Jeff:

 

Session voting for Drupalcon 2011 in Chicago started over the weekend and I am very proud of the great entries that our team at Phase2 has prepared for the conference. In total our team proposed 14 sessions that cover 4 of the 6 categories and run the complete range from business topics to design thinking, project management and code development. We would love your vote and chance to share what we have learned this past year.

 

Avoiding a Frankenstein Website Design: Collaborating with Clients 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/avoiding-frankenstein-website-design-collaborating-clients

Track: Design and UX


Experience: Beginner

We have all had it happen. You give your client three different comps for their website project, and the next thing you know, you're trying to clean up their Franken-Comp: a whole new kind of nasty, with pieces from each of the three designs slapped together. Nevermind the research, brainstorming, and concepting that went into each of them; not to mention the hours you spent laboring over the finer details of the comp.

Can you blame them? Clients don't understand design processes, nor should we expect them to. So how do we effectively communicate these kinds of concepts without spending hours blowing a budget? If clients are more involved in the Web design process, are they more likely to trust your final design? In this presentation, Samantha will talk about the Web design process, discuss how Drupal can affect that process, and explore methods to include client feedback early so that you save time in the final stages of your project. She will talk about design kick-off meetings, the right questions to ask, moodboards, style tiles, and other methods that help avoid making a comp that turns into a nightmare.


Intended audience: 
This is for anyone who designs websites, works with designers, oversees design, or deals with maintaining client relationships. Design process is a rarely talked about topic in the Drupal design community, and it holds the answers to so many of our common problems.

Questions answered by this session 

Question 1: How do I keep http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell from happening to me?

Question 2: What are some common methods used to hold a successful design kick-off meeting?

Question 3: What questions should I be asking my clients, both up front and throughout the entire design process?

Question 4: What methods are available to establish a common visual language between the designer and the client without having to spend precious hours designing multiple photoshop comps?

 Question 5: What are moodboards and style tiles and how can I leverage them to create more powerful designs? When is it right to use which? 

 

Drupal As a Mature Software Industry


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/drupal-mature-software-industry

Track: Business and Strategy


Experience: Beginner

Drupal will become a billion-dollar industry in the near future. The number of companies with >$1 million annual revenue from Drupal work is on the rise, as is the number of companies with >$1 billion annual revenue who now also sell Drupal services and products. Drupal is clearly becoming a mature software industry.

But what does it mean to be mature? Who thrives in mature software industries? How is our industry segmented? And, importantly, how does this compare to software industries that have come before us?

This talk will attempt to dissect and inspect our Drupal ecosystem, and compare it to other mature industries. After attending you should be able to better answer questions such as:

• Where does my company fit in the Drupal ecosystem?
• What untapped opportunities might there be in the Drupal ecosystem?
• What roles will the elephants (billion-dollar software vendors and integrators) play as they become more and more interested in Drupal?
• Is my company big, robust, diverse, focused, or agile enough to survive in a mature Drupal software industry?

Intended audience:
 Please attend this session if Drupal is your business, or if you’re considering entering the market as a Drupal business. This session will also be interesting to evaluators, analysts, and anyone new to the community who wants to learn more about it. This session should serve as an introduction to the Drupal business ecosystem, and will hopefully provide a good overview of where the Drupal business community is at.

Questions answered by this session

• Question 1: What is the current segmentation of the Drupal software industry?
• Question 2: Where does my company fit in the Drupal ecosystem? 
• Question 3: What untapped opportunities might there be in the Drupal ecosystem?
• Question 4: What roles will the elephants (billion-dollar software vendors and integrators) play as they become more and more interested in Drupal?
• Question 5: Is my company big, robust, diverse, focused, or agile enough to survive in a mature Drupal software industry?

 

Major Trends In Online Publishing Today, and Where Drupal Fits In 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/major-trends-online-publishing-today-and-where-drupal-fits

Track:  Business and Strategy

Experience: Beginner


If you have been following online news and media lately, you know that the trends change fast -- one day content is king, the next: mobile is the answer to everything. We get it right, and we'll see big, national/global publishing brands embrace Drupal. But if we get it wrong, there is no shortage of resourceful, proprietary software vendors ready to take the space. If you're hoping to build in Drupal for the burgeoning market of online publishing, you are the perfect audience for this presentation/discussion.

