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DrupalCon 2009 Recap

| drupal

Quick notes on sessions I attended

Building APIs that Rock
By: Jeff Eaton
Links: Slides, Video
Talked about the importance of making it easier for other modules to use your code (not just users through the Web interface); showed an example of using hooks for ultimate flexibility. Key takeaway: Try building your module as an API, then layer a user interface on top of it (ex: Views). Also, puppets!

Keynote: The State of Drupal
By: Dries Buytaert
Links:  Video , Text Outline
Drupal community, code growing exponentially. Next steps: Connecting data

Totally Rocking Your Development Environment
By:  Sacha Chua
Links:  Video, Installation Profile
I had a lot of fun learning from people’s tips, too!

Handling Asynchronous Data with Drupal
By: Josh Koenig
Links:  Video, PDF Presentation
Key takeaway: Use Drupal.behaviors to attach contextualized Javascript code. Also, you can write data to files in order to make polling more efficient.

Advanced Theming Techniques
By: Trevor Twining
Links: Video, Slideshow
Most of the presentation was about how to define subthemes and extend something like Zen.

Business Analytics with Views
By: Irakli Nadareishvili
Links: Video, Slideshow
Ooh, pretty charts. Key takeaway: look into charts and views_charts modules for integration with Google Charts and other charting engines

Boosting Our Raw Capacity to Provide Drupal Training
By: Sean Effel
Links: Training Models, Notes from Audience
See my notes at https://sachachua.com/blog/2009/03/05/drupalcon-day-1-notes-and-links-from-march-4-2009/ . Key takeaway: Core training has lots of common ground, but then need to customize training for skill level / needs; group clinics/workshops handy

Building Infrastructure You Can Scale, Monitor and Maintain
By: David Strauss
Links: Video
Great slide breaking down flow of traffic to rough percentages. Key point: adding more components is easy (content delivery network, reverse proxy, etc.), but adding more than one component (ex: multiple database servers) is harder. Coherency issues, replication issues, etc. Try to minimize dynamic pages.

When Efficiency and Manageability Matter, Drupal at Scale,
By: Scott Mattoon
Links: Slideshow, Video
Left this session after a short while, as it seemed to be mostly about Sun tools.

Powering Collaboration in a Distributed Enterprise

By: Dan Karran
Links: Video

Interesting demo of a featureful Drupal site used on the intranet. Check out their auto-saved drafts.

Drupal Patterns: Managing and Automating Site Configurations
By: Chris Bryant
Links: Slideshow, Video
Patterns allow you to bring in groups of functionality. Interesting: can publish and share patterns. No support for change management yet.

Staging and Deployment – A Panel Discussion
By: Greg Dunlap
Links: Video
Deploy and db_scripts look interesting. Also, I promised to upload my .install file snippets…

Why I Hate Drupal
By: James Walker
Links: Video
Good stuff. Interesting contrast to kumbaya keynote: contrast of Drupal’s growth with Sharepoint, WordPress, and Joomla.

Advanced Drupal Security
By: Neil Drumm
Links: Video
Went through key parts of Drupal security handbook. My takeaway: use session_save_session(FALSE); when changing global $user;

Selling Drupal Services
By: Neil Giarratana
Links: Video, Slideshow
Lots of tips about the business side of it. Key takeaway: RFP process is inefficient; try partnering up with agencies instead, so you can build on relationships

Project Management For Fun and Profit
By: Crystal Williams
Links: Video
Not much new here if you’ve managed or worked on projects before

How do Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress Stack Up?
By: Amy Stephen
Links: Video
Didn’t go into an in-depth technical comparison / benchmarking

Token: The Little API That Could
By: Greg Knaddison
Links: Video
Walked through how Token module works, how to implement your own tokens

Sessions I wish I also attended

JQuery, Dmitri Gaskin Links: Video
Drupal and the Geospatial Web, Jeff Miccolis Links: Video, Notes from Audience
Optimizing your LAMP stack for Drupal, Eric Mandel Links: None
Learning jQuery UI, Richard Worth Links: Video
SEO & Drupal: Search Engine Optimization Tips, Tricks and Best Practices, Gregory Heller Links: PDF Slideshow, Video
Building advanced social networks at a large US University, Kyle Mathews Links: Slideshow, Video
Building a Frankenstein monster and how to maintain it, mortendk Links: Video
Front End Performance – Make Your Website Lightning Fast, Konstantin Käfer Links: Video
Communicating Data Online: Data Visualizations and Open Data, Eric Gundersen Links: Video
Project Flow and Tracker: From business objects and user stories to test-driven Drupal based website application, Victor Kane Links: PDF within page
Scaling Drupal using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Frank Febrarro Links: Video , Slideshow
Drupal Process Management, Drew Gorton Links: Video
The Business of Open Source, Liza Kindred Links: Video
Quality Assurance and the Drupal Development Process, Fen Labalme Links: Video, Slideshow
Inside Drupal Caching: From Static Variables to Memcache, John VanDyk Links: Video

