Session Type

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:

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

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.