It’s about that time again! Although it’s six months away DrupalCon Denver is ramping up, and session submissions are ready to be voted on by the wonderful Drupal community members. There are almost 600 submissions this year covering every aspect of design, development, mobile, and business strategy. Read on for the informational feasts prepared by the Web Chefs for Denver 2012:
Mobile
Big Websites for Small Screens: ICANN.org Case Study
Zach Meyer (zachattack), Todd Nienkerk, Chris Ruppel (rupl)
ICANN is the organization responsible for coordinating global use of the domain name system (DNS). Due to the massive scale of their operations they serve users of all types, from feature phone users in Africa to iPad users in LA. This session will take you through Four Kitchens’ process of redesigning ICANN.org from static HTML to a responsive Drupal 7 website.
Lean, Mean, Responsive Machines
Chris Ruppel (rupl)
You’ve heard about responsive, mobile-first websites, and have probably built a few at this point. Mobile users have a short attention span, and they stay happy when sites load FAST. Heavy files, extra assets, and other inefficiencies can cause page loads to drag. Come to this session and learn how to keep your mobile users active without sacrificing the richness that desktop users expect.
Why you don’t need a responsive framework for mobile
Zach Meyer (zachattack)
Frameworks can help you rapidly prototype websites in mobile but they are also a crutch. To make a website responsive or have a fluid layout, flexible images and videos you don’t need a framework and sometimes it can be faster to produce without if you know what you are aiming for. Trying to understand what all the features are in a framework and which ones you really need to use for your project can be hard. Is the framework really meeting your needs or is it a swiss-army knife when all you need is a toothpick?
Wireframing for Every Screen
Aaron Stanush
In this session, we will explore the how the mobile era is changing the previously straightforward task of wireframing a website. When designers only have one instance of website (desktop) to wireframe, the layout is uniform. The header, content area, sidebar, and footer all remain static. But if you are designing a responsive website — one whose look and feel adapts depending whether you’re using a phone, laptop, or tablet — then these elements and especially the layout begin to diverge.
Coding and Development
Automated Performance Testing
Rob Ristroph (rgristroph)
Continuous Integration has become a standard part of the DevOps of many teams, and one component of that is usually automated testing of the code at a “stage” or “testing” point before it is released. Less common is automated performance testing, which is launching a load test at some point in the continuous integration process. While it is more common to monitor performance of the live site, it is rare to test it prior to making changes live.
PHP for NonProgrammers
Diana Dupuis (dianadupuis)
This is a friendly programming introduction for people new to coding. We’ll take a “Physics for Poets” approach to basic PHP concepts like variables, if/else statements, and functions. You’ll write some code, speak some geek, and start down the addictive path of programming logic. There’s also a geek quiz — in case you don’t know your Picards from your Kirks.
Feature Detection and Future-friendly Development
Chris Ruppel (rupl)
In an ever-increasing world of web browsers and mobile devices, how can we possibly keep track of all the front-end functionality on a website? It’s not enough to degrade gracefully; we must be future-friendly. Come to this session to learn about feature detection. It’s the only way to cut through this confusion and maintain a sane developer experience while actually improving user experience.
How Low Can You Go: Reducing Drupal’s Memory Footprint
Rob Ristroph (rgristroph)
Drupal 7 takes more memory per server thread than Drupal 6, reducing the number of threads that can be run on a given server, and raising the minimum requirements for a VPS. This impacts not only bottom-scraping hosting, but also “real” infrastructures, where process size is sometimes viewed as a necessary evil solved by buying RAM. Rob will offer comparisons of D6 versus D7 memory usage in various configurations, and a few simple attempts to reduce it, and benchmark results.
Zero-Downtime Releases For Big Websites: ICANN.org Case Study
Mark Theunissen
Big websites need big uptime. Do you need to keep a site up, even during code rollout and big database schema changes? If you’ve got the infrastructure, we have the method for you. We can show you techniques that maximize uptime with minimum disruption to your site. In addition, we will show how testing your switchover process regularly prepares you for real catastrophic events that may affect your datacenter.
