drupal

These are my notes from a talk at Drupalcamp NYC in December 2011 by Sam Kottler, @samkottler on twitter and skottler on drupal.org.

Let's make the LAMP stack go "Vroom!" This is going to be a really high-level overview of performance.

Benchmarking vs Profiling

When we benchmark something, we're setting a baseline to compare against in the future. We want to say "it was this fast this long ago, and here's how we improved." Whereas profiling is telling what is fast and what is slow.

Apache

Has a lot of parameters you can set; I'll cover some basic ones.

Why Make Maps Beautiful?

Google has done amazing stuff with making maps on the web work well. But, Google Maps has become a bit like stock photography; it's not that exciting or novel anymore.

Part of why you want a map to be customized is to match the branding of your site, but maps are also a really powerful way of presenting information to people. The first thing that you do when you look at a map is to say "where am I on this map?" and see where you fit. Maps are a powerful way of presenting information, see the Pakistan Flood Response Map.

by Karim Ratib, infojunkie on d.o. He's the author/maintainer of Views Bulk Operations, Views Hacks, Sheetnode, Feeds Oauth, and Feeds Topics. He's currently a freelancer living in Vancouver.

Objectives

To give you a conceptual overview of how to code views, without going into the details, which can be a bit overwhelming. We'll be talking about high-level stuff. Hopefully by the end of the talk you'll be able to open some Views code and maybe even start coding your own views.

by Howard Tyson

Core isn't really good at either popular type of configuration management. Nothing totally really covers it. I'm in the camp that configuration and content are different but they're connected to each other; exactly where that line is, is not something I'm going to specify.

by Jacob Singh and Aaron Winborn

Jacob:

Media is a module for Dupal 7. It extends the file management capabilities in core. We take the base ways that you can handle files and added enhancements. It's a framework for handling media meta-data such as authorship or quality information, as well as a consistent user interface for managing files. These are the goals of Media.

Peter Wolanin and Robert Douglass work on the Solr search module in Drupal. They both work for Acquia.

Overview

• What is solr and how do you run it locally
• Getting Drupal data into Solr
• Changes in Drupal 7
• Field API integration
• Searching Solr from Drupal
• Modifying what's searched and the results
• Theming search results

The code examples in these presentation work in Drupal 7; the Drupal 6 module is very similar with slight modifications.

First, some definitions:

Entity

An entity is a container for bundles. Entities can contain multiple bundles. Examples of an eitity are Node, User, File, Taxonomy term, Taxonomy vocabulary.

Bundle

A bundle is a set of fields that are treated as a group by the Field API. Buncles are simillar in concept to a node type in Drupal 6. You can have a bundle that describes an article or a photo or a story, for example.

Fields

Advanced Drush
Moshe Weitzman

Drush is the Drupal shell that allows you to affect a Drupal site from command line. You can write scripts to increase:

• Ease of installation and configuration
• Speed of maintenance
• Reproducability of actions

A reaction from the audience (check out the guy to the left)

A Method For Getting Early Estimates Right
Jakob Persson
Co-founder of Node One

Early Estimating

A method that uses your prior experience when making early estimates. By doing so, you can make estimates accurately and more effectively, not just hunches or intuition. Estimating is like taking a blurry picture and trying to figure out what's in it. What you find may surprise you!

What is an Early Estimate?

"Estimation is the calculated approximiation of a result which is usable even if input data may be incomplete or uncertain." -Wikipedia