Sessions at DrupalCon Denver 2012 in 401-404

Tuesday 20th March 2012

• Beginner Theming

  by David Needham

  Believe it or not, Drupal makes theming easy!

  Drupal provides the themer with a system of overrides that allows you to change literally anything on your site. Themers decide what gets printed to the screen and what doesn't - essentially what lives and dies. For this and some other reasons, themers have ultimate control.

  Don't let it get to your head though. Before you can make Drupal bend to your will, you have to introduce yourself via the .info file. From there, you can control style with the CSS we've all come to love. Want to add in your own divs, regions, classes, etc? That will require copying and tweaking one of Drupal's template files (a super easy process).

  Following this easy pattern, you can get most of the way there without writing PHP. Even if you need to extend the way that breadcrumbs, pagers or other Drupal elements work via the template.php file, you can usually find a friendly companion on Drupal.org who has code you can copy and use without having to fully understand it.

  By the end of the class, you'll be able to create your own themes, sub-themes and rock Drupal's world like you never have before - all while fulfilling the mantra of a themer: "Make it pretty."

  [The techniques you learn in this session will apply to both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, however I will be leading the session in Drupal 7.]

  Intended audience:

  Beginners who want to learn the basics of theming without knowing PHP.

  At 10:45am to 11:45am, Tuesday 20th March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• We the People & WhiteHouse.gov: Citizen Engagement Powered by Drupal

  by Tom

  President Obama issued the Open Government Memo on January 21st, 2009 based on the three core principles that government should be transparent, encourage participation and enable collaboration.

  In October of 2009, WhiteHouse.gov was relaunched, powered by Drupal and open-source technology. In doing so, it leveraged over 100 contributed modules by over 800 public contributors.

  Two years later, The White House launched We the People, enabling the American public to directly petition their President on issues they cared most about. The collaboration and participation enabled by We the People is directly the result the Administration's support of open government. All of this was done using the power of open-source software, Drupal and the greater developer community.

  In this presentation, you'll be given a brief history of WhiteHouse.gov on Drupal, and find out how The White House leveraged open-source technology to reinvent how citizens communicate with their President and his Administration.

  At 1:00pm to 2:00pm, Tuesday 20th March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• Services Inside and Out

  by Kyle Browning and Marc Ingram

  Services modules is the most widely used and robust Drupal module that provides API's for external applications that wish to communicate with Drupal.
  This presentation aims to provide Drupal Developers a deeper understanding of how Services module works, what ways it can be used, and some ways not to use it. Well discuss how you can debug, extend, alter and even create your own services, resources and servers so that you can get anything in Drupal, into an external application.

  Id also love to touch base on Services 4.x which will be our stepping stone branch with an upgrade path to Drupal 8

  At 2:15pm to 3:15pm, Tuesday 20th March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• Designing Fast and Beautiful Maps

  by Alex Barth and eric gundersen

  Alex and Eric from Development Seed will show how to design beautiful custom maps using MapBox's open source tools.

  The session will start with a walk through of how web mapping works. This will include several deep dives into examples to show the art of the possible targeted at both technical and non-technical users. At the halfway point the talk will quickly get hands on and look at how to actually design a custom map in TileMill with users only needing a basic understanding of HTML/CSS. By the end of the session everyone will have seen a slippy, mobile-friendly web map made from scratch and launched on a Drupal site.

  Sample fast maps made with TileMill:

  • http://www.npr.org/censusmap
  • http://horn.wfp.org
  • http://japanearthquakerecovery.com
  • http://data.nai.org.af
  • http://nigeria.mixmarket.org

  See other examples on: http://mapbox.com/showcase

  At 3:45pm to 4:45pm, Tuesday 20th March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• HTML 4 S - While We're Waiting for the Revolution

  by mortendk

  This is the future.
  So where's my html5css3responsiveSemanticalDrupal8 site that's easy to put my design on top of?

  It has been 15 months since Drupal 7 was released. The html5-css3-responsive is the new black & IE6 is dead & IE7 is getting closer to the grave \m/.
  With the mobile browsers hell is coming at us and Drupal 8 is not here yet for several more months - bummer!

  So how can we get the Drupal frontend up to speed with all the html5css3responsive awesomeness?

  DRUPAL FRONTEND LOVE FROM <HEAD> TO <FOOTER>

  This session will be focused around the real-life, nitty gritty dirty frontend solutions & tricks that your mom warned you about & your father told you not to do & developers are afraid to touch cause it might "break".

  This is design implementation done right & NOT the way Drupal thinks it should be. We're gonna kill the Divitis & take on the .class war, fix the CSS overload with a BAT, and look goddamn good on the screen, mobile, iPad & lynx (almost kiddin).

  This is gonna be extremely hands-on from the header to the footer, licking every template & function we can find - making sure we're getting in there where it's actually itching: the markup to design implementation.

  At 5:00pm to 6:00pm, Tuesday 20th March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

Wednesday 21st March 2012

• What's new in the Panels Universe

  by Earl Miles

  A lot is changing in the Drupal world today in the Panels universe. More tools are appearing to make it easier to separate the site builder experience from the content manager experience. The In-Place Editor is getting some much needed improvements. A new thing called Panelizer has been released, and Fieldable Entity Panes are now a possibility. There is even talk of a User Experience redesign!

  At 10:45am to 11:45am, Wednesday 21st March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• Building Beautiful, Dynamic Forms in Drupal 7

  by Chris Shattuck

  Forms aren't just for harvesting information, they're opportunities to build serious karma with your audience and set the right atmosphere on your site. In this session, I talk you through some principles that will help you deliver the warm fuzzies without getting in the way of a form's essential purpose, and we'll cover in detail how to implement several common form enhancements like in-field labels, conditional input display and on-focus style changes, among several others.

  While we will be talking through PHP code, illustrating CSS styles and demonstrating some fun jQuery, feel free to attend just for the ideas. If you're a developer, you may have some ah-ha moments when we walk through how to set up and infinitely expanding registration form with Ajax, and non-developers will likely gain some insight into a range of possibilities for form enhancement that they might never have heard of.

  We'll be using a default Drupal 7 installation for the demonstration, so you can bring your laptop with a clean installation of Drupal if you'd like to follow along. We'll be supplying a link to a download for all the code we use at the beginning of the demonstration.

  At 1:00pm to 2:00pm, Wednesday 21st March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• View Modes: The Many Faces of Your Content

  by Tim Cosgrove

  View Modes are a core feature of Drupal 7 entities that most users don’t give too much thought to, even though they use them all the time. This is a shame because View Modes are an extraordinarily powerful tool for streamlining the theming and development of your site and ensuring consistency of output for your content. View Modes give the themer the ability to show the same content in many different contexts and with the right display for each situation. Through smart use of View Modes, a themer can avoid having the huge stack of node templates and Views displays that we’re used to.

  In this session, attendees will learn what a View Mode is and how to create custom View Modes both in code and with contributed modules. We’ll demonstrate how to set and export display settings for all of your View Modes. We will also spend time looking at the design strategies and types of site elements that View Modes are well suited for. We’ll will see how View Modes can change the way you template your nodes, lay out your content, and interact with developers, all for the better.

  At 2:15pm to 3:15pm, Wednesday 21st March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• Rapid Drupal Development using the Features Module

  by connerton

  In this session, we will discuss using the Features Module for Drupal 7 to build out reusable site functionality by pulling together entities, content types, fields, views, context and more. We will focus on how we can use features to package these entities together into reusable modules to make site building faster and cheaper.Using features, anyone building Drupal sites from freelancer to mainstream Drupal agencies can shave hours of development time off the beginning of their site building.

  We will talk about:

  What the Features Module does and how to build features from views, fields, entities, content types, context, and more
  How to set up a Feature Server to share your features
  Using Drush Make to create your own "distributions" for rapid deployment
  Adding custom hooks to your feature
  How to safely override your features on a site by site basis while retaining the ability to update that feature.
  Intended audience:

  Anyone who wants to create reusable feature sets to be deployed quickly on other websites should attend this session.
  Sitebuilders, freelancers, and organizations that want to save time when developing websites for clients.

  At 3:45pm to 4:45pm, Wednesday 21st March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• Thinking big: Assembling a Drupal Web Experience Management Powerhouse

  by batsonjay

  Drupal is disrupting the traditional CMS market & is winning. Organizations large and small are adopting drupal and the WCM/CMS market is gaining momentum again.

  For every market action, there's a reaction. Proprietary vendors are responding - Adobe, Oracle & Salesforce are all buying technologies to tell a new story of "Web Engagement Management." This is a label given to platforms designed to equip marketers with the tools to do more, with less developer involvement, and measure the the results. These tools let marketers answer the big question: are their websites succeeding at their basic mission of getting the right message, to the right users, at the right time, through the right channel?

  Fortunately, Drupal already has a pretty good answer to this "big question" - and any gaps that exist can be filled by a passionate Drupal community.

  This talk will dig into the Drupal projects that already (or need to) exist to build a killer Web Experience Management solution, including:

  GUI-based page layout tools for content creators (vs. site builders)
  Workflows that don't suck
  Content reusability
  Media management on steroids
  Mobile presentation layer as part of content creation
  A/B and multivariate testing for marketers
  Analytics that show whether web investments are working
  (Note: For reference, Web Experience Management (WEM) is also called Web Engagement Management, Customer Communications Management, and numerous other similar terms.)

  At 5:00pm to 6:00pm, Wednesday 21st March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

Thursday 22nd March 2012

• The Alice in Wonderland World of Fields and Entities

  by KarenStevenson

  Drupal 7 is a topsy turvy place where everything you thought you knew about content types and fields goes out the window. Enter the Mad Hatter's world where anything can be an entity and fields can go everywhere.

  Already the floodgates are opening as developers and users find new ways to take advantage of all the possibilities: Field Collection, Entity Reference, and Entity Construction Kit are brand new concepts. Bean has re-invented blocks as entities. Media has re-invented files as entities. Organic Groups has been re-written to make groups entities. Drupal Commerce makes commerce transactions into entities. The new Entity Translation module treats groups of translated fields as entities. And D7 is just getting out of the gate.

  This session will look at some of the new entity and field modules, and some older modules that have been re-invented for D7. We'll talk about how they work and where they could be useful and what they get from using the new entity framework. We'll also discuss some of the questions they raise, like when you might want to create a new entity rather than a content type.

  We will discuss:

  A little $entity->history
  Fields that relate fields
  Fields that relate entities
  Fields that ARE entities
  Entities that relate entities
  Entity utility modules
  Field utility modules
  Don't forget properties!
  Everything is a Node, Take 2

  At 10:45am to 11:45am, Thursday 22nd March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• Thrown Into a Shark Pond? A Guide for Surviving Core Development and Even Enjoying It

  by Gábor Hojtsy

  Have you ever tried to submit a core improvement suggestion? Two common experiences I have seen is that your issue is ignored or dissected to pieces and beyond possibility to move forward. Did you feel sometimes like you are attempting to navigate in a shark pond? Or maybe more like this guy? http://www.flickr.com/photos/ega...

  Being a Drupal core developer for about nine years and a core committer (Drupal 6 maintainer) for five years, I have experience on all sides of the situation. We'll look at examples of issues gone wrong and cover issue queue psychology. You'll get tips and tricks on how to get your issues noticed and avoid them becoming shipwrecks.

  I hope to help individuals and companies alike who intend to invest in Drupal core to find your place and be a productive and happy member of the core development team.

  At 1:00pm to 2:00pm, Thursday 22nd March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

• Tapping Into the Power of User Narratives

  by Michael Keara

  Although user interfaces can be aided by various visual and structural elements, they are fundamentally driven by words, forming what can be called user narratives. But what restrictions prevent Drupal UX designers from achieving clear and well-targeted user narratives?

  Drupal does a great job of presenting words in various languages, but truly well-defined user narratives must speak at the level of Idioms – the subtle nuances of speech and terminology that characterizes distinct groups of users - and functional User Roles. Drupal is virtually incapable of achieving this UX goal.

  Using a real world example as a reference point, this talk will illustrate how to dramatically boost the effectiveness of user interfaces by harnessing the power of user narratives. Along the way, we'll look at how the user narrative model is based on natural 'field-resolution' patterns such as those found within the neurological system.

  Transcending Drupal's current limits, we’ll explore ways that idiomatic, Role-oriented interfaces have been applied in our case study through the use of our 'User Narratives' module. Through this example, we'll catch a glimpse of the powerful dimension of Role-oriented UX design and the benefits it could potentially bring to all aspects of Drupal's UX.

  At 2:15pm to 3:15pm, Thursday 22nd March

  In 401-404, Colorado Convention Center

  Coverage video