Jeff:

Session voting has kicked off for DrupalCon London and Karen, CJ, Tobby, Erik and Jeff have all submitted some great entries. In total the Phase2 Team proposed 13 sessions with at least one session for each track.

Check out the full descriptions below and as always, we would love your vote and a chance to share our knowledge with the rest of the community.

Taking Inventory of Drupal Products and App Stores

URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/taking-inventory-drupal-products-and-app-stores

Description: We now live in a world of Drupal products. The first "app store" was announced and launched, and more companies than ever are building (or want to be building) Drupal products. It's time to take a look and see what's working, and why. Who is succeeding with Drupal products, and what should newcomers to the market know and pay attention to for their products to succeed?

We'll be asking hard questions:

What products are doing well? What ingredients make them succeed? How does the GPL help us? Does it hold us back? Are distributions and app stores the future of Drupal products? What APIs and technology platforms are important?

Intended Audience: C Types, business minded developers, analysts, and decisions makers of all stripes.

Questions Answered by this session:


• What products are doing well?
• What ingredients make them succeed?
• How does the GPL help us? Does it hold us back?
• Are distributions and app stores the future of Drupal products?
• What APIs and technology platforms are important?

Everything as an Entity or Why Everything is not a Node


URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/everything-entity-or-why-everything-not-node



Description: 
We have a new paradigm in D7: Entities. In D6, many subscribed to the mantra of "Everything as a Node." In D7 we were given the gift of entities, which open new data options for module developers. With this new option, we can rediscover what nodes are and why they are special. This presentation provides a framework for evaluation when a developer should create an entity, node or use a custom database table. We will also cover the essence of an entity and its place in Drupal, and outline strategies for deciding which type of entity should be used or created.

Intended Audience: Those who will be Creating module that need to store data, as well as site designers that want to make use of the entities in drupal.

Questions Answered by this session:

• 
What is an Entity?

• How does an Entity fit into drupal?
• 
What is special about nodes?

• What other entity types are there?

• Why should I not continue to make everything a node?

5 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do in Open Atrium 


URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/5-things-you-didnt-know-you-could-do-open-atrium 

Description: If you've spent time in Open Atrium, you may know it as a useful collaboration tool for teams with an administrator-friendly interface. But did you know you can use Atrium to build public-facing sites? What about multi-site platforms? Have you seen the theming capabilities around Open Atrium? Atrium's flexibility makes it a powerful tool for many different challenges facing a team, and that flexibility allows for some really innovative solutions. We'll show you some of the best examples of innovative use of this powerful Drupal distribution, and talk about the business problems you can solve with Atrium - for yourself or for your clients.

Intended Audience: This session is for users hoping to make the best use of Open Atrium for their own business or organization, or teams who build sites for others and want to understand more about a solution to offer their clients.

Questions Answered by this session:


• What are the challenges I can solve for my organization with Open Atrium? 

• How is Open Atrium used for public-facing sites?

• How are teams successfully fitting Open Atrium in with their branding and design?

Slick Data Sharding: How to develop scalable data applications with Drupal

URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/slick-data-sharding-how-develop-scalable-data-applications-drupal

Description:
  High-traffic websites that capture a lot of data from users often encounter performance problems when database input becomes a bottleneck. High volume user-submitted content (comments, ratings, form submissions, etc.) is typically stored in a single (master) database, and this creates problems not only for scale but also for replication and useful backups. It becomes important to be able to write these sorts of things to other secondary storage locations. I'll cover how to successfully write to different databases (MySQL and MongoDB) while still use Drupal's APIs and to cover pitfalls and successes.

In addition to scalability, data sharding provides other capabilities. Applications may be developed using Node.js or with other technology, but still needs access to the same data. With smart data sharding, this becomes possible and even easy.



Intended Audience: Developers looking to build large-volume sites who haven't built massive-scale sites before. Developers looking to build complex applications that need to integrate with Drupal, but won't necessarily need to be in Drupal.


Questions Answered by this session:

• What is data sharding, and how does it apply to Drupal sites?
• Why MongoDB and how can I use it?
• How can I use a secondary MySQL database (or database cluster)?
• But Drupal's APIs give me what functionality I need. How can I do all of this without reinventing the wheel?
• Besides scale, what other advantages do these techniques have? 