Note: Thanks to Ana Macatiag for all these handy links! =)

IRC backchannel log for Totally Rocking Your Development Environment, DrupalCon 2009

| drupal

IRC chat, thanks to Stephane Corlosquet

This was for my Totally Rocking Your Drupal Development Environment talk at DrupalCon 2009. =)

bryankennedy my favorite development environment requirement = electricity
bryankennedy glad i got near the power strips
jrglasgow Be Lazy!
lyricnz Such infectious enthuiasm
jrglasgow http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris
danblah hah nice jrglasgow
jackaponte is now known as palante_jack.
jrglasgow http://api.drupal.org
jrglasgow What? I only maintain 5 or 10 modules myself!
danblah lol, she has to much time on her hands!
jrglasgow Hey, I’v read about all the modules, at one point in time, then there just got to be too many.
danblah so true nothing worst is when i start putting a module together then find that it was already done a few hours in
tcconway drupalmodules.com rocks
edeloso biggest problem is sorting out which is the most current and well developed for the specific domain
jrglasgow danblah: I’ve done that as well
Morbus what’s going on in the trellon room?
alaken Going through all 4000+ modules is being lazy???
lladnar1_ I guess you have to work hard to be lazy
scor__ Morbus: Totally Rocking Your Development Environment
scor__ http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/totally-rocking-your-development-environment
bryankennedy It’s lazier than writing a module that’s already been developed.
jrglasgow Morbus: we are discussing being lazy, the first of the 3 virtues of a programmer
lladnar1_ is now known as lladnar1.
scor__ bashing windows and IE
Morbus thanks.
jrglasgow scor__: that’s exactly why I can this week
jrglasgow ^^ came
vasi For the firefox profile manager on Mac OS X, here’s my way to do it: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2008/08/shortcut_to_lau.html#comment-2622794
Lane did she use some term to describe “relentless improvement”? “kaisa” or something?
Lane or did I just mishear?
vasi kaizen i think
scor__ vasi: thanks for sharing your tips – keep it coming!
vasi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
tcconway http://getfirebug.com/
Lane vasi: thanks!
vasi np
vasi Safari and Chrome have “private mode”, that also lets you log in as two drupal users in one browser
vasi (Firefox 3.1 should have that too)
Lane tamper data sounds fun just in general, nevermind for development work
jrglasgow When you hate clicking on things, TAB is your best friend
jrglasgow Lane: Tamper Data is fun, especially when writing screen scraping scripts.
tcconway any good iMacros tool for the Mac?
vasi tcconway: i don’t think there’s anything free
tcconway figures….
danblah dude thats crazy
danblah this ext sounds sick
vasi wow, Drupal for firebug shall be my new god
vasi worships
danblah https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8370
tcconway I’m in LOVE http://drupal.org/project/drupalforfirebug
japerry omg bouncy bouncty!
bryankennedy isn’t selenium kinda like imacros?
bryankennedy http://seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/
danblah lol
bryankennedy you can use that on a mac
tcconway OW – PAIN
lladnar1 Drupal for firebug rocks!
tcconway amazing!
tcconway I can’t live without AdminMenu
japerry tcconway: same here.
danblah admin menu ftw
jrglasgow Instead of Admin Menu I use Simplemenu, SimpleMenu has the full Navigation Menu, not just the Admin menu http://drupal.org/project/simplemenu
tcconway Sacha is adorable!
tcconway (couldn’t resist)
bryankennedy Login with email should be in core.
jrglasgow bryankennedy: I agree, let’s make a push to get it there
vasi any recommended debugger UI?
jrglasgow tcconway: I agree
vasi i’m using Komodo
vasi but it’s non-idael
vasi *ideal
sceo XDebug = like Krumo?
vasi (i find Eclipse’s debugger painful)
japerry didn’t emacs die?
alaken I’m using freeware Komodo edit
sceo +1 for Komodo Edit
vasi (and don’t even get me started on vi)
japerry ducks
bryankennedy jrglasgow – yeah, i knew I should have had a commitment to do some code before I suggested
vasi Does the freeware Komodo have debug?
jrglasgow +1 Komodo Edit
bryankennedy xdebug is more than krumo
jrglasgow vasi: no
vasi sceo: no, not at all like krumo
bryankennedy you can use krumo with xdebug
vasi it lets you actually step through lines of code
danblah w00t! shooting
vasi as they execute
jrglasgow +1 Git
alaken Komodo edit – MUCH better with the Komodo Source Tree add-in
Moonshine_ can be handy for xdebug also… https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3960
tcconway what? You have to check things in?!?!
bryankennedy brining new drupal developers into SVN or CVS is a big learning hump….so useful though
sceo puts xdebug on the list
tcconway makes a note to checkin.
edeloso I agree with the whole source tree… makes sure that version of core code is tied with the site…. upgrading a multisite hosting can be a nightmare
tcconway works really well for us too.
bryankennedy whole tree in svn is great, especially b/c most websites have SOME non-drupal pages or info in them somewhere
sceo source code control + drupal — so many approaches. we battled this for hours and hours at my company… we don’t really still have a good method
tcconway wait – you can have subdirectories in /sites/all/modules?
vasi sceo: yeah, it’s hard
vasi tcconway: yup
bryankennedy we use sites/all/modules/dev and then svn ignore on trunk for dev modules
tcconway wow.
vasi bryankennedy: doesn’t that make your dev env hard to migrate?
openprivacy check out drubuntu’s layout http://groups.drupal.org/node/6270
tcconway bryankennedy: brilliant!
bryankennedy vasi: nah, you just ignore it on trunk, not on the branches
