DrupalCon Copenhagen wrapup and recovery

This year's European Drupal conference has sadly come and gone. Ezra Gildesgame, Ben Jeavons, Lisa Rex and Carl Weidemann were in Copenhagen representing Growing Venture Solutions. Here are a few of our highlights. Links to the videos will be added when they are available.

Theme Preprocess Functions

Carl presented Theme Preprocess Functions: an Introduction, where he showed a packed room how to bring and flexibility into the hands of the themer. Preprocess functions are a key component of Drupal theming and when first learned, open up a whole new world of possibility. Carl received some positive feedback on the session and hopes to continue to give it at future conferences, adapting it to stay current with future versions of Drupal.

COD (Conference Organizing Distribution)

Ezra (our COD ringleader) and Ben co-presented Building Conference & Event Websites in Drupal with COD, with Lisa there to lend support. COD is a Drupal distrubution for building event websites.

The primary out-of-the-box benefits of using COD are:

• Proposing and voting on sessions
• Setting a session schedule for the event and for each attendee
• Making it easy for attendees to register, pay and provide profile information
• Managing a waiting list of attendees
• Collecting and displaying sponsor information

Drupal Security

Ben and Gábor Hojtsy co-presented Drupal Security - Configuration and Process. The session covered:

• Common vulnerabilities and what they mean
• Drupal defaults and why you should care
• Trusting site visitors
• How to recover from attack
• Is Drupal secure?

Drupal.org Redesign

Lisa co-presented The Future of Drupal.org with fellow project manager Kieran Lal, former Blue Cheese theme lead Todd Nienkerk and the Drupal.org redesign technical architect Neil Drumm. They covered:

• Why Drupal.org needed a redesign
• How the Drupal.org redesign project is also a redevelopment, and the technical challenges we face
• What project management strategies worked, and what didn't, and what we're learning along the way
• Why the Drupal Association had to hire people
• Overview of our contributors

Scrum and Drupal at the Economist

Ezra co-presented On the importance of DONE: Scrum and Drupal at the Economist with the lovely Rob Purdie, SCRUM Master at The Economist in New York City. Topics covered include:

• Introduction to Scrum
• Why a complete, shared Definition of Done is critical
• Benefits & challenges of having 3 teams working in 3 timezones
• Launchpad and Bazaar workflow for code review and management, pushing configuration changes to production
• Measuring progress
• Getting products 100% Done

Watch the Economist Scrum session video

Views Basics

In Views: The Key to the Drupal Castle, this informative beginners' session, Ezra showed attendees how to create:

• Dynamic photo galleries based on a tag
• A Map of user locations
• A list of blog posts sorted by post date and more

Watch the Views session video

Taking it for the team

On Tuesday, in addition to co-presenting The Future of Drupal.org, Lisa was involved in the Redesign BOF, and appeared in the live Day One wrap up on Drupalradar.

On Wednesday, Ezra was involved in a record three sessions in a single afternoon. Can you say extreme?

The post-conference sprint was quite productive. Carl focused on Drupal.org redesign theming and Lisa contributed more Drupal.org redesign content-related issues and direction. Ben worked with Jakub Suchy and Gerhard Killesreiter on updates to security.drupal.org.

OH: What's funkplaza

You also may have seen tweets with the hashtag #funkplaza. Let us explain. Our wifi account in our apartment was creatively named funkplaza (the original name from Ezra's personal blog), and it quickly became the name for the two apartments that GVS was sharing.

What's next

Post-conference, Ben went to Stockholm, Carl went to Berlin and Lisa went to Tallinn (that's Estonia). Ezra flew home to attend a special concert -- details and link to review forthcoming.

Once we're back to routine, expect more great things from GVS.