DrupalCamp Vienna 2009 Report

This Friday and Saturday (27 – 28 Nov) DrupalCamp Vienna was happening at the Vienna Tech University.  Over 200 Drupalists from Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech, Hungary, USA, Canada, Ireland, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Germany, Argentina and a few Austrians  ;) came to enjoy networking, learn new stuff and share knowledge. Here is a short summary from sessions I was able to attend.

In the first session cgalli showed us "How to build a Drupal website in 40 minutes". He presented the “usual suspects” modules like cck, views, imagecache and using a Marinelli theme he built a basic website for an Austrian football club.

Second session was “Reaching your audience with an Accessible CMS” Shadi Abou Zahra presented on how to make Drupal more usable and high quality. Explained the purpose of W3C and WAI initiatives. Accesibility means that people with disabilities can use the web. He pointed out that any content on the website must be: Percievable, Operable, Understandable and Robust. Key features of accessible web:

• Semantic structures using supported standards
• Images, videos and audio with alternative text
• Layout and font sizes that can be used by keyboard
• Forms and controls that can be used by keyboard
• Consistent and predictable navigation and usage
• Device and browser independant operability

Semantic Drupal is a big thing at the moment and the third session “Getting Your Site Ready for Web 3.0: The semantic Web and Drupal” was a good example of it. Lin Clark explained what the basic principles and benefits of semantic web are. Core benefits:

• Programs and sites can exchange information
• Search engines can display more relevant information in results
• Data mashers can combine data from different datasets to find new and astounding things

Lin also pointed out different approach of Mmachine understandable, RDF, SPARQL, Linked Data, Federated datased, Giant Global Graph and how to use them all to get the best results with Drupal. RDF will be a part of Drupal 7 core, that will make Drupal more semantic. Christian Ziegler shared examples of “Intranet, Collaboration and Project Managemeng in Open Atrium”, explaining why is Drupal easy to use with social networking. He did a short demo of OpenAtrium.com a Drupal Project management and collaboration installation, Organic groups, Features, Storm project management module, CiviCRM. Watch this video to get a better picture of what cloud computing is. “Productivity without web with CCK, VIEWS, PANELS” session by hagengraf was filled with great tips for building Drupal website. Use CCK, Views, Panels as a Lego blocks to create Drupal website as a Lego building, plugging in different features and modules. Modules mentioned: Galleria, Mp3player, Emfield for videos, image, audio or podcasts, Node Relationships. Fago’s session “Rules: How to leverage rule-based automation” presented great workflows to save clients money, developers time and make users happy with creating Rules for automation process. He demonstrated a automated process of notifying and blocking inactive users. “Securing your drupal site” by pivica presented some best practices for having a secure drupal site. Some examples:

• Enable update module
• When using contributed module, check if module is popular, actively mainainted , developer, security holes in past, using db_query, check_plain?
• Consider using captcha; login_security; persistent login; single login; password policy; Salt; Phpids; httpbl modules
• If you don’t know what you are doing don’t use php input filter; Never trust a user input
• Consider disabling logging to web browser on production sites
• Check_plain($text), Check_markup(), Filter_xss(), l(), t()
• Never write and/or execute sql commands manually, use drupal db layer; Use db_query() properly; Use db_rewrite_sql to respect node access restrictions
• Forms api protects you from invalid form data, against CSRT
• Don’t trust js for input validation
• When using ajax use drupal_get_token and drupal_check_token
• Respect and define new permissions, Use menu access arguments
• Be safe in your themes, Write clean template files; Provide custom variables in preprocessor functions

To feel the atmosphere of DrupalCamp Vienna take a look at pictures, tweets, and this amazing Flickr Twitter mashup Last note: there are multiple DrupalCamps coming up in Europe in coming months in Bratislava, Ghent, Essen, Munchen. Looks like Europe discovers Drupal :)