Four Kitchens
Insights

A plethora of DrupalCon DC session proposals

2 Min. ReadEvents

Besides sponsoring next year’s DrupalCon Four Kitchens is also offering to share our know-how in the form of five session proposals and a MEGA session series on theming! Oh yes, we have a plethora. Read the rundowns below and if you find one you want to see on the schedule — go vote for it!

Business

Build your own open source business
This session will share the real experiences and hurdles encountered in the first two and half years of starting a Drupal consulting business. It’s aimed to enlighten attendees who are interested in a) building their first business with little or no funding and b) who prefer to embrace open source solutions.

Project Management for Agile/Scrum Development
Project Management is essential to successful projects and successful companies. Learn how the Agile/Scrum method can enhance your current project management skills. Or, learn about Project Management for the first time! This session will cover basic PM skills, organization, communication, and tools to make your life as a project manager run smoothly.

Core

Building infrastructure you can scale, monitor, and maintain
It’s easy to set up a single GNU/Linux server, but there’s no obvious way to take those same skills and build functional clusters. If you want to do that, you need a whole new class of tools. At Four Kitchens, we’ve done the hard work: we maintain an in-office lab to develop and apply cluster-level integration and management techniques to the challenging problems we encounter managing our clients’ infrastructure. We’d like to show you what we’ve learned in our lab and in the field.

Flexible development and deployment with Bazaar
Bazaar represents a departure from the dichotomy of “centralized” versus “distributed” because it directly supports both types of workflows, as well as hybrids. While other distributed version control systems also claim to do this, none support it quite so elegantly (and with such good cross-platform support) as Bazaar. Learn how Four Kitchens uses Bazaar to have unprecedented capability in development and deployment — from our smallest personal projects to our largest enterprise installations.

Design

MEGA SESSION: Theming Drupal from the ground up
This series of sessions will cover the full spectrum of Drupal theming. The first session will cover webdesign basics: HTML, CSS, and three-column layouts. Subsequent sessions will demonstrate how to port a theme to Drupal, aspects of design unique to Drupal, and advanced techniques such as implementing preprocessing functions and overriding theme functions.

Update: Our resident UX expert Shannon Lucas will be lending his expertise to the newly submitted usability session

Usability testing at the University of Baltimore
A report back from the third round of formal usability testing of Drupal core – held at the University of Baltimore, a week before Drupalcon DC. We’ll give an overview of the state of usability in Drupal core, see where improvements have been made, where there’s still work to be done. Building on the lessons learned from previous testing at UB and the University of Minnesota.