Proposed Sessions

Drupal Strategies for Nonprofits

juaneclark — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 20:17:51 +0000

This session has been declined by the session moderation team.

Nonprofit adoption of Drupal is now common. But too many nonprofit organizations are reinventing the wheel in Drupal. I’ll talk about some common strategies for using Drupal within nonprofits based on our experience with a wide variety of international, national, and local organizations, including the United Nations, the International Center for Transitional Justice, the Center for Investigative Reporting, U.S. Agency for International Development, the International Center for Journalism, and more.

Much of this experience has been distilled into OpenAid, the Drupal distribution for program-focused websites for NGOs and small nonprofits. We’ll look at OpenAid’s features and discuss some strategies for leveraging distributions for multifaceted organizations.

Schedule info

Status:

Declined

Session Info

Speaker(s):

juaneclark

Track:

Business & Strategy

Experience level:

Beginner

Space Settlement with Drupal 7

mossy2100 — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:51:49 +0000

moonmars.com is a social network for the space community built with Drupal 7. It features user profiles, channels (like a facebook wall or twitter feed), groups, events, projects and more.

The goal is to integrate the social network with a virtual environment built using OpenSim and HTML5. It will be similar to Second Life, except scientifically realistic. The virtual environment will contain a model of the Solar System, with realistic topography and colour for the Moon and Mars, giving people the experience of exploring these worlds through their browser.

The presentation shows how the site has been built so far, and how I plan to use Drupal with VR.

Schedule info

Status:

Unprocessed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

mossy2100

Track:

Case Studies

Experience level:

Advanced

Protecting Australia's Biosecurity with Drupal

mossy2100 — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 01:04:20 +0000

The Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), in collaboration with the Australian Centre of Excellence in Risk Analysis (ACERA), has been developing a new biosecurity intelligence system using Drupal. Using a list of key words and phrases, the software crawls the interweb (including twitter, google and other sources) for news of diseases in plants, fish, birds and other animals, extracts geographical and other information from found articles, automatically adds meaningful taxonomy, and collects and presents all valid articles as lists or as markers on a Google map. Cluster analysis is performed by the software to detect emerging trends. Articles from sources found to be reliable are automatically published. The article detection algorithm improves over time as information from verified reports is fed back into the system, i.e. machine learning.

A community of biosecurity experts is automatically notified about diseases and emerging trends. The software functions as a worldwide early-warning detection mechanism for non-human diseases across a range of interconnected ecosystems. In this way, the government, and ultimately anyone, can be fore-warned about plant and animal disease outbreaks and take appropriate measures sooner.

This is a very interesting project that combines Drupal with AI, science, spidering and crowd-sourcing. It began as a collection of three Drupal 6 sites, but is being (and by the time of the conference, will be) developed into a single Drupal 7 multisite.

aquatichealth.net
planthealth.org
animalhealth.org

Schedule info

Status:

Unprocessed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

mossy2100

Track:

Case Studies

Introduction to Nginx, Varnish & FPM

Josh Waihi — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 01:28:58 +0000

Every wonder if there was a world beyond LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)? There is! This session will introduce three somewhat new technologies that are being used with Drupal very successfully.

Nginx - a lightning fast webserver. Well matured, Nginx offers great performance and reliability. More commonly used as a web proxy, it can do far more as an alternative to Apache.

Varnish - Similar characteristics to Nginx, Varnish is a dedicated cache proxy. Putting this technology in front of your website can improve performance significantly! I'll be providing an overview of varnish and its great features that will make it hard to exclude in your next Drupal tech stack.

FPM - while still considered "experimental", PHP FastCGI Process Manager is PHP's first offical FastCGI manager. With the absence of apache2 and modphp in your technology stack, this piece of tech is the recommended approach of connecting Drupal to Nginx.

Find out how all these systems work in with each other and Drupal and why they are considerable alternative to the beloved LAMP stack.

Schedule info

Status:

Unprocessed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

Josh Waihi

Track:

Coding & Development

Experience level:

Beginner

Module-a-minute

realityloop — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 23:56:38 +0000

With over 17,000 contributed modules on Drupal.org, how do you find the diamonds in the rough?

You have your favourites, just as others have theirs.

In this interactive exploration session everyone will be invited to share a module with the audience and tell us why we should be using it.

One minute, one module.