Taking your site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7


URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/taking-your-site-drupal-6-drupal-7

Description: Drupal 7 offers a lot of exciting and big changes when coming from Drupal 6. However, some things are vastly different under the hood, and modules are not immediately compatible between major versions. This leads to two basic options: upgrade or migrate.

This session will cover the decision process to follow when deciding to upgrade an existing Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7 or to build a new site and migrate content and users to it. There are factors that can impact that decision making process: evaluating which contributed modules are in use, what functionality has been moved into Drupal core or deprecated entirely, and how much work is really involved. This will also take a look at the basic tools for upgrading components of existing sites and helping to migrate to a newer and better site.



Intended Audience:
 Site maintainers who have an existing Drupal 6 site and want to go do Drupal 7. 



Questions Answered by this session:

• At what point do I choose migration over upgrading?
• How do I really determine all the pros and cons of upgrading over migration?
• What tools exist to help me upgrade my site?
• What tools exist to help me migrate from an old site to a new Drupal 7 site?
• Why not just stay in Drupal 6? 



Taking your module from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7


URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/taking-your-module-drup...



Description: When upgrading an existing site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, often the biggest blocker is the use of custom modules. There might be tons of data in a proprietary format using a custom developed (may or may not be in-house) that the site requires. This presentation will cover what steps are necessary to upgrade a module from 6.x to 7.x. 



Intended Audience: Module developers and contributors that have contrib modules that haven't upgraded them to 7.x (this includes community members who might want to release a patch to upgrade a stale project). Site maintainers who have developed or inherited a custom D6 module.


Questions Answered by this session:

• I ran Coder, now what? 
• Ack! All my queries look weird now. What is DBTNG?
• How can I avoid upgrade cruft? .
• Patches and git branches -- what does that mean for me?
• How do I provide an upgrade path for users of the older version?



Dungeons & Dragons & Drupal


URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/dungeons-dragons-drupal

Description:
A magical quest through complex record keeping that takes our adventurers from the mighty cities of Features packages through the deep delves of compound fields, facing off against hordes of PDF output.

The D&D module for Drupal 7 was released last February, and aside from making the lives of Dungeon Masters and players easier, it's a great example of some really common (and modern) Drupal module functionality. First, it provides a Features package (Features module) to allow users to create their characters. Second, it defines several compound fields to help account for the varieties of complex data such as skills, feats, magical items, and weapons. Finally, it make use of PHP's PDF libraries to create printable character record sheets for a character node. 
In addition to discussing the inspiration behind the D&D module, I'll explore how similar complex record-keeping requirements can be handled with Drupal and custom fields and content types.



You hear something behind you.

Roll for initiative.



Intended Audience: 
Dungeon Masters, Players, and Drupal developers who need to be able to store records of something a little more complex than basic content types.



Questions Answered by this session:  

• What does role-playing have to do with the Drupal community? (A lot can be learned here, actually)
• How do I build a module with custom compound fields for my content type? (maybe not this one) 
• I can generate nodes as PDFs? Cool, how do I do that?
• D&D is cool and all, but what if I play GURPS?
• What other real-world applications can this approach help? 


Custom Compound Fields in Drupal 7


URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/custom-compound-fields-drupal-7 


Description:  With Field API being part of core as of Drupal 7.0, creating custom fields just became a lot easier than they were in Drupal 6.x. Suppose you need to create a compound field, which consists of several different form elements (a select and several text fields). You can now have a basic compound field in three basic steps.

Think of it as a single ingredient in a recipe. Each ingredient actually has multiple pieces of data: the amount, the metric, the ingredient itself, and maybe even a description of how it should be prepared. Each ingredient though is really a single field, with compound elements.

This session will walk through these steps, and discuss the many variations of what you can do with these fields, and how data can be processed and stored.



Intended Audience: This is intended for developers who need complex data or custom data schemas.



Questions Answered by this session:

• Why would I want to do this, when there's plenty of singleton fields that I can use?
• How do I build a compound field module?
• What about entities?
• What are some examples that I can use to build my compound field module?
• What's the difference between a field, a widget, and a viewer?


Fields of Communication


URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/fields-communication

Description: Communication within the Drupal community can be sporadic and widely distributed. News, documentation, and help can be gathered and received on Drupal.org, Groups.drupal.org, project issues queues, IRC, personal blogs, Twitter, and forums.
Find out how to better function in a community where multi-band communication is the norm, and where to ask for and give help.



