Session Wiki

Once registered, propose ideas for presentations below. If you want to hear about a specific topic, fill out a proposal template with the topic details. Be sure to list your self as "Interested" in support of topics. Want to present on a topic? Add your details below and contact us to reserve a time. Deadline to submit Session Proposals = October 22nd, 2008 6PM (CST). CDMUG will post confirmed event schedule October 23rd, 2008 8AM (CST).

Session Proposal # 1 - Search Engine Optimization for Drupal Sites


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • There are a few modules in Drupal that you need for effective SEO, including clear-text URLs, pathauto, meta tags, xml sitemap, and Google Analytics. I'll cover them all.
  • drupalcampchicago.org has been running google analytics for weeks. It has been collecting great data, you can utilize this data during your presentation if you wish.
  • Structuring page templates with SEO in mind

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#1B or 2B (I have to travel over this weekend)

Session Proposal #2 - Drupal 6 Themeing


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Drupal 6 Theming: Come Knowing .css; Leave a Jr. Theme Developer
  • Have you ever heard "All Drupal sites look alike."? They don't have to. Find out where to begin, how Photoshop can help, and how to integrate with Drupal 6. Come and learn how to make your Drupal site distinct.
  • A basic understanding of static .html and .css is required.
  • Crell & Hans both requested to present on Drupal 6 theme, but on seperate days. If we have space, have this presentation on both days with different presenters and key topics.

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#1A: NonProfit
  • Saturday - Crell

Session Proposal #3 - Drupal & Libraries


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Showcase library-related Drupal projects in the Chicagoland area.
  • Talk about future plans and aspirations, field questions and compare experiences.
  • So whether you've done a project or would like to do a project, this event is for you. We had a great time doing this in Anaheim for ALA and it's good to organize something similar for the home team.

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#3B

Session Proposal #4 - Server monitoring, graphing, & optimization


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • How to monitor Drupal related services - MySQL, Linux system, Apache, etc.
  • Present graphing solution for drupalcampchicago.org in cacti
  • Compare Cacti vs. Google Analytics data
  • How to setup Drupal Google Analytics (quick overview)
  • Graphs are not only great for a developer, but even better for clients to visual issues.
  • Provide evidence to your hosting provider about downtime, high ping latency, server load, and more
  • Please contact Matthew with ideas you want to learn about for this session. Anyone want to preset with me?

Preferred Session

  • Saturday
  • Any day

Session Proposal #5 - Drupal Multisites


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • How to setup multiple sites in Drupal
  • How to upgrade multiple drupal sites with cvs
  • Implementing security updates
  • Sharing data between multisight installs (single database vs. shared database vs. syndicated content)

Preferred Session

Session Proposal #6 - How to install Drupal


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Go over local install on Linux, Mac, & Windows
  • How to Drupal US-Keychain
  • Methodology for creating your own Drupal install repository
  • Using Profiles
  • Basic security principles and setup

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#1B
  • Saturday -

Session Proposal #7 - 10 must have Drupal modules


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Basic intro on how to install & setup a module
  • Go over installation of each module (some require config)
  • Review 10 of the must have Drupal and show off examples of them on real sites.

Preferred Session

  • Session #2
  • Session #3

Session Proposal #8 - Sell stuff online with Übercart and Drupal


Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

Ubercart is an open source e-commerce program designed to integrate fully with the content management system Drupal. Despite its German-sounding name, the company that developed it is based in Louisville, Kentucky. Development on the cart began two years ago, and a stable version 1.0 was recently released. It is based on the prior version of Drupal, version 5, and is currently being transitioned to work with Drupal version 6. Ubercart is available for free under the GNU Public License and is available in 44 languages.

Ubercart's first main focus was to sell physical shippable products, however it was become so much more. What is unique about Ubercart is that its tight integration with Drupal allows you to seamlessly combine a fully-functional community, business or news Web site with e-commerce. This allows Ubercart store owners to sell members-only access to premium paid content, with automatic renewals and expiration of user access. The integration with Drupal also gives the option of using blogs, social networking, forums, newsletters or custom displays of content. It also allows the store owner to offer paid file downloads such as music, videos, e-books and software.

By the end of our presentation you should walk away understanding why Acquia, Lullabot, AOL, Sony BMG, and so many others sell online with Ubercart.

Check out a demo site for a sneak peak!

