back schedule request in the new 'notes to organizer' session field.

John Romine

Beginner's guide to module building

chellman's picture

I could expand my "don't be scared of writing modules" lightning talk into a full-length on diving into simple module development.

Not having been around for this last year, I'm wondering what the makeup of the DCLA audience tends to be. Has it skewed more toward beginners or more toward experienced folks?

DCLA audience tends to be the entire range

bvirtual's picture

You ask:

Has it skewed more toward beginners or more toward experienced folks?

All I have it my personal opinion and beliefs. Here they are. I feel like I'm out on a limb. Everyone should feel free to cut the limb. I'd like to hear from others who have attended.

Due to the LA Drupal User Group meeting organic growth format, having not one main presentation for 2 hours, but having multiple smaller ones, the attendees attracted run from many beginners, likely over half the audience, to a range of intermediate beginner to medium to highly expert.

DCLA tends to reflect this range, with the experts giving all levels of session talks, and doing job networking between their sessions, while the general audience is 50% or more beginners, looking to go up the steep Drupal Learning Curve, and having the FULL RANGE of beginner sessions I think will give the best value to these adopters.

That said, I feel an expert would be wise to give BOTH levels of sessions, the expert level to show their advanced skill sets, and an entry level, to show they can "talk" to potential clients at an understandable level. If the session speaker wants to accept work at both levels, that is.

We know about "first time" attendees at our monthly meetings as our sign up sheet has a column with YES it in. While it's not an exact measure, all our meetings have first timers, and over half come back due to the value provided to them. Our LA Drupal User Group effort does have a strong focus on beginners, and experts. It's the middle range, in my opinion, that we may be light on, but not by much. Why?

Once a beginner is jump started, the middle range is the steepest learning curve, and the greatest benefit in attending is no longer the presentations as much as the Q&A and After Dark, where one on one answers can jump up the steep learning curve. I'm now above the steepest curve, and thoroughly enjoying Drupal. It makes things so easy to implement. There is just so many features, hundreds, to be learned.

That's why I have decided to attend every LA event for the next 6 months. And why I am taking extensive notes, so I can remember. As a value to our members I am publishing Meeting Minutes, which take over 30 minutes to 60 minutes to write up, review, reread, preview, preview again, before I save. I feel these Minutes will assist the middle range learning curve. Also, Minutes will encourage future attendance to first timers, and those who could not make it, thus growing LA Drupal, growing Drupal. A contribution to the community, which I hope includes other DUGs as they 'see' what LA's meeting formats are and our topics.

That said, about LA, DCLA also attracts world wide. We've had Drupalers from Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, to mention a few. It would not be exact to extrapolate LA factoids to DCLA attendees.

All of the above is my personal belief, and so is my belief that DCLA attracts more beginners, both locally, within South Western USA and the world. Over half is my estimate.

Disclaimer: I feel it's worth repeating, DCLA attracts both beginners, and experts, who have contributed to core, written many Contributed modules, written original Themes, do amazing performance analysis and implemented extreme measures for gain, and provide their fellow attendees with valuable advice and knowledge, in the unconference style of open source today.

Show your FIRE!!!

Pete

Peter

LA's Open Source User Group Advocate - Volunteer at DrupalCamp LA and SCALE

If there is going to be a Beginner Track...

JSCSJSCS's picture

I could give a presentation with step-by-step instructions on how to make a Simple Hover Gallery with Drupal 6, Views_Slideshow, some easy Views "tricks", and some CSS styling. I gave this at the IE meetup on 9 June 2011. Seemed to be well received. (But they are a polite bunch.)

Only local images are allowed.
Only local images are allowed.

James Sinkiewicz
Drupal Site Builder and Generalist
http://MyDrupalJourney.com

My Sessions

arcaneadam's picture

I'd like to give a few sessions.

Advanced Themeing

Advanced Track
This will cover how to unlock the power of Drupals theme system utilizing theme overrides, hooks, and the Theme Registry.

Building API's

Advanced Track
This would cover how to write effective API modules. How to utilize the hook system found in Drupal in a way that makes your module extensible and pluggable. I'll look at some of the Drupal modules that do this effectively and also look at a recent example, The Piecemaker API module, where I implemented this strategy.

