DrupalCamp Vienna 2009 Report - Part 2

3 Dec 2009

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To continue with our report from DrupalCamp Vienna 2009, I would like to fill in with some of the sessions Jozef wasn’t present at. Not that he would be just hanging around but we have decided to split up as the different topics interested each of us to bring as much as possible from the DrupalCamp Vienna.

There were always two parallel sessions running on Friday and even three parallel sessions on Saturday during whole day. So there really was what to choose from. And to keep it more funny (… and healthy :-)) the sessions were in other rooms, other floors, even other buildings. So it was also very nice cardio training :-).

First session I would like to cover was from Saturday - “Theming Drupal - The gap between PHP Developers and Designers”. Raphael (@rapsli) opened one of the hot topics: whose responsible for area between design and development. He described Drupal’s theming system and showed some best practices of Drupal theming. The conclusion is that Drupal developers and themers support each other work hand in hand.
[session slides]

Essential topic for every Durpal website maintainer: Upgrading Drupal. Whether it is from lower to higher version (like Drupal 5 to Drupal 6) or keeping live Drupal site up to date. Florian (@flobruit) revealed some great practices from his expirience in this field. He described a workflow how to update modules or even add custom functionality to live Drupal web site with as less downtime as possible. To mention at least ingredinces for his recipe, you would need:

some STAGE server between PRODuction and DEVelopment server
use versioning control system like SVN, Git, Bazaar, …
drush magic and shell scripts
Installation profiles, Features
… and backup often:-)

To describe whole workflow here is much out of the scope of this post, but I will get back to this topic soon, so stay tuned.
[session slides]

Next session with a bit similar topic but focused on development process - Development workflow and deployment at Absolventen.at - was presented by Klaus Purer (@klausi). Klaus was talking about their team development work at Absolvent.at. Just short list of tools Klaus was talking about:

[Subversion (SVN)[http://subversion.tigris.org/ "Subversion"] - industry standard tool for version control, CVS is really not a choice knowadays. Use branches for features development, bugfixing and tags for releases and deplyments.
Document your code. Really. Also check out new Drupal installation profile called Open Atrium. It offers simple document management, communication tools like blog, issue tracking and can by customized.
Use Simpletest to catch as many bugs as possible.
Examine your watchdog for “File not found” (some dead links ?) and PHP errors (NULL values in arrays ?)
Have separated Development, Staging (testing) and Poduction servers.
Deployment of DB changes:
- manual DB dumps
- for some modules you can export the changes (e.g. Views, Rules)
- custom code hooks
- export Features
use Drush to simplify and speed up your work

The session triggered interesting discussion about versioning systems and their future. Should we use Git or Bazaar ? What about migration from SVN ?

Another great session for Drupal developers on animal friendly topic focused on saving kittens: Clean Customizations: use the APIs and save the kittens. Florian (@flobruit) and Daniel introduced a lot of real-life examples, how-tos, very interesting examples of using Views as tools and many other. Simple need-to-know for every Drupal developer (if you don’t want to kill the kittens).
[Florian's blog post]

Very interesting session by Karoly Negesy (@chx) about “MongoDB: a database for websites” introduced future alternative for regulary used SQL databases. SQL databases were designed and developed a long time ago and to fulfill slightly different requirements than web applications like Drupal have. MongoDB is document oriented database which is very fast and with it’s philosophy fulfills the requirements of CMS system much better than regular SQL databases. It will be very interesting to watch development of Drupal in relationship to database systems like MongoDB.

From conception to realization: A journey through the creation of a website by Marek (@sotak). That was the last session on Saturday I attented to. And it was one great session. As Marek says in his blog, this session was almost Drupal free, but defenitely one of the best session on this DrupalCamp. Marek described entire process of creating a NGO website, from the first meeting, through the analysis, design and development to site launch.

Very useful method for determinig features of the site is so called MoSCoW method. It helps you to define MUST have requirements and cathegorize them into SHOULD have, COULD have and WON’T but WOULD like to have groups. Another great helper to define mood and colorisation of a web site are Mood boards. Just take a scissors, some magazines and put together some pictures that will define mood and colors of your site. Or do it on your computer. It’s a great starting point for creating a design. You can use another tools to extract colors from a picture to color palette and use it as a basis for your web.

Use wireframes to create layout of the pages and have them signed by your client. There are a lot of tools for it, online and offline.

After site’s launch make some buzz around it, write a blog post, present a case study on a comunitty meeting and don’t forget to track your work even after the site is launched. There is a lot you can learn from live site. Check out the statistics, Google Analytics or Chartbeat, very interesting is ClickHeat mapping (Drupal module for it). You will find all mentioned links in the session slides.

Thanks again to all organizators and speakers for great event and educational sessions, you have done a great job. And don’t forget ! The First Slovak DrupalCamp is comming soon !

About the author: David Lukac - @davidlukac is a managing partner in Mogdesign.eu - a Drupal design company. He is passionate about Drupal, music and his beloved family.