Preferred Session

  • This realistically will need 2 hours would prefer last 2 hours on friday either A or B
  • Friday - Session#5A and 6A or 5B and 6B*

Session Proposal #9 - JavaScript, jQuery, Drupal: Oh, my!


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • JavaScript: It's not just for calculators and image rollovers.
  • This session will look at what can be done with JavaScript (and especially with jQuery) in Drupal 6. While the presentation will be geared toward those with development experience, JavaScript is often used in themes. For that reason, theme developers may find the track useful, as well.

Preferred Session

  • Saturday

Session Proposal #10 - How we built drupalcampchicago.org


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • xen virtual machine/Debian - static ip, domain name
  • Graphing & monitoring systems we established
  • How registered users automatically appear on the attendee page with a limited profile
  • Peter can go over the salamander theme hacks
  • Hosting, DNS
  • Modules we used
  • Wiki Content Types
  • User Roles
  • This was an easy site to build and would be easy for beginners.

Preferred Session

  • Friday

Session Proposal #11 - Yes We Can: Building Beautiful and Sustainable Sites in Drupal


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Using examples from actual projects, this session will talk about how to work with creative partners and colleagues to develop visually stunning and highly functional sites in Drupal.
  • Can a great Drupal site continue to live after the security upgrades stop?

Preferred Session

  • Saturday - Session#**

Session Proposal #12 - Drupal in the Enterprise


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Drupal & Oracle
  • Who in the enterprise is using Drupal?*
  • How can we get Drupal further into the enterprise?

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #13 - Drupal 7 to Date


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

This session will provide an overview of the work done in Drupal 7 to date, as well as recent trends in Drupal development. As that will likely not take up an entire hour, come with questions you want to fire at a Drupal subsystem maintainer! I can answer questions all day, but you only get an hour.

Preferred Session

  • Saturday - Session#**

Session Proposal #14 - Getting to "I Kick Ass"


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

learning-curve.jpg

  • Upgrading, patching, monitoring
  • Navigation, Menus, Taxonomy
  • Front Page Customization
  • Theme and Template Modifications
  • (Too much for one session? Probably.)

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #15 - Drupal internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n)

Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • translations for views
  • How to Build a Multilingual Website with Drupal
  • Pitfalls and exceptions: multilingual vocabularies, panels, views and menus
  • http://groups.drupal.org/node/15177

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #16 - CCK in Drupal6 (the basics)


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Stories, Pages, Blogs, so what? When you need "Real" Content you need CCK, and it isn't that hard to use!
  • visit the module page to read more about CCK
  • learn how to define any content you want with the fields of your choice, including checkboxes, radio buttons, text fields, drop-downs, etc.

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #17 - VIEWS2 In Drupal6


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • OMG! it's Views on STEROIDS!?!? And once its explained to you... it makes sense!!!
  • Wonder if Views Bonus Pack will port to D6
  • How and why to embed a view in a page template.

Preferred Session

  • Saturday - Session#**

Session Proposal #18 - Soup to structure: making a real site from a pile of nodes


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Mapping paper plans to live sites
  • Simulating "oldschool" directory structures with Views
  • Breadcrumbs, menus, and related content -- the evil trifecta

Preferred Session

  • Saturday - Session#**

Session Proposal #19 - How to Drupal freelance


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • NOT how to get clients
  • How to accept payments from clients.
  • How to deal with paying taxes as an independent consultant.
  • Health insurance.
  • billable hours vs BILLABLE HOURS (actual hours spent on project)
  • Outsourcing other developers to help meet a deadline.
  • Traveling and being a freelance drupaler.
  • The perfectionist developer and self-imposed scope creep.

Preferred Session

Session Proposal #20 - Drupal/meetup.com API


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • present the meetup.com API even if it isn't finished.
  • also bring up topics/benefits about meetup.com.
  • maybe show an example of the meetup.com talking to a live drupal site?

Preferred Session

Session Proposal #21 - Panels2


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • What it is.
  • How it works.
  • How to actually make it work the way you want.

Preferred Session

Session Proposal 22 - Mapping/Location

Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Google Maps API
  • Other mapping APIs
  • How easy is it to setup a location in Drupal? What info can you get from it in Drupal?

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #23 - Dreamweaver & Drupal


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • How to make your life easier with Dreamweaver
  • Drupal themes in Dreamweaver
  • Whatever happened to that extension that was in the works?