From our experience selling Drupal online publishing to major news brands, we'll let you in on what's ruling the CMS software decisions, at large scale, how big publishing companies feel about crowdsourced content and mobile, and what they say they need more than anything (hint: it's not banner advertising). Then, we'll engage in a discussion about what Drupal has (and what it doesn't have yet) to meet these needs.

Intended audience:  This session is intended for those interested in the online news market, and how Drupal distributions and products are received with this audience. 

5 Questions it Answers:


• How ready is Drupal to be used for big publications?
• What do online news publishers want out of their software apps?

• How are CMSes, open-source and Drupal included, evaluated against alternatives, during the sales process?
• Where does Drupal fit as far as publishing in the Open Government space is concerned?
•  Where does Drupal stand in mobile publishing?

 

The Drupal CEO Roadmap: Lessons from the Road 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/drupal-ceo-roadmap-lessons-road

Track: Business and Strategy


Experience: Beginner

The last year has seen a dramatic growth in the number of Drupal focused businesses. This is essential to the growth and future of Drupal as a platform. However, we have also seen in the past that having a great technical framework to build from doesn't create a winning business. In this session, we will take a look beyond the technology side of Drupal and share what it takes to run a successful Drupal oriented business.

This all star group of presenters is coming off a roadtrip of doing a "Running a Drupal Shop" panels at many of this past year's biggest Drupalcamps (yea they took this show on the road!) Drawing from these experiences and many past Drupalcon panels, we will kick it up a notch and use a fast paced ignite style of rapid presentation to focus directly on the most key issues and best secrets.

The format and topics have been refined and distilled to 7 concise areas of best practices and lots of great honest advice and Q&A with the audience. Each of the following will be presented by the CEO or owner of a Drupal focused business.

• Vision: Knowing who you are and what you want to create
• Strategy: Finding a Niche in the crowd
• Community: How to maximize your marketing efforts
• Sales: Face the competition and reap your rewards
• Project Management: The silver bullet to establishing order
• Process: How to manage and scale your growth
• Culture: The secret to achieving long term success and profit

 The presenters include:

• Ron Huber of Achieve Internet
• 
Ben Finklea of Volacci
• Dave Terry of Mediacurrents
• Jeff Walpole of Phase2 Technology
• 
Michael Caccavano of Treehouse Agency

• Drew Gorton of Gorton Studios
• 
Glenn Hilton of ImageX Media

Intended audience:  This session is great for entrepreneurs, CxO's, business owners, business managers, agency heads, freelancers, idealists, or any Drupal community person interested in or concerned about making a buck from Drupal.

Questions answered by this session

• Question 1: What type of work is out there for Drupal? How do I position my product or service to get it?
• Question 2: How do I effectively balance community time and billable time?

• Question 3: Where and how do I recruit good people? What are the best practices for contracting for work?

• Question 4: How can I find out what I should charge for my services? What is fair?

• Question 5: Does a distributed operating model work? How can I manage remote employees?

 

Building Drupal Platforms 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/building-drupal-platforms

Track: Site Building and Implementation


Experience: Intermediate

Drupal as a platform is exploding. The way organizations plan and build sites no longer fit neatly into one domain, one design, one set of users, or one site. As Drupal moves further into government and the "enterprise" market, it is no longer being built (or sold) as a single site, but as a platform to meet the needs of multiple business units, departments or agencies both internal and external. These needs can be met through a variety of architectural approaches including installation profiles, multisite, microsites, or virtual sites.

When building Drupal platforms, the CMS itself is now just a central piece of the puzzle, but it is only one piece. There are various decision points based on the different strategies that need to be employed for these more complex forms of site implementation. In addition the hosting and maintenance of a Drupal platform for a single or handful of sites is drastically different from how you should approach hosting 600 sites, and the tools you would use to manage deployments is different as well.

This session will cover real-life techniques used to host Drupal platforms for a US government and commercial clients built to provide a massive platform ready to host hundreds of sites.

Intended Audience:  
For the professional site builder that needs to learn how to plan Drupal platform rollouts.