Schedule info

Status:

Unprocessed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

realityloop

Deciphered

Track:

Sitebuilding

Experience level:

Beginner

Configuration management in Drupal 8

beejeebus — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:05:48 +0000

Drupal 8 has a shiny new file-based configuration management system via the Configuration Management Initiative (CMI).

The new configuration system provides a much improved API, and import / export functionality built right in to Drupal core.

In this presentation I'll cover:

Why CMI - what made us do this?
How - I'll walk you through the overall design
What - we'll dive in to some CMI files and the basic API
Demo - because what could possibly go wrong?
Questions - you bring them, I'll try to answer them

This talk is aimed primarily at developers and site builders who have grappled with Drupal and deployment. I'll assume a good understanding of Drupal concepts and give a fairly technical overview of the new system.

Schedule info

Status:

Unprocessed

Time slot:

Friday, February 8 - 10:45am-11:45am

Session Info

Speaker(s):

beejeebus

Track:

Coding & Development

Experience level:

Advanced

Building awesome search pages with Apache Solr, SearchAPI and FacetAPI

larowlan — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 02:27:22 +0000

Search API lets you build a Apache Solr powered searches just like building a view.

Build and theme your search results to provide a superior search experience and add Facet API for extra polish.

This session will cover working with the Search API and Facet API from a site-builders' perspective.

The session will feature configuration towards building a real-world search example, complete with some autocomplete goodness.

Time permitting we might even look at the Search API and Facet API API's (that's a lot of API's) to show how you can easily add your own features and functionality with a minimal amount of code.

About the presenter
Lee Rowlands is one of Australia's most experienced Drupal developers, is the maintainer of the core forum module and is a provisional member of the Drupal Security Team.

Schedule info

Status:

Unprocessed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

larowlan

Track:

Sitebuilding

Experience level:

Intermediate

Introduction to Symfony2

lsmith77 — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:11:39 +0000

Drupal 8 will use a considerable chunk of Symfony2 components. One of the side benefits of this is that Drupal 8 will also make integration with Symfony2 applications very easy. This presentation will give a hands on introduction to how to develop Symfony2 applications and how to integrate them with Drupal 8. As part of the talk we will walk through real code rather than slides. The audience can therefore actively influence the focus of the talk by asking questions.

Schedule info

Status:

Unprocessed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

lsmith77

Track:

Coding & Development

Experience level:

Intermediate

fatal error allowed memory size of bytes exhausted : Memory in PHP

jpauli — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:29:48 +0000

Every developer has already experienced the "fatal error allowed memory size of bytes exhausted..." error message in PHP. Haven't you ?

As an internal guy, I'll try to explain it by first refreshing your mind about what memory is. Then we'll dive slowly into PHP source code to reach the component that deals with PHP memory : Zend Memory Manager.
It will then help us answer questions such as "How does PHP allocates memory ?" "How can I control PHP's memory consumption ?" and more important : "How can I reduce PHP's memory footprint ?"

For practical use case, we'll turn around PHP variables and how they work, we'll explain very important rules such as copy on write or reference counting as well as garbage collection.
The goal is here to make tahe developer's everyday life easier by making him understand what happens when he creates variables, loops etc... from a memory point of view inside PHP.

Schedule info

Status:

Unprocessed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

jpauli

Track:

Coding & Development

Experience level:

Intermediate

No module for that? No problem!

berenddeboer — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 21:18:39 +0000

What if there is no module for that? Stuck? This session by New Zealand's first Drupal user will demonstrate how to extend Drupal using its API, its hooks, and the hooks offered by third party modules. Need a custom webform field? We'll built one. Need a custom content type field? How can views access my custom tables? The rules module has become a very popular part of Drupal 7 sites, but what if you need a custom event, condition and actions? And a popup form would be nice, how would you do that?

This session is intended for PHP developers who have heard that Drupal is extensible, but wonder how the API and all these hooks actually work, and how complex it would be to extend Drupal beyond using contrib modules. You'll leave this session with fresh inspiration on how to extend Drupal in your current or next project. All examples are taken from actual websites built by the speaker and will be built live.

Modules which will be discussed: webform, views, rules, ctools.

Schedule info

Status:

Unprocessed

Session Info

Speaker(s):

berenddeboer

Track:

Coding & Development

Experience level:

Intermediate