vasi bryankennedy: nice
Lane so what’s a good VCS for a single-person shop with no VCS experience or even awareness?
bryankennedy you have to do some manual moving around when you branch
Lane well, some awareness.
tcconway Lane: I’ve had good success with VisualSVN
vasi Lane: i’d start with SVN
Moonshine_ likes subversion as it’s time tested, lots of tools and not CVS
nick_vh Finally got some connection, yeah!
roginald nice
vasi but git is nice, too….it just breaks your brain
bryankennedy and svn has a free book
bryankennedy http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
roginald i started using svn for local with 0 knowledge and it seems fine
bryankennedy You can start using svn in a day, it’ll take a year to learn really well.
nick_vh we use unfuddle for our repository and issue tickets. Really nice tool
openprivacy svn >> cvs
bryankennedy But it’s easy to weather mistakes with SVN
bryankennedy was kicked from the chat room by dcdc. (flood)
tcconway svn ftw
Lane thanks all
scor__ bryankennedy: what happened?
Lane that’s very helpful
Moonshine_ Lane: what os for dev?
bryankennedy posted too much
bryankennedy ooops
openprivacy ubuntu
Lane linux (CentOS 5) and Leopard
bryankennedy Sound like we could have an entire session on version control strategies for Drupal.
scor__ bryankennedy: submit a BoF!
sceo bryankennedy +1 yes and I would definitely go
bryankennedy BoF?
lladnar1 I still struggle with keeping database changes in svn
edeloso anyone had luck with versioning and changes to the database for modules that use a content type built with CCK?
lladnar1 Staging and deployment… I’ll be there
Moonshine_ Lane: In Leopard I use Subversion that’s built right into Komodo and SCPlugin for the finder http://scplugin.tigris.org/
Lane Moonshine_: Thanks.
bryankennedy lladnar1: yeah totally
alaken can anyone recommend a how-to for this branch mergins stuff
lladnar1 Anyone have a good answer for database structures and confit settings?
roginald for a recap of last year’s dev/stage/build talk there is a video of the session here: http://www.archive.org/details/DrupalconBoston2008-BestPracticesInDevelopmentEnvironmentsStaging
bryankennedy lladnar1: this one helped me at one time – http://blog.daemon.com.au/go/blog-post/merging-with-subversion-and-eclipse
lyricnz what’s the link to Sacha’s pages again?
lyricnz notes for this session, that is
vasi i would LOVE a VCS BoF
vasi btw, i recommend that people learn how to use the command-line for version control….
bryankennedy make sure to svnignore your sites/default dir so you don’t put your DB pass in your version control
msonnabaum yay bash
openprivacy we rename settings.php to settings.inc and commit that to the SVN repos; then create a 2 line settings.php that includes settings.inc and sets the $db_url
openprivacy you can also create any other local overrides into the settings.php file
sceo http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/node/3974
sceo http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/node/3810
sceo ^^ any of those apply?
vasi openprivacy: yeah, we do that too
vasi we call it ‘settings-private.php’
vasi and then we have tools that check if there’s a settings-private.php nearby, and will read it to autodetect the db/user/password
vasi makes dump/restore much easier
openprivacy since we do multisites for every project (Dev/QA/Live) I wrote a pushdb script that moves databases between them, changing all the appropriate values – doing dumps of the from and to DBs first
tcconway what’s the tag?
openprivacy it parses settings.php for the db_url
tcconway vimpirator
tcconway http://vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator
nick_vh aegir
vasi AEGIR
vasi http://conkeror.org/
tcconway http://groups.drupal.org/aegir-hosting-system
nick_vh real nice tool for lot’s of sites
tcconway geben
vasi http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_vhost_alias.html#virtualdocumentroot
openprivacy I haven’t got geben working yet
tcconway what’s her blog url?
vasi we just have VirtualDocumentRoot /var/shared/sites/%-3/site/
nick_vh unfuddle
vasi and then you checkout a site inside /var/shared/sites/
nick_vh www.unfuddle.com
nick_vh really really good!
lyricnz has script to upgrade modules between versions, when module is under SVN control – which determines local patches, makes upgrade, reapplies patches, does svn add/delete as required. Maybe that’s useful to someone
japerry definitely good!
vasi and it appears as blah.ourdomain.ca
sceo https://sachachua.com/site/ I think
vasi blog url: https://sachachua.com/blog/2009/03/01/25-tips-for-totally-rocking-your-drupal-development-environment-pre-session-notes/
vasi basically with VirtualDocumentRoot, you don’t need vhost
tcconway quote of the session: “Spaces, no tabs. Spaces, no tabs”
vasi entab/detab \o/
openprivacy coder will mark those
lyricnz Sacha ftw
tcconway agreed.
msonnabaum haven’t tried Drush for running update.php, but here’s a kinda ghetto bash script I wrote to run it: http://colonqbang.com/content/automating-updatephp
danblah w00t for ghetto bash cripts
sceo1 is now known as sceo.
ccalnan http://drupal.org/project/install_profile_api for those who want to know about install profile
vasi does anybody use a local DNS?
vasi i’ve been thinking of doing that for staging….so i can see what a site will look like with the final domain
tcconway I *kinda* do…I take advantage of MAMP Pro’s local dnsin’
vasi ah
nick_vh http://krimson.be/en/debugging-drupal-6-using-xdebug
nick_vh another handy url
bryankennedy great session
vasi who’s emailing the log?
scor__ http://openspring.net/tip/script-for-dumping-your-drupal-database-by-reusing-settingsphp
scor__ vasi: I will

