Chennai Drupal Meet - My experience at the Lullabot workshop

To meet all co-drupalers in Chennai was a great experience and very exciting! I shared a brief of my experiences at the Lullabot workshop at Minniapolis.

My experience at the Lullabot workshop (my ppt in text format!)

Lullabot Workshop

Drupal 6

• Increased
• Performance (every version of Drupal, takes care of performance aspects in the architecture)
• Security
• Theming made simpler
• Form API is more versatile, with multi step forms and AAHA integration and support
• Database (people working on oracle integration, architecture has the database handled separately)
• Devel module! (Firebug -à real cool stuff)
• More drag and drop, AJAX features in the user interface.
• A site which is going to be launched in 3 months stick with Drupal 6, CCK Views not ready yet! (Views integration)

Theming in Drupal 6 vs Drupal 5

• In Drupal 5 the theme could be altered using the _phptemplate_variables function. The templates could be altered only from the template.php file. The only way to override the formatting at the module level was to override rendering in the template.php file.
• In Durpal 6 since we have the preprocess functions we can access the templates at the module level!!

Lullabot Team

• Most Helpful
• Consulting - Help Architect a site in Drupal
• Team working on different aspects of Drupal
• Core
• Form API
• Theming
• J-query and Ahah
• Ahah - Asynchronous HTML and HTTP,
• Security
• Documentation and Training
• Provide Training material
• Screen casts/ Videos or Articles
• Podcasts

A Drupal Project

• Theming to done as a wire frame
• Photo shop file
• Drupal team to decide how the regions are going to be designed
• Create a markup file in HTML
• Then hand the mark up file to the Drupal team
• New features not available to be modules
• Modules back in Open Source for others to use
• On completion of Project, the client must be able to maintain the same easily – Importance of Usability improvements in Drupal 6, admin interface has drag and drop/ AJAX features
• Working with Open source
• We must not look at proprietary code!
• Put the code back into the community
• The community help is fixing bugs
• Improved features
• You have a whole lot of new ideas
• 
  

Acquia

• Acquia = Drupal as Redhat = Linux
• The founder is the Dries Buytaert, the original creator and project lead of the Drupal open source web content management system
• A new software company that will provide value-added software products and services for the Drupal social publishing system
• Carbon - commercially supported distribution of Drupal 6
• Spokes - update notification service for the Carbon distribution
• Caliper - spam-blocking and content monitoring network service
• Yellow Jersey provides training and certification program

Sony

• A big company that uses Drupal: http://www.myplay.com
• A team of about 25 developers
• Involved in creating custom module(that they role back into the system Drupal)
• Working on upgradation and maintenance

What the workshop gave me?

• How they work?
• Professional
• Organized
• Friendly
• Inspiring!!
• The power of Open Source