Flexible site building with Fields and Views

Beginners Track
Discuss how to build flexible and dynamic sites utilizing Fields/CCK to get the data in and views to get the data out.

Adam A. Gregory
Drupal Developer and Consultant
Hire me
http://AdamAGregory.com
Twitter Me
http://twitter.com/adamgregory

2011.drupalcampla.com is up!

jromine's picture

Our http://2011.drupalcampla.com website is now up and (mostly) working!

You can now login to your account (or register, if you weren't signed up last year) and post your sessions.

John Romine

mike.roberts's picture

I'm not proposing a session that I can present, but I would be very interested in a session that goes over all of the php functions available to you within drupal and how to use them (hooks, etc.). I'm a front end drupal themer who is just starting to learn PHP and I feel that to us frontend people this type of session would be extremely useful. Is anyone willing to do a session on this? Or maybe just a BoF small session for this?

A couple ideas, one that's shameless

chellman's picture

I'm planning to give a talk that will address some of this:

http://2011.drupalcampla.com/sessions/your-first-module-mostly-painless-...

I daresay it's almost exactly what you want. At least, it sounds from what you're saying like what I'm going for. There's also (not listed yet, but it should be coming) Kevin and Oliver's "Why Hooks?" talk that gives an overview of what hooks are and how to start using them.

Already Signed Up

mike.roberts's picture

Ha, yeah I've already signed up for that one, I'm excited to learn more about building modules. I'm currently in the process of building out a module, but getting slightly lost as I do not know all that is available to me within Drupal and even in PHP itself (still a semi-beginner). I think between your module session and Kevin and Oliver's "Why Hooks," one could get a pretty decent overview on functions within Drupal, but if someone was still willing to put on the other session I suggested, I'd go to all three and wouldn't complain :)

ladrupal.org discussion and code sprint

christefano's picture

Who'd be interested in a code sprint at the camp for the ladrupal.org website? We talked about the site at the organizers' meetup today and the general agreement was that it needs some major love.

Please discuss at http://groups.drupal.org/node/165374

I'd be. Especially if I get

wizonesolutions's picture

I'd be. Especially if I get to try doing some Meetup integration stuff :D

WizOne Solutions - https://wizone.solutions - Drupal module development, theme implementation, and more
FillPDF Service - https://fillpdf.io - Hosted solution for FillPDF

Was going to submit my

Techivist's picture

Was going to submit my SimpleTest presentation & how it's integrated into D7 & how Test-Driven Development (TDD) is really the way to go etc etc etc. However, I haven't had a chance to practice it at any of the meetups recently (been moving & July was hellish for me) & also cuz I don't have my laptop back from HP (tho I noticed there's an option to borrow a laptop in the session submission process, I'd rather not depend on that in case it isn't available). Not sure what folks here think about this presentation's usefulness but I hardly ever see QA/testing presentations at DrupalCamps, sadly.

However, I did make a submission for something I've been talking about for over a year & which I decided to finally do something about: Drupal in Spanish (bilingual user groups/resources for DUGs/areas that have a high percentage of non-English speakers). I'd like to hear about what some of the DrupalCamp/Con vets think about this as it's a topic that also sees little coverage from what I've seen/read: http://2011.drupalcampla.com/sessions/drupal-spanish.

Your comments & thoughts would be greatly appreciated as it's something new so we'd be doing some trailblazing here. ;)
Thx in advance folks!

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

If you'd like, I have a Hackintosh netbook

christefano's picture

If you'd like, I have a Hackintosh netbook at Droplabs that you can borrow.

I'll be at your session and would love to offer any assistance I can. I remember people applauded during the opening announcements at last year's camp when they heard about ladrupal.org being in both Spanish and English. It's been on my mind ever since.

There's already a discussion about an ladrupal.org code sprint at http://groups.drupal.org/node/165374 so please post any ideas about ladrupal.org there. That said, I don't see why there shouldn't be a few Spanish-language pages on the http://groups.drupal.org/la site, too.

Thanks Christo! You always

Techivist's picture

Thanks Christo! You always come thru in the clutch! :D

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu