Sessions at DrupalCon Munich 2012 on Thursday 23rd August in Westin Grand München Arabellapark

This session will look at the UGC heavy Drupal site and how Exove achieved high performance with front-end off loading modules.

A lot of Web Services today claim to be RESTful APIs. But are they really? Do the URLs accurately identify resources? Are the powers of HTTP leveraged properly? What is "Hypermedia", what is the Uniform Interface, and what is the secret behind the HATEOAS acronym that is so essential to the REST architectural style? This talk gives answers and guidelines using real-life examples.

Nonprofit adoption of Drupal is now standard. But too many nonprofit organizations are reinventing the wheel in Drupal. We’ll talk about some common strategies for using Drupal within nonprofits based on 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, USAID, the International Center for Journalism, and more.

Maintaining a big IT infrastructure can only be done efficiently with automation tools. For our DrupalCONCEPT hosting, we run a steadily growing number of servers (currently more than 120). And thanks to Chef and other datacenter tools, we do it with only 2 full-time sysadmins.

But even if you only have to set up a few development VMs now and again, you can use those tools to make your work much more efficient. And there isn't even a big upfront effort to get them running!

In this talk, I'll explain how you can deploy a consistent Drupal development and testing environment with minimal effort by adding IT automation applications like Chef to your toolbox.

One of the strengths of Drupal is that it's not just a tool for building a single website. It can be used equally well for managing multiple companion sites together. This capability has existed for many years, but is not always well understood. And in true Drupal fashion, modern Drupal has several different options available for users looking to run a series of Drupal sites together, each with its own trade-offs.

This session will explore several leading ways to handle a multi-headed Drupal installation, including Domain Access, Organic Groups, and Multi-site. It will also ask the question of whether a multi-headed Drupal is necessary in the first place; often it is not. Attendees should come away better-armed to evaluate how, and if, to roll out Drupal for a multi-part site.

One of the first steps in a new Drupal project is to walk through the wireframes and functional requirements of the new site to try to decide exactly how you would implement them in Drupal.

Sometimes that is dead easy to do. A simple list of the titles of the latest content can be constructed using Views. Done!

Sometimes that is an enormously complicated problem because there isn't any existing Drupal solution, or there are multiple possible Drupal solutions, or the Drupal solutions won't meet the functional requirements, or they don't seem to be ready for production.

If you've been around Drupal for any length of time, you've heard the phrase "There's a module for that", referring to the fact that there are over 15,000 contributed modules on Drupal.org that extend the core functionality and do almost anything you might imagine anyone would ever need. Sometimes you can do a quick search of the module list, find a module that is a perfect fit for your needs, and drop it in place. But often that's not sufficient. Both the cost and the timing of a Drupal project can be significantly affected by the decision about how to respond when there is no drop-in Drupal solution that will meet the project's requirements.

At Lullabot we call this the 'discovery' phase of a project -- the process of understanding the functional requirements of a new site and exploring the best ways to achieve it in Drupal. We've helped clients of all sizes determine how to use existing contributed modules to build out the site that they need, and when (and how) to respond when the existing solutions just don't work.

Some of the questions this session will cover include:

• How to find existing modules that might solve your problems.
• How to test drive potential modules to see if they work the way you need.
• Digging for sometimes obscure or hidden documentation about how the module works.
• Mining the module issue queues to tell if a module is really suitable for your needs.
• Deciding which version of a module is really 'safe' to use.
• Choosing between alternate modules that might solve the problem.
• What to do if existing modules aren't ready?
• When and how to roll your own solution.
• When and how to contribute your modules and/or changes back.
• Validating your decisions in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty.

As a UX professional you've probably found yourself forced to argue for the importance of UX in a project. You've probably heard people say that UX is of little importance. And as a designer it's not always easy to explain why UX matters. But UX needs to be justified. And it's your job to do so. In this session I will present ways to convince even project managers from hell about the value of UX.

Attend this session to learn methods to visualize and communicate the value of UX and usability. Using these tools and frameworks you will be able to convincingly argue for why UX is critical to a website delivering what its stakeholders expect.

