Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - drupalcon

GVS DrupalCon Chicago Session Slides and Videos

Ezra — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:22:19 +0000

Below you'll find a list of sessions by GVS folks as well as links to slides when the presentations are complete.

We'd love to get your feedback through the official DrupalCon Chicago session evaluation form linked from each session, as well as on Twitter!

Introduction to Module Development
Presented by Ezra
Session slides
Video
Example code .tar.gz | .zip

Drupal Security for Coders
Presented by Greg
Session slides
Video

Community benefits of the Drupal.org redesign
Presented by Lisa with Neil Drumm, Kieran Lal & Chris Strahl.

Certifications and Drupal: Three strategies
Presented by Greg with Aaron Winborn and Jeff Robbins
Session slides
Video

Building Conference & Event Websites in Drupal with COD
Presented by Ezra, Ben & Lisa
Video

COD Day Stage lightning talk
Presented by Greg

DrupalCon Copenhagen wrapup and recovery

lisa — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:49:55 +0000

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.

Some Trainings at DrupalCon SF selling out - and GVS Proposed Sessions

Ben — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:21:08 +0000

DrupalCons are great for learning new things and the conference in San Francisco this April will be no different. What will be different is that this year there are formalized training sessions happening the day before the conference really starts. If you want to get a more structured day of training before the somewhat unpredictable sessions start, you can.

Training sessions from GVS: Security and Site Building

The team at GVS is teaching two training courses and offering a handful of sessions. Our security training course was just increased to hold more participants and our course on site building is also looking to fill up. If you're interested in either please sign up soon!

GVS Proposed Sessions for Drupalcon

Session voting just started and we've proposed a variety of sessions, including training, module maintenance, using theme preprocess functions, and site-building. Here's the full list:

The trainings and sessions will be lead by 5 of our team members. We hope to see you at DrupalCon!