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #24 - Debugging Drupal with watchdog, xDebug, firebug


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Watchdog

  • xDebug
  • Firebug
  • Firefox Web Dev Tools

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #25 - Drupal University Classes/Projects


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Many schools are sponsored by Microsoft which ultimately influences teaching students asp.net for web applications. Why not go with

  • Which schools are teaching Drupal
  • Which schools have a project which use Drupal
  • Students who have used Drupal for a project

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #26 - CCK in Drupal6 (advanced)


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • If you already know CCK, but want to know what's new in Drupal 6:
    • Drag n drop goodies: Manage fields UI, 'Add more' buttons, re-arrange values
    • Views 2 integration - node and user relationships and more
    • Multigroup - potential new way of combining multiple value fields that need to stick together
    • D5 to D6 upgrades - issues and solutions
    • CCK APIs

Preferred Session

  • Saturday- Session#**

Session Proposal #27 - WindyCitizen.com - Building a News site when you know nothing


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • A look at WindyCitizen.com, a social news site for Chicago, Warts and All
  • Brainstorming ideas for how to fix problems vexing the site's first-time Drupal developer

Preferred Session

  • No preference

Session Proposal #28 - 10 Cool SQL commands for Drupal


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • There are various SQL commands which can grab data about Drupal
  • Maybe some basic SQL commands to start off "use" "select" "where" "count" etc.
  • How to dump a database for migration/backup
  • drupalcampchicag.org example - how many people registered as vegetarian? select count(*) from profile_values where fid=24 and value='Vegetarian';

Preferred Session

Session Proposal #29 - Website Performance - Front End and Back End


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Starting with talking about the work of Steve Souders, who wrote this amazing book on High Performance Websites
  • Yslow: Important firefox extension to test and improve your site's perforamce.
  • CSS/Javascript Caching with apache/php
  • A few mysql/database tips to improve performance.

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session# Any as long as I can attend my other interested sessions :)**

Session Proposal #30 - Get to know your Drupal API


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • A discussion of the must-use Drupal functions when doing custom theming and module building.
  • I'd like to get a co-presenter or two for this to make sure all the bases are covered. If not I'll work the functions I use most often into a few example modules.
  • Functions I'd like to mention include, but are not limited to: l, t, theme, theme_image, drupal_add_js, drupal_add_css, arg, drupal_set_title, noad_load, taxonomy_get_term, taxonomy_get_tree, user_load and views_build_view.
  • If there isn't another full session on the form API, I'll cover what I can on that.

Preferred Session

  • Any time Saturday**

Session Proposal #31 - jQuery, hook_nodeapi and hook_form_alter: the 'Trifecta' for Slick Looking AJAXForms


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • A how-to session regarding best practices for creating slick-looking AJAX forms in Drupal capable of submitting page information without the need for full page submits, and updating the current page based on responses from the server.
  • Discusses the use of jQuery to create effects and interaction between the browser and server, hook_form_alter to get the forms looking just right, and hook_nodeapi to handle requests received.
  • Also, a common design challenge is creating associations between nodes during the AJAXForm submission process. This session will deal with how to handle the underlying logic for creating relationships on form pages using Drupal settings in jQuery.
  • This session will use a live demo of a system in action demonstrating all of the concepts in place, example code during the presentation, and code samples for people to take away.
  • UPDATE: I noticed many of the registrants for Drupalcamp listed themselves as point and click developers, Drupal themers, or just starting. Putting together the presentation to be accesible to everyone.

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session #4**
  • Saturday - Session #4**

Session Proposal #32 - Date and Calendar


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Demonstrate using Date and Calendar in Drupal 6, including:
    • Calendar 2 -- lots of new ways to customize everything using the new Views 2 API
    • Repeating dates
    • iCal feeds
    • Using the date widgets in other modules with the Date API

Preferred Session

  • No preference

Session Proposal #33 - Improving Search with the ApacheSolr module


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Learn how sites like Netflix, CNET Reviews, and Digg search.
  • Installing, and configuring Solr
  • Implementing Faceted Search
  • Content suggestions with moreLikeThis queries
  • Integrating custom fields in 5 minutes or less
  • Scaling search to 100,000+ nodes

Preferred Session

  • No preference, I'm flexible

Session Proposal #34 - Microsoft BoF


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Session to discuss Drupal on Windows. What works, what doesn't, what's good, what sucks.
  • This is a shot at a discussion with a Program manager from the IIS team (Windows web server) who

is interested in making Open Source and PHP apps play better with Windows. Any questions, comments
criticisms, ideas, rants, etc... welcome and appreciated.