Intended Audience: Beginners and regular Drupal community members alike who find it daunting to know where to ask for help, how to disseminate information.


Questions Answered by this session:

• What is the philosophy behind multiple/distributed forms of communication?
• Where can I get help or find the latest information?
• How do I know which communication medium to use for what I need?
• Why so many or why not just have a single band of communication?
• Who just sits in IRC rooms all day?

Load Testing


URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/load-testing


Description: Learn about tools, strategies and methods for performing load testing your Drupal site. Presentation is slanted towards informing developers about tools for performing load testing and monitoring results. Also covered are discussions of a variety of issues that surround load testing like calculating testing targets, data and infrastructure preparation needs and where testing fits in a development schedule.

Intended Audience: Target audience will be developers but presentation is not code heavy and is accessible to anyone who wants to get a more detailed picture of what is involved in load testing.

Questions Answered by this session:

• What am I trying to learn from my test?
• What has to be done before I can begin testing?
• What kind of access is needed in order to test effectively?
• What tools can I use for testing?
• How do I schedule testing into my project? 


Building Entities with the Entity Module


URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/building-entities-entity-module


Description: Making use of the entity system in Drupal can involve a lot of boilerplate code. Learn how to leverage the Entity module to help speed development of custom objects in Drupal 7 that are extendable using the entity paradigm, reduce the amount of code that you write and help further standardize access to custom module data. We'll also briefly cover why to expose your custom data as an entity.

Intended Audience: Developers familiar with creating modules with custom data tables in Drupal 6 and those who are getting started with entities in Drupal 7

Questions Answered by this session:

• What are entities and why should I use them?
• Why should I use the entity module to help create my entities?
• How does theming work when using the entity module?
• What functionality can I centralize if building a site with many entities?
• How does the entity module help me manage my entities?

Drupal for the Public Sector

URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/drupal-public-sector

Description: We want to share the outcomes of the Drupal Government Days, talk about development trends in governments & the OpenPublic distribution.

OpenPublic is the first major initiative in the Drupal community toward an extensible, powerful platform to meet the varying needs to properly power government sites. This is done while maintaining the rigorous standards and security measures necessary and serving citizens with open and accessible information. As the first open source CMS distribution for government, OpenPublic enables government and constituents to collaborate within a software ecosystem in which systems and code are collectively built and shared. This opens new opportunities to build, share, report on, and make use of government information online.

Intended Audience: This session will be of great interest to evaluators, developers, implementers and adopters of Drupal in a public sector environment. This session will also serve as a great introduction to both the world of Drupal distributions and the emerging role of Drupal in government.


Questions Answered by this session:

• What are the results of the Drupal Government Days?
• Where are Governments heading with Drupal?
• What use cases can OpenPublic solve for an organization?
• How can I get involved?

Drupal Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances

URL: http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/drupal-mergers-acquisitions-alliances

Description: Drupal is a growing and maturing industry. The typical Drupal business is no longer just a small sole proprietor, trying to make ends meet. There is now a wide range of businesses working with Drupal, from well established large integrators, to well funded venture-backed startups seeking to revolutionize the way websites are built. Mergers and acquisitions in such a landscape are to be expected, and recent history shows that consolidation is already happening.

What are the benefits of a merger?How do you position your company to be acquired? How does the resulting entity get the most value from the deal, and what problems can arise as a result of the merger?

The key principle behind these strategic M&A is that a strong and experienced Drupal providers will buy or merge with a smaller one to create a more competitive or cost-efficient company. Ultimately the companies will come together gaining a greater market share or achieving greater efficiency.

This session will be a panel including several C-level executives from Drupal companies who have recently been through a merger or acquisition.

Intended Audience: The intended audience for this session are Drupal shops (small & big ones), business leaders, Drupal experts, project owners, business evaluators, strategy planners, business consultants, & Drupal start-up companies


Questions Answered by this session:

• Which successful examples exist and what are the motives behind Drupal Mergers & Acquisitions?
• How can I profit from a Merger, Acquisition or Acq-Hire?
• How Drupal companies benefit from economies of scale?
• How to create synergy through mergers/acquisition or alliances that makes the value of the combined companies greater than the sum of the two parts?
• When is the right time to merge, acquire or form an alliance?