Intermediate

The secret is out – Drupal has become the ‘go-to’ open source software for the publication and management of website content. By pairing Drupal with cloud technologies there is a whole new world of user benefits well beyond scale and performance.

In this session, Bret Piatt, director, technical alliances at Rackspace Hosting will discuss how to best take advantage of cloud technologies with Drupal sites. The panel presentation will address:

• Leveraging the cloud ecosystem for managing configuration, code, and backups
• How to scale Drupal clusters by integrating with cloud APIs

How to include the best CMS, the best eCommerce software, the best LMS, etc. on your website - and theme them all consistently, at once, through a single effort and common tool, and by using only HTML and CSS.

Description

The slides are available here: http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfmz85hd_297fjkj42f3

This talk will be co-presented by Logan Smyth and Alex Dergachev of Evolving Web.

Ever since we started using Apache Solr for our projects, we've been looking into ways of making search more intuitive and usable. The Apache Solr module provides Drupal with faceted search functionality. With large sets of data and lots of search filters, faceted search is a user interface challenge. It also opens up a world of possibilities for UI innovation.

Duration

1 hour

Brief Description

A general overview of the apachesolr module from a development standpoint. We will expand on the standard functionality to see how to create new facet types and add extra into into the search index. We'll then go a bit farther to see how you can create custom search pages and integrate search more tightly with your site. The idea and methods for creating hierarchies of facets will also be covered along with a demo illustrating some of the behavior described.

Agenda

• Creating custom facet types

Duration: 1 hour or less

Brief description:
Drupal 7!!! Drupal 7!!! Drupal 7 is around the corner and we all have to update our modules... again. really? Yup it's true the API has changed and it is for the better. In this session we'll look at the changes to the Drupal 7 API and how you can prepare your modules for the impending upgrade.

Agenda

• Changes to existing hooks
• Getting your hooks ready
• New hooks
• Wait!?! What's a hook?

About the Presenter:

Duration: 1 hour or less

Brief description:
Drupal 7 is right around the corner and you need to be prepared. In this session we'll take a look at the new features of Drupal 7 and how that are going to make your life easier. We will walk through the new installation process and explore Drupal 7 from a newcomer's perspective but also compare and contrast it with Drupal 6 and the former contributed module that made it into core.

Agenda

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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.

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.

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.