DrupalCON Boston: Site Building track

Posted on February 18, 2008 by agentrickard

Well, it's now official. We are ready to announce the Site Building track of DrupalCON Boston.

First, a big hat tip to Addison Berry (add1sun) and Victor Kane for helping get all this organized. And a note to the submitters: We reviewed 54 strong proposals for only 16 conference slots. Decisions were made carefully, along the following criteria:

• Some panelists were invited by the committee to address specific topics. These account for half of our sessions.
• Sessions featuring panelists discussing broad issues were generally favored over sessions featuring single modules or ideas.
• We wanted to have some true hands-on sessions to help people solve specific problems.
• With one exception, presenters could only get one session selected.

So, with that out of the way, here's the list. We are very excited, and hope you will be as well.

• Performance tuning and optimization of high traffic Drupal sites by Khalid Baheyeldin + *
• Drupalcon Tutorial: Best practices in development environments, staging, build management, and production environments by Neil Giarrantana + *
• Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn + *
• Using Drupal with External Data