Questions that will be answered:

• How to choose and plan for multi/micro/virtual sites?

• How to build a platform to effectively allow for flexibly designed sites?

• How to deploy and rollout new sites in a platform environment?
• What tools are used to manage the platform (version control, etc.)?

• How infrastructure can be deployed and scaled and managed over time?

 

Effective Drupal Project Management: Why having a PM that gets their hands dirty is a good thing!


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/effective-drupal-project-management-why-having-pm-gets-their-hands-dirty-good-thing

Track: Business and Strategy



Experience: Beginner/Intermediate

To consistently delivery high quality Drupal projects, good project management is a must. However from a PM perspective, it is easy to stay behind the curtain and leave the guts of the Drupal build-out to other team members. I propose that getting your hands dirty is an important aspect of effectively managing a Drupal project that simply cannot be ignored. This discussion will explore how to get involved early, stay involved without micro managing, and other related tips & tricks to help manage your Drupal projects more efficiently and with greater success.

In addition to the topics above, we will explore:

• Tips based on experience that help a Drupal projects run smoothly

• A (brief) discussion on what a PM should be expected to know about Drupal (& modules) to help facilitate the PM process
• Why project tasking and planning is important to project success
• Things that DON'T necessarily work

• From the PM perspective, what are the different ways you can start a Drupal project

Intended Audience: Project Managers, Drupal business owners, Business Analysts, Drupal team leads, or anyone involved in managing or constructing Drupal project teams.

Questions answered by this session 

• Question 1: Why should a PM be involved in everything from tasking to testing and everything in between?
• Question 2: What level of involvement for this upcoming Drupal project should I have (as a Project Manager or team lead)?
• Question 3: What constitutes the optimal team structure for different types of Drupal projects?
• Question 4: What methodology works best? Scrum, waterfall, both or neither?
• Question 5: What type of client involvement works best?

 

CTool Plugins and Exportables 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/ctool-plugins-and-exportables

Track: Coder


Experience: Intermediate

CTools provides two new tools that are great for module developers. CTools Plugins allow for a more robust hook system and exportables helps get configuration out of the database and into code.

This presentation will demonstrate how to use both tools and discuss how they enhance module development.

To gain the full benefit of this presentation, experience in the following is recommended:


• Creating modules
• Familiarity with the drupal hook system
• Familiarity with how configuration data is stored in the database.

Intended audience:  The audience is module developers. While it will be most valuable to those that work on contrib modules. It will also provide info for those that work on custom modules for individual sites.

Questions answered by this session

• Question 1: Why Should I use CTools plugins in my modules?
• Question 2: How do I use CTools Plugins in my modules?
• Question 3: How do I implement a CTools plugin?
• Question 4: Why should I use CTool exportables?
• Question 5: How do I make my module's configuration exportable?

 

Design Thinking 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/design-thinking


Track: Design and UX

Experience: Intermediate

Design has the power to influence our core values, our identity, our expectations and our worldview. Design brings clarity and enhances meaning. It is time to reshape our understanding of the value of design.

We have an opportunity to develop sustainable solutions for our online campaigns, sites and apps. This is where design thinking can really change the future. On this panel we'll tackle the why and how of moving through steps and deliverables that will make your project awesome.

Everyone at this session will walk away with useful resources to begin to create their own design systems and use solid design thinking.

Intended audience: Designers, UX, IA, Frontend Devs and those involved in business/organizational communication. This is a session that reaches out and equips those that shape the presentation and messaging of any website.

Questions answered by this session

• Question 1: What is design thinking?
• Question 2: How do you create a complete design system?
• Question 3: What is the process needed to create an excellent design system?
• Question 4: How to apply your design thinking to any Drupal project
• Question 5: What are the essential deliverables in a design system?

 

Introducing OpenPublic: the Government Drupal Distribution! 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/introducing-openpublic-government-drupal-distribution

Track: Business and Strategy

Experience: Beginner 

The OpenPublic project builds upon the experiences of government web sites such as the White House and the New York State Senate which have successfully used Drupal to build open gov oriented sites. These projects have demonstrated that a “government 2.0” platform is possible using Drupal, but building them has previously required a high level of commitment and expertise in Drupal. And while there are many discussions, conferences, and ideas around “open government,” we have not yet seen a major effort toward an extensible, powerful platform to meet these varying needs while maintaining the rigorous standards and security measures necessary to properly power government sites while serving citizens with open and accessible information.