SESSION HIGHLIGHTS
* The reasons why UX comes under fire, and the many misconceptions that exist regarding UX and usability.
* The UX value proposition: How to visually translate the value of UX work.
* The link between UX and business: How to talk about UX in terms MBAs can relate to.
* A success story: What an incredible difference a few hours spent on UX can do for a website.

I use the the term UX here as a shortening for the wide field of usability, interaction design (IxD), user experience design and information architecture.

Previously presented at Frontend United in Amsterdam in April of 2012, this session was very appreciated and highly rated.

Learn from the experiences of Examiner.com's team. We've done it all - cowboy, waterfall, extreme, and agile scrum.

Learn why...

Waterfall doesn't always work
Agile has a place, but isn't the holy grail
Cowboy can kill the relationships you have with your stakeholders
How "Fixed Scope" is a lie
That a combination of approaches is the answer
The Examiner team has carefully honed, updated, improved, and iterated its process for over two years. It continues to evolve, improve, and make development more consistent and predictable.

Project management requires a blend of techniques and tools to effectively shepherd projects from ideation to release. We'll explore and discuss different tools and methodologies that can help make your project successful.

Saunders first presented on this Topic at Drupalcamp Austin as one of the Keynotes. The presentation was updated for Drupalcon Denver. The presentation is being updated and improved upon for Drupalcon Munich!

Saunders has worked in project management at a variety of shops ranging from the Western States Arts Federation as Senior Director of Technology, pingVision as Senior Web Producer, one of several Principals in Vintage Digital, and most recently as Senior Director of Technology at Examiner.com. He writes at Dogstar.org regularly - mostly on the business of open source and Drupal.

Do you often think about making your mobile Drupal website friendly for smartphones? Or has you already started to build a Drupal mobile application using MAG (Mobile App Generator) module and PhoneGap?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you should be on this session! You will learn the best practices for making your mobile Drupal website look like a native iOS or Android app. You will know how to make:

• iPhone-like scroll.
• Touch carousels and slideshow.
• Transition effects between pages.
• Nice popups and panels.

Also we are going to show you our favorite ready to use mobile themes and modules and introduce you to the PhoneGap project and MAG module.

Fabian's and Jeff's session about MAG and PhoneGap:
http://denver2012.drupal.org/pro....

If you want to be on this session, please, leave your comment!

Since March 2011, the community has been hard at work on Drupal 8, which is currently undergoing active development. This revolutionary new release sports tons of improvements, and Angela Byron, Drupal core committer and long-time core developer, will lead you through the most important ones and how they'll impact your future site building endeavors.

Get answers to your frequently asked questions, learn about the changes are coming down the pipe for clients, site builders, designers, and developers, find out more about the core development process, and take away some action items for what you can do to help make Drupal 8 the most awesome release of Drupal yet!

Although there's a session in Drupalcon Denver mentioned China, we still haven't got enough information from China in which there should be a big community but not.

As a native Chinese Drupaler, I helped almost all the Drupal events in Beijing since 2010 and would like to give a session which can go deeper on this topic. In this session, I will share my recent years experiences in China about the community, developers, market and etc and analyze the important factors that limited the popularity of Drupal.

The development of Drupal is getting very fast in China now. I hope this session will help to enlarge the community in China

I'm keeping updating the slides online. Please check here:
https://docs.google.com/presenta....

Pakistan is in one of the fastest adopters of Drupal in the developing world, yet little is known about the uptake of Drupal and the Drupal community in Pakistan.

As a native Pakistani Drupal entrepreneur, I have dragged the local Drupal community kicking and screaming to be more active and tuned into the wider global Drupal community.

My colleagues and I got the first Pakistani Drupal meet up off the ground in April 2012 and are in the process of finalizing the first ever Drupal camp for June 2012.

The Pakistani Drupal community considers itself marginalized and is somewhat resigned to its silent status! I would like to bring this growing and vibrant community to the attention of the wider Drupal community and hope this session will help to bring the Pakistani Drupal community out of its shell.

I shalll share my experiences of setting up a Drupal software house in Pakistan, the challenges of linking with the community locally, introduce some of my colleagues to answer questions from the audience, present the market potential and explore the challenges faced by the Drupal community in Pakistan and the growing strength of Drupal in Pakistan despite the challenges.