Preferred Session

  • Any

Session Proposal #35 - Drupal Basics Q&A BOF


Should it be a session? or a BOF?
Possible Presenters
  • dougvann This is a group discussion, not lecture style.
  • I need a few power Drupal users to help me out.
  • We can split up and help the attendees with their questions
  • Matthew Lechleider

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Get the basics out of the way. Bring your questions. Bring your Drupal projects and get help.
  • What are nodes? What are some tips to navigating the admin menus? How do you change the front page?
  • Selecting modules, installing modules, configuring modules.
  • Depending on who needs what we could divide and conquer and get each attendee the answers they need.
  • How to interact with the online Drupal community [irc, groups, forums, mail lists, etc]
  • I need some Power Drupal users to join me in this one so that we can help each attendee out

Preferred Session

  • either- Session#**

Session Proposal #36 - LDAP servers for Authenticating across multiple sites


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Go from LDAP ignoramous to LDAP novice
  • Find out how to register on one CMS and auto-magically get access to others through the LDAP server
  • Examples include Moodle+Drupal user-tabe sharing

Preferred Session

  • either- Session#**

Session Proposal #37 - Mapping Workshop

Presenters

  • Becw

Interested People

  • Dchakrab

Ideas For Topic

  • State of Drupal mapping
    • Location and GMap
    • searching and displaying locations
  • quick intro to Geo, in theory and practice
  • case study

Preferred Session

  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #38 - Code for a Cause, come volunteer!

This extended session involved the development of a functional, Drupal-based website for a local nonprofit organization, produced entirely on time volunteered by attendees at Drupal Camp Chicago, and led by nonprofit Drupal consultants at the Chicago Technology Cooperative.

Possible Presenters

  • Dave Chakrabarti, Chicago Technology Cooperative
  • Jim Craner, Chicago Technology Cooperative

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • Why do nonprofits love Drupal? Quick overview + samples.
  • Overview of the Code For a Cause project, requirements, work plan.
  • Development of the website, volunteer-based, headed by CTC staff.
  • Discussion + Review.
Preferred Session
  • Friday - Session#**

Session Proposal #39 - Complex layouts in Drupal 6: Important Tools, Useful Patterns, and Handy Hacks

Possible Presenters

  • David Eads, Chicago Technology Cooperative
Interested People

Ideas For Topic:

Drupal theming as always been more rigid and inflexible than it needs to be. With the advent of Drupal 6's template preprocessing system, the designer and developer have significantly more power to easily theme any Drupal element. When Drupal 6 theming is used in conjunction with Nodequeue, Views 2, and the presenter's forthcoming Blocktools module, one can compose extremely sophisticated layouts with a simple menu callback and template preprocessor. This session will cover other common problems in advanced theming: how to use Nodequeue to allow for both structured and freeform content in dashboards and views, saying goodbye to Drupal-added CSS once and for all, and how to override any theme function with just a few lines of code.

Preferred Session

Session Proposal #40 - Introduction to Views


Possible Presenters

Interested People

Ideas For Topic

  • The Drupal Views module is the backbone of nearly all non-trivial Drupal sites. Views is essentially a graphical user interface for pulling items out of Drupal's database, allowing the user to make lists of Drupal content according to taxonomy, node type, content type, or nearly any other criterion.

Many people are coming to Drupal from a non-programming background. Views makes customizing Drupal possible for the non-programmer, but you have to understand some of the options that Views presents. This workshop will take the attendee from no knowledge of Views (but a very basic understanding of Drupal nodes, blocks, and taxonomy) to being able to set up your own Views using your own custom criteria.

Preferred session: flexible

Session Proposal #X - NAME GOES HERE


Possible Presenters

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Possible Presenters

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Preferred Session

  • either- Session#**

Session Proposal #X - NAME GOES HERE


Possible Presenters

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Preferred Session

  • either- Session#**

Session Proposal #X - NAME GOES HERE


Possible Presenters

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Preferred Session

  • either- Session#**