 Through an emerging collaborative effort, OpenPublic will be a free, open source, Drupal distribution that government entities can use as a platform from to rapidly build and deploy affordable, standards-compliant public information websites. 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

• Question 1: What do government sites need from Drupal or a CMS?
• Question 2: How does a distribution like OpenPublic work and how is it put together?
• Question 3: What does OpenPublic do out of the box? How can it be customized or extended to specific needs?
• Question 4: What use cases can OpenPublic solve for an organization?
• Question 5: How can I extend or contribute to OpenPublic?

 

Massively scaling sites by offloading functionality and using MongoDB 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/massively-scaling-sites-offloading-functionality-and-using-mongodb

Track: Coder

Experience: Intermediate 

High-traffic websites (as in millions of page views per day or week) that still use a single database for writes can choke on high-volume user-submitted content (comments and ratings) and forms (contact, requests for information, job applications). Writing to a single (master) database creates problems not only for scale (holding db connections and I/O), but for replication and backups (large tables take forever to re-initialize a slave, and create backups). It becomes important to be able to write these sorts of things to a secondary database/storage entity. I'll cover how to successfully write to a different database, including how to still use Drupal's database API (hook-schema, db_write_record, etc.) and to cover pitfalls and successes.

Some applications just don't make sense as a Drupal module, in spite of the fact the primary functionality will still take place on a Drupal site and needs to integrate with it. These reasons may be for simple scale (need to store in something like MongoDB) or the cost of a Drupal bootstrap is too expensive (making tiny, but tens of thousands of AJAX/JSON requests). I will cover how to reuse Drupal APIs when it makes sense, and how to write a separate web service that Drupal can talk use without it being a Drupal module.

Intended audience:  Developers looking to build large-scale sites who haven't built something that big before. Developers looking to build complex applications that need to integrate with Drupal, but don't necessarily need to be *in* Drupal.

Questions answered by this session

• Question 1: Why offload site functionality and not just build it in Drupal?
• Question 2: Why MongoDB and how do I use it?
• Question 3: Why use a secondary MySQL database (or database cluster)?
• Question 4: But Drupal's APIs give me what functionality I need. How can I do all of this without reinventing the wheel?
• Question 5: Besides scale, what other advantages do these techniques have?

 

Drupal Module Coding: Leaner Techniques for Faster Websites. 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/drupal-module-coding-leaner-techniques-faster-websites

Track: Coder

Experience: Advanced 

Problem: Drupal often gets "credit" for being a memory- and CPU-hungry content management system.

Solution: The session will describe latest code-design best practices that, when used in module development, provide better resource profile and decrease memory footprint of Drupal-built projects.

We will show how to leverage frameworks like CTools to write leaner, yet extensible modules and what impact the best practices used in this style have on the performance and scalability of the system.

Intended audience:  Drupal module developers with substantial experience writing Drupal code, who want to write better, leaner code.

Questions answered by this session

• Question 1: Why is writing leaner modules important for you and Drupal in general?
• Question 2: What are some of the problems with the way modules are written?
• Question 3: How should you write a module that accepts plugins?
• Question 4: How should you write modules that have complex configuration?
• Question 5: How can you make your module compatible with the Drupal distributions that everybody seems to be talking about these days?

  

Drupal: The Point of Convergence. 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/drupal-point-convergence

Track: Business and Strategy


Experience: Intermediate

Web a mere few years ago was a relatively plain field with a handful of dominant technologies. Fast-forward several years, and welcome to the emerging dominance of disruptive technologies like NoSQL databases, functional programming languages, grid systems and cloud computing. Welcome to the world in which the new kid on the block: NginX fearlessly goes after the web-server almost as old as the web itself: Apache, and often beats it.

Due to the rapidly increasing demand for more scale, more data-processing on the web, the new technologies are here to stay. What is the role of Drupal in the new eco-system? Can it survive the changing demands? What might its value proposition be in 5 years? 

