Programme & Sessions

There are a lot of theme snippets available in the Theme Guide. There is not, however, a lot of information about PHP which is the language that makes up these snippets. If you're tired of copying, pasting and praying and are ready to understand some of the magic behind those snippets, this session is for you!

In this session you will learn how to manipulate and master:

• The very, very basics of PHP and the popular theming engine PHPtemplate
• Variables and tpl.php template files
• Arrays and objects and other crow-bar-worthy data containers

Action-packed, info-filled, mind-bending fun. Lightning talks are super-short presentations.

We'll divide our session of 45 minutes by the number of people who sign up to give a Lightning Talk, and that's how many minutes short each talk will be. That includes set up time, so if you have slides it's a good idea to get them on to the presentation laptop in advance to maximise your speaking time.

But what can you possibly cover in 3-5 minutes? Quite a lot. But the point is to cover the basics, demonstrate one key idea, pose a question, or promote a project or event.

For nearly ten years I have used open source software tools to earn a living. It may have started as the "me" economy, but over the last decade I have become part of the "we" economy. I rely on complete strangers to build me the tools that I use daily; and other complete strangers rely on the work that I do too. I have deployed open source solutions for government agencies, non-profits and for-profit companies. Everyone wants to know, "What's the catch?"

In this 45 minute presentation we'll explore the underbelly of the open source world and address the questions:

In this session we will go though the benefits we had from the implementation of a domain switching module for Drupal called Domain Access. This module allowed us to produce the perfect system to manage websites for any industry that has a head office > regional branch model.
Each branch has its own website, Head office can add content to any or all branches at once, while at the same time branches can add content to their own sites as well.

Come along to discuss the state of Drupal training.
Let's explore questions like:
- Who needs training? users? designers? developers? usability experts? security specialists? sys-admins?
- What does best practice look like?
- When will the Acquia / Drupal Association certification program be ready?
- Where are the resources? Can we share them? Can we build on them?
- How can we work together to train our users and colleagues, and extend our own skills and knowledge?

Dave Hall will discuss what aegir is, why you should use it and how he uses it. Aegir allow system administrators (and developers) to quickly and easily manage the deployment and updating of their Drupal sites. If you are running more than 10 or so drupal sites, you probably should be running them in a multi site instance with aegir, if you don't believe me, you should be convinced by the end of this session.

Dave has been using aegir since the 0.2 alphas to deploy and manage the largest know production multisite instance of Drupal with almost 2100 sites running off one code base.

The web CMS market is commonly segmented into 3 tiers:

• Top tier - large enterprise level proprietary CMS's such as Interwoven Team Site, Vignette Content Management Server, Stellent Web Content Management. These a very sophisticated products and are expensive to licence and implement. They are generally part of larger Enterprise Content Management suites including EDMS, EDRMS, Digital Asset Management, and collaboration components.

Background to the http://fixmystreet.org.nz project, using Drupal to emulate FixMyStreet.com touching geo, iphone, APIs, workflow and more.

If you don't know them, they will hurt you. No matter how expert you are, there are holes in your knowledge, and when things go wrong you usually blame what you know the least. So the culprit could be that database, the regular expression engine, the XML parser, the thread engine. What if the problem is between the chair and the keyboard instead?
This talk will give you some general insight on the art of software development, encouraging users to rant less and improve their own practice.

At last year's DrupalSouth, I spoke about "Ned", Egressive's internal project management system. This talk provides an update to the story.

Egressive is now actively managing our development projects and tracking staff and contract developer time using "Ned 2" on Drupal 6. In addition to providing Egressive with tools to manage our development resources in realtime, and build invoices based on actual time worked on customer tasks, customer representatives can log in and submit new tasks and refer to existing tasks and time against them.