After several years of running various CMS such as Typo3, Wordpress, custom systems and also Drupal, the online division of Greenpeace Germany decided to switch entirely to a single underlying system for all their online projects. Of all the discussed possibilities, Drupal stood out as the framework that appeared fitting best for the demands of Greenpeace.

In this case study, we will briefly describe the course of action for establishing a "Drupal only universe" at the German division of one of the world's most influential NGOs, which includes

- setting up an Aegir based server infrastructure for smooth project rollout and maintenance
- creating a Drupal based OpenID provider in order to allow SSO between the various Greenpeace websites
- building a powerful internal community plattform which allows German Greenpeace volunteers to share information
- giving local German Greenpace volunteers the possibility to introduce theirselves and bring up news and events by a Drupal based "Greenpeace Groups" distribution
which can deployed as often as needed while it's codebase is still managed and maintained centralized via Aegir
- making the final step in "Drupalizing Greenpeace Germany" by rebuilding the greenpeace.de website in Drupal 7 and saying goodbye to the old Typo plattform

This talk introduces MongoDB and provides an introduction of how to get the
most out of MongoDB.

One of the challenges that comes with moving to MongoDB is figuring how to best
model your data. While most developers have internalized the rules of thumb for
designing schemas for RDBMSs, these rules don't always apply to MongoDB. The
simple fact that documents can represent rich, schema-free data structures
means that we have a lot of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized,
relational model.

Not only that, MongoDB has several unique features, such as
atomic updates and indexed array keys, that greatly influence the kinds of
schemas that make sense.

In this session, I'll answer these questions and more, provide a number of data
modeling rules of thumb, and discuss the tradeoffs of various data modeling
strategies. I will also provide information on MongoDB's strong points, such as
scalability and performance.

Efficient teamwork in Drupal projects can be a challenge even with modern tools like Git, Redmine and so on. We also need the right processes to distribute tasks, detect bottlenecks and make well-directed improvements. Only if we're able to keep work flowing at a steady and realistic pace, we'll have happy clients and team members.

Kanban is a great way to achieve this goal. It's a lean workflow management method that is both powerful enough to revolutionize car manufacturing in Japan and simple enough to quickly adopt it in IT teams without throwing all existing processes over board.

In this talk, I will explain all important aspects of the Kanban method and demonstrate how it works in an easy to understand example.

The creator of the Drupal package for Node.js goes over how to leverage the strengths of Node.js to compensate for some of the Drupal stack’s weaknesses, especially when creating real-time system with chat and queue systems as examples.

Configuration management is a big initiative for Drupal 8 but what can you do now in Drupal 7?

We will talk about the current state of contrib solutions including CTools, Features, and Configuration modules.

Exportables
Until Drupal 8, the main format for exportable configuration is through the ctools module's exportables API. What is exportable and how it is exported is crucial to understand the limitations of what is currently possible in Drupal 7.

More at the CTools project page.

Features Module
Features provides a UI and API for taking different site building components from modules with exportables and bundling them together in a single feature module. A feature module is like any other Drupal module except that it declares its components (e.g. views, contexts, CCK fields, etc.) in its .info file so that it can be checked, updated, or reverted programmatically.

More at the Features project page.

Configuration Module
The configuration management module enables the ability to keep track of specific configurations on a Drupal site, provides the ability to move these configurations between different environments (local, dev, qa, prod), and also move configurations between completely different sites on a granular level (migrate configurations).

This module takes some concepts from the Drupal 8 core Configuration Management Initiative(CMI), including the concept of the "activestore" and "configstore" architecture, and applies them to D7. This allows us to use some of the benefits from CMI in D7 now. As well as testing integrations, like answering, how does the Features module work in D8.

More at the Configuration project page.

Prepare to be dazzled with how easily you save yourself time, money and unicorns by using a deployment tool like Capistrano. No longer shall you battle with command line RSI! It's time to embrace the power of deployment tools, today!

This session will give a 101 on installing and configuring Capistrano to deploy you projects and demonstrate some neat tricks for special cases. The session is a very practical, hands on look at using Capistrano in combination with Git to accelerate your deployment processes.