Intended audience: Business decision-makers, software architects and Drupal community members interested in taking a closer look at the changing playing field and engaging in a discussion about Drupal's role in the new Web.

Questions answered by this session

• Question 1: What is causing the changing demand for technologies on the Web?
• Question 2: What are the various disruptive technologies that have emerged and are here to stay?
• Question 3: What is the role of Drupal in the new eco-system?
• Question 4: What is Drupal's value proposition in 5 years?
• Question 5: What niche is the most well-suited for Drupal going forward and why should you still love Drupal?

 

Making Drupal Admin Simple \ Usability for the backend 


URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/making-drupal-admin-simple-usability-backend

Track:  Implementation and Config

Experience:  Intermediate

 This session will demonstrate how to:


• organize data (nodes, cck, etc),
• simplify navigation, and

• enhance front-end and back-end theme

To create websites that:


• are easy to administer,
• reduce the need for extensive training and/or documentation, and
• extend the overall lifespan of the website structure. 

Included will be:


• The questions one needs to ask when building out data types,

• How to modify front and backend themes to prompt easy editing and administering
,
• How to use help to actually help users,
• How to implement these concepts in Drupal 6 and 7
, and
• What tools you will need along the way. 

This session will be geared for the beginner to intermediate level Drupaler. However, in order to gain the full-benefit of the information provided, prior experience with installation, theming and configuration of Drupal as well as the CCK and Views modules is highly recommended.

Intended audience: The main audience for this session is the Drupal authenticated user. This session will benefit the casual once-in-a-while editor to the administrator tasked with supporting various roles.

Questions answered by this session

• Question 1: What can I do to reduce the cost of training and documentation?
• Question 2: What modules are out there that can help make my site easier to maintain?
• Question 3: What UI tweaks will have the greatest impact on usability?
• Question 4: How have things improved with D7?
• Question 5: How do I add additional help to my website?

 

Improving Query Performance Without Hacking Core 


URL: https://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/improving-query-performance-without-hacking-core

Track: Coder

Experience: Intermediate

The Drupal database structure and highly-customizable field system make for great sites, but can also cause a problem with poorly constructed queries. As your site grows, queries that perform well one day may not the next due to additional features or an influx of content.

This session will cover how to identify if you have a problem with your queries and what tools are available to help you. We'll look at some common query problems and how to solve them, and cover some common Drupal queries that can run slow. We'll also give an overview of reading the query execution plan ( focusing on mysql and postgres ) and how to use that knowledge to identify solutions for better query performance.

We'll then look at the changes in the query system from D6 to D7 with a specific focus on the changes that affect your ability to alter queries. We'll take a look at how to use Drupal 7's new DBTNG system to modify core and views queries for performance, add filters to queries, send queries to slave servers, or otherwise alter the query object.

We'll look at a few real-world queries, and how you can improve them dramatically with just a few lines of code.

Intended audience: Drupal developers of all experience levels, especially developers of medium-to-high traffic sites or sites with a large quantity of content. Attendees will learn where to look to find problem queries, how to identify and solve common query problems, and how to take that knowledge and apply it to your Drupal site.

Questions answered by this session

• Question 1: How to find queries that may be responsible for site crashes.
• Question 2: How to read an execution plan and what are some things to fix if they show up.
• Question 3: What are some views configurations that can result in poor performance, and how can I make them perform better?
• Question 4: What are the differences between modifying queries in D6 and D7?
• Question 5: How can I use the DBTNG system to alter a query?

So Vote!

Here they all are again as quick voting links - we would really appreciate your time to click through and vote on any you would like to see.

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/avoiding-frankenstein-website-des...

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/drupal-mature-software-industry

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/major-trends-online-publishing-to...

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/drupal-ceo-roadmap-lessons-road

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/building-drupal-platforms

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/effective-drupal-project-manageme...

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/ctool-plugins-and-exportables

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/design-thinking

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/introducing-openpublic-government...

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/massively-scaling-sites-offloadin...

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/drupal-module-coding-leaner-techn...

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/drupal-point-convergence

URL: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/making-drupal-admin-simple-usabil...

URL: https://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/improving-query-performance-with...