DrupalCon Washington DC Notes

Developer notes from the conference

These are my personal notes of the sessions I followed at DrupalCon DC in Washington. They primarily serve for myself and Youth Agora to recap the conference. All the sessions were recorded and put online. Most sessions have follow-ups in the comments of the sessions page on the DrupalCon website.

Building APIs that rock

Jeff Eaton from Lullabot explained us the need to structure modules around APIs, and having your modules expose API functionality. It will eventually make code more readable and easily extendable by other modules. Interesting!

Keynote: The Sate of Drupal

The bi-annual keynote of Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal. Some interesting notes were the profile module that got kicked out in Drupal 7 (finally!) with CCK fields in core, and the support of RDF as part of the semantic web out of the box!

More Than Search: How ApacheSolr changes the way you build sites

Acquia introduced us to ApacheSolr, a faceted search engine on top of Lucene, the open-source search platform. The information architecture has changed, and ways to organize content in content management systems have changed. Websites are much more complex than they used to be, visitors are too varied to have one website view fit them all, and content does not fit in a hierarchy anymore. Moreover, if we have dynamic user contributed content, why do we still insist of having static menus?

Search could solve some of the above issues, but it is still not a priority in Drupal. Most websites even ignore search, and the ones that do not ignore search put their search boxes in not very visible places (for example, right top instead of centralized). Popular websites such as google, ebay or amazon all have their search boxes in the most visible parts of their websites.

So, why did search die in Drupal? It was too slow and too limited. However we shouldn't give up on search but instead use different strategies, and one of those could be Apache Solr. Solr supports faceted search, indexes metadata, and provides better search results. It is now used on drupal.org (running Drupal 6) and provides much better results already now. One of the drawbacks of using Solr is the need for a dedicated server, but Acquia will provide cloud services for indexing content on their servers. Some of the killer features will be multi-site search and location-based searching.

Drupal and the Geospatial Web

Interesting talk about using geo-tagged data, and how to do take advantage of that in Drupal. Definitely worth following.

OpenID, Drupal, and the Open Web

Interesting talk about the open web and Drupal's role in bootstrapping the revolution.

Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care

Interesting session about the semantic web. The presentation kicked off with a great screencast showing the potential of RDF. Unfortunately, the video is not yet published on the net. Notes from this session can be found here.

BoF about the semantic web

We participated in a Bof (Birds of Feather) session around the semantic web. Here some notes:

Exhibit module for data visualization
Workflows for adding semantic data markup: OpenCalais as a top-down approach to semantically tag content, zamanta plugin for firefox for the bottom-up approach
Now people have to explicitly make their feeds available, with semantics all data will be open (eg with RDFa)
http://dbpedia.org and http://linkeddata.org
SPARQL integration in views is a nice idea
Modules to check out: RDF, RDFCCK, RDFevoc, SPARQL, MOAT, Exhibit, Neologism
Using RDFCCK and RDFa you will need to patch CCK
Yahoo Terms
Visinav RDF crawler
Yahoo Search Monkey cannot handle SPARQL at this moment, you will need to index pages yourself

Usability Testing at the University of Baltimore

Very interesting session unveiling some of the major usability drawbacks in Drupal. Make sure to have a look at http://www.drupalusability.com.

Communicating Data Online: Data Visualizations and Opening Data

Showcase session about using geotagged data in Drupal.

Staging and Deployment – A Panel Discussion

In Drupal it's very hard to synchronize staging and development environments, as most of the drupal configuration and data is stored in the database and cannot be put under version control. No good solution seems to exist here, and people go from reproducing changes from development in production to database dumps to real database surgery.

A solution to this problem could be to provide import/export functionality in the Drupal core (using hooks), and allow contributed modules to implement their module-specific import / export functions. This is an idea we heard a couple of times at DrupalCon, but nobody seemed to know if something like that would end up in the core. It seems that for the moment you need to continue using tools such as dbscripts or deploy (not released but interesting).

The Business of Open Source

Cool presentation about how open-source can fuel businesses. Check out the slides and the session notes. Some things to learn: never keep things in private, virtual developer teams actually work (look at Lullabot, they don't have an office), diversity of experience (open-source businesses seem to look for people even in hard economical times). Check out this book: small giants.

Drupal Multimedia

Embedding external media in your drupal website. Combination of FCKEditor with Imagebrowser looks cool, as it integrates nicely with imagecache. Drupal considers files to be physically stored in the filesystem, but this is a wrong assumption as we move to embedded content. Antonio introduced his new slideshare module that integrates with emfield.