A tale of two scrums: Agile from a developers perspective
Michal Minecki (mirzu)
Scrum and Agile are buzzwords that you seemingly can’t get away from. As a developer, if you haven’t run into them one way or another, you will. After working on two large scrum projects — SDG&E’s new website and The Economist — Mike has seen the good, the great, the bad, and the ugly. In this panel members of both teams will discuss their experiences and review what they loved, and what they hated. We’ll attempt to separate the fact from the sales pitch, the process from the ritual, and give you a view from the trenches.
Debugging Techniques for Drupal and LAMP
Rob Ristroph (rgristroph)
A general but scientific approach to debugging Drupal problems will be presented, followed by an overview of a variety of tools such as the Devel suite, krumo, xdebug, client side debugging such as Firebug and LiveHTTPHeaders.
DevOps in a multi-server environment
Elliott Foster (elliotttf)
Want to learn how to take the hassle out of managing a large Drupal deployment and an even bigger development team? Want to know how we do it at Four Kitchens? We’ll cover tools and best practices for setting up an infrastructure to manage large Drupal sites in multi-server environments.
Migrating Big, Multilingual Websites From Static HTML: ICANN.org Case Study
Mark Theunissen
Do you need to move a huge amount of inconsistent, legacy HTML files and associated documents into Drupal? Is the content in 14 different languages? We’ve done it, and we can show you how recent improvements to the fantastic Migrate module can process your old site with ease. This technique is not only useful for Migrations, but also for moving any static content into Drupal at any stage of a site’s lifetime.
Simple DevOps Using Jenkins
Rob Ristroph (rgristroph)
This presentation will cover a simple setup of a Jenkins (it can even run on your laptop), and a set of scripts will be demonstrated that enable a solid workflow. This will done live as much as possible; slides and screenshots will be a fallback. Electronic copy of the scripts and other files will be provided, so that attendees can modify and use them.
Poor Man’s Devops, Small Scale Continuous Integration
Michal Minecki (mirzu)
In this session we’ll show you how you can use some of the same tools we use to deploy to 30 servers to more reliably deploy your next little project. We’ll go over the high level ideas that make Continuous Integration work in big software development projects and see how these practices and tools scale down to small projects.
Nonprofit, Government & Education
Drupal Can Save Higher Ed Web Publishing
Dave Diers (thebruce)
Higher Education web publishing has big challenges: a diversity of technical needs and expertise; decentralized power and decision-making structures that exist in cooperation with (and sometimes in opposition to) governance committees; complicated institutionalized approval chains; regulatory and privacy issues; intellectual property concerns; and, increasingly, funding issues that impact IT staffing and support. In this session we’ll share experiences with Drupal at several large world-class educational institutions and dive into the benefits of multi-site Drupal web publishing for .edu organizations.
Drupal community
Mad Skillz: Be the Best in the World
Diana Dupuis (dianadupuis)
Are you a developer (themer, designer, site builder, sys admin) who wants to work on bigger, more complicated projects? Do you want to send your resume to top Drupal shops and get hired? Do you want to assess and approve your skills? If so, come to this session and take the Mad Skillz Quiz. You’ll also find out what top Drupal shops and in-house Drupal team leaders say are the “Most Important Skillz” their best developers possess. The answers will surprise you!
Business and strategy
Building a Dynamic Team
Diana Dupuis (dianadupuis)
A Drupal website is as effective, performant, and reliable as the team who builds it. Whether you need one developer or twenty, finding the right people is essential to a site’s success. What are the traits and skills to look for when hiring a Drupal developer? What can we learn from Drupal shops with years of experience building successful, and sometimes unsuccessful, Drupal development teams?
No RFPs! Why requests for proposal are bad for business (and how we can stop them)
Todd Nienkerk
In this panel, some of the world’s top Drupal business development professionals will speak to the RFP process and other options. The strengths and weaknesses of RFPs will be identified, and creative alternatives will be discussed. If you are writing an RFP, this is your wake-up call. If you are bidding, come learn about your options.
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