Totally Rocking Your Drupal Development Environment

Also: a whole slew of talks and events!

Posted: - Modified: | conference, drupal, event

My session on Totally Rocking Your Development Environment has been accepted for DrupalCon 2009, hooray! Thanks!

This is great! And handy, because I’ve already promised to give an IBM-flavored version of the talk at the first community call for the newly-formed (or -revived, not sure) IBM Drupal community, which means I will have to have it all ready to go by two weeks from now instead of two months.

Two weeks from now is also when I’ll be giving a lecture on Enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management to Dorit Nevo’s MBA class at Schulich.

And I’ve volunteered to help organize or otherwise make these upcoming conferences awesomer: IBM Web 2.0 Summit, DrupalCampTO, Mesh.

And there’s LifeCampTO.

Busy, busy, busy.

Fortunately, talks are so much more fun to prepare when you think of them as learning opportunities. And I’ve volunteered to help conferences out with either things I know how to do well (say hi to people at registration desks, etc.) or that I’m interested in transforming/scaling (abstract submission, voting, schedules) or that I’m interested in learning (selling sponsorship, buying merchandise). And the conferences are a bit further out.

But “slew” is such a good word, because if I’m not careful and if I don’t intentionally slow down as I get into the busy-busy-busy times, then another sense (slew: past tense of slay) may figuratively kick in. That wouldn’t be fun at all.

It’ll all be great fun, though, and I’m sure I’ll learn tons! You’ll hear about all of it here, of course.

So if I’m slow at e-mail, you know why. =)