Drupal Asia Pacific Conference

Summary

There is current trend in web interface design towards user customizable, or personalizable, websites.
Take, for example, the new BBC site at http://bbc.co.uk
This session will cover some newer interface techniques including:

• How to make your Drupal blocks drag and droppable in a few minutes
• How to implement basic AJAX callbacks in Drupal using jQuery

Goals/Outcomes

After attending this session, you should be able to go away and recreate and extend these techniques yourself.

Presenter Info

David Thomas is a Senior Developer at Catalyst IT, Wellington, New Zealand. He specializes in web applications development with a particular focus on content management systems.

Summary

This session looks at how to use your Drupal site to deliver Views as Services where the views are modified on the way through.

Outline/Plan

-- Modules that provide views arguments to render views differently.
-- Returning a view via a service, some server options.
-- Writing our custom service with extra parameters
-- Loading (and modifying) views dynamically. views_build_view() options.

Goals/Outcomes

Demonstrate the power and limitations of services and share ideas about leveraging the power of views.

Presenter Info

Simon Hobbs built a prototype for Lonely Planet, one of the requirements was to deliver content flexibly and to explore the potential of an API for external clients. This session is based on learning from that project.

Summary

This session will present some general ideas/areas for best practices in Drupal development/deployment and then will open the floor for a discussion session for people to offer their own tips, tricks, best practices and more.

Outline/Plan

-Dev Environment (IDEs, RCS, etc)
-Coding Practices
-Deployment/Rollout
-Team Structures
-Management practices (SCRUM, waterfall, ?)

Goals/Outcomes

The goal of this session is to share best practices between everyone to enhance our effectiveness as a whole.

Presenter Info

I will present a some starting points and then aim to be a moderator for this discussion

Summary

Caching is one strategy that can be used to increase the Performance and Scalability of a Drupal site. This session will cover the various types of caches in Drupal, how to use them, and what the alternatives are. Topics include:

- drupal core caching: what is cached, how it works

- pluggable cache system

- using caching in (your) custom modules

- alternate caching implementations (memcache, apc)

- advanced caching module

- block cache module

- filesystem caching (boost, fastpath_fscache)

- bytecode caches

- changes between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6

Presenter Info

Simon Roberts has been using Drupal for about 2.5 years, and enjoys the challenge of producing high-performing and scalable websites using Drupal. He is a (sometimes) co-maintainer of memcache module, and is currently working on another large-scale Drupal site.

Summary

What unit testing is, and why it'll save your sanity later

Goals/Outcomes

The work to hook Drupal into simpletest has been done already, so all you need do is write the tests. This session will go over both why this is a good idea, and how to write some simple unit tests, and run against both drupal core and any contrib modules.

Presenter Info

Brenda has taught unit testing php at university level from time to time, and firmly believes unit test driven development ensures a higher quality code.

Summary

This session will cover short into to getting drupal working on postgresql, and then the usual steps needed to quickly get (your?) contrib modules working in postgresql

Outline/Plan

Bootstrap a drupal site into postgresql (creating dbs, users, connection permissions)
Quick overview of some mysql-only "sql" to avoid when writing drupal modules.
Pick a contrib module at random and make it go in Postgresql with minimal effort.

Presenter Info

Brenda is a "superhero of open source in Wellington" according to Wellingtonista. She's spearheaded the successful and very popular SuperHappyDevHouseAotearoa - a monthly hackathon where coders from across Wellington hang in one place and get their code on. Why this rocks is because SHDH is not about people from different companies competing or poaching staff, but about bringing together like-minded geeks to share knowledge, and that is just a little bit awesome.

Plus she has the largest collection of gadgets in the whole of Wellington, and is completely addicted to both Drupal and Coffee.