DrupalCampNYC8

Description
In this presentation I will dissect a moderately complex Drupal module from beginning to end. I will discuss not only what hooks and functions are used but also the design considerations behind them. I will also talk about basic through intermediate functions and hooks that you are almost necessarily going to need for building modules, as well as a few that will just make your life easier!

Drupal's Panels module allows site builders to create sophisticated landing pages with custom layouts without writing a line of code.

In this session, Panels aficionados Ezra Gildesgame and Jen Lampton will walk through creating landing pages and taking advantage of Panels' more advanced features, like selection rules and context, to create custom landing pages that are specific to a taxonomy term or node type. Content panes allow users to customize the content in a landing page without having full administrative access.

As web site developers, you will find yourself managing more and more web-severs as time goes on. Eventually, managing one server at a time becomes tedious and leaves room for error. Puppet and Chef are open-source configuration management tools that will allow you to configure your server programmatically and help keep your sysadmin time to a minimal.

Agenda:

• When should you consider using an configuration management tool?
• An overview of how they work
• Puppet overview including setup and sample config files.

I will give a brief intro on what monitoring is and why anyone would want to use it, followed by a talk on monitoring.

In particular, I will present how to setup Icinga, which is a fork of Nagios with a slicker interface. I will cover using the Drupal Nagios module, but mostly be about monitoring the health of the server itself. It will therefore be more focused around system admin tasks.

Agenda :

• A brief intro on what monitoring is and why anyone would want to use it.
• Installing Nagios
  ** Compiling from source
  ** Ubuntu package
• Configuring it

Designing web pages as static images is usually a time-consuming exercise and produces a lie we tell ourselves and our clients. We're not designing pictures of websites, so why ask clients to sign off on one? Web work is dynamic, and needs to be seen and evaluated as early and often as possible in many browsers.

About the speaker

Brian Gupta has 14+ years experience in the IT space in a variety of roles, including: network engineering, system administration, storage administration, High availability deployments, IT management. Currently Brian is passionate about open source projects and mobile technology. (Especially where the two meet: e.g. Android)

Brian founded Brandorr Group LLC, an operations consulting company that is also an Amazon Web Services partner: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/solution-providers/brandorr/

Drupal demos (25 mins)

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Keep hearing about "the cloud" and not sure how to get there? This talk will help you decide when it's time to start reaching for the cloud, and how you can get there.

Agenda:

• Easy pre-cloud optimizations to help speed up your site.
• Need the cloud? What is your server architecture going to look like?
• What software can you use to build and scale? GlusterFS, memcache, nginx, varnish, boost, puppet, chef.
• Speed tuning. Using xhprof to see where your CPU time is spent.
• Seeing results. Using jmeter to benchmark anonymous and authenticated user response time.

** UPDATE: I will be unable to attend DrupalCampNYC 8, but will gladly share my slides and presentation notes if anyone else wishes to present this session. **

** NOTE: This is the same session I did at Drupaldelphia and DrupalCamp Colorado. **

There are ways to organize a page before it gets rendered to the screen. The purpose of this presentation is to show what Drupal does out of the box (blocks/regions) and then show 2 alternatives that provide more flexibility (context & panels). We will identify the strengths and weaknesses of each and provide examples for situations where one is more suited than the other.

So I have this thing called Drupal installed... now what? How do I post to my blog? I'm not a PHP/HTML/CSS guru (yet), I just want to learn how to use this contraption. What are blocks anyway and what am I supposed to do with them?