No software solution (proprietary or commercial) will ever meet 100% of the current, let alone future, needs of enterprise users; in addition to customizing the look and feel to reflect their unique brand and needs, these organizations typically implement new and enhance existing functionality. To accommodate this, they go through an extensive evaluation process and choose a technology platform that meets the majority of their needs, that they can easily and cost effectively customize and extend to get the remainder, and they invest a lot of time, money, and resources migrating to and enhancing the solutions they choose.

Increasingly the solution of choice for many organizations is Drupal – one out of every fifty websites on the Internet, 2% of all sites globally, are running on the platform – including some of the largest government, media, entertainment, and educational sites. These organizations are doing amazing things with the framework and innovating by breaking through prior limitations.

However, there is limited knowledge sharing and discussion happening among the biggest Drupal users. Similar problems are often solved multiple times independently, and in incompatible ways. And since few of these large companies are vocal and active in the community, the expertise gained from solving these problems isn't making its way back into the software that all Drupal users rely on. To help solve these issues, Acquia created and launched an innovative strategic alliance, "Large Scale Drupal".

Large Scale Drupal is a consortium of large enterprise Drupal users who meet regularly to discuss and collaborate on common problems. We provide a forum for enterprise users, listen to their needs, prioritize them as a group, and then figure out a proper way to address those needs through knowledge sharing, white papers, training and development. The intent is not to keep the outcome of these efforts within the group. We want to share what we learn with the specific intent of it becoming a contributed back to Drupal and the community.

The goal of these projects is to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration among members of the group and the community. The Large Scale Drupal members get the benefits of sharing their development costs with other members. They also get significantly better software through the input of a diverse range of participants, built by some of the most talented people in the community, which will last longer and provide longer-term value as a shared solution that will continue to be enhanced by the partnership and community. The community benefits by gaining new contributions to Drupal, and an influx of expert talent into the Drupal contributor pool. Both the contributions of these companies, and the expertise that they bring to the table will help Drupal remain a long-term viable project.

In this talk, I’ll give a high level overview of the Large Scale Drupal Strategic Alliance, the consensus-driven process we follow for project selection and development, the types of problems we are solving, how we do all the work through partners (vendors and services companies that are active contributors in the community) funneling money back into the community, and present a business case for collaborative development. I’ll talk briefly about existing projects and goals and the success we’ve seen to date, as well as future initiatives and plans, and take questions from the audience at the end of the presentation.

There are so many community projects around education that it is overwhelming to figure out what is going on, much less actually help out. There are all kinds of projects from using Drupal as an education platform, to certification programs, to classes for teaching people about Drupal itself. This session will look at the big picture of education initiatives in the Drupal community, break them down into some manageable categories, evaluate where we are, figure out where things overlap, and make some proposals for where we can go in the future.

If you are interested in Drupal education/training but don’t know what’s what, this session will survey the ongoing projects and sort them out. If you are already working on community education, this will serve as a starting point for us to discuss what other work is being done in the community and how we might collaborate better. Related to this session, we also plan to have a BoF at the conference to continue the conversation about collaboration.

Note that this will not cover commercial projects or resources around Drupal education. This is focused on the community efforts that are out there (things like Drupal for Education, Drupal Dojo, Learn Drupal, skill maps, etc.).

I used to say: "There isn't a hard-to-theme design, only a lazy or bad themer". But after over 6 years working as designer, themer and now a CEO of a Drupal consulting company (Mogdesign.eu) I would probably change it to: "There isn't a hard-to-theme design, but some are easier and more cost-effective". I would like to share a few lessons and ideas from what I learned. What are those aspects that make your designs successful, easier to theme, cost effective, but still beautiful and meeting your client's needs. In other words - how to make both your themer and client fall in love with you:)

- How is print design different from web design
- Typography, grids
- Learn about Drupal, theme layers, elements, blocks, regions, etc...
- How to find balance between beauty and usability
- Be consistent: use same layout for views, blocks, headlines, font sizes, line heights, borders, margins, comments, images
- Design a style guide: a specific page with all often used HTML & Drupal elements, image sizes
+ more tips on becoming pixel perfect designer

The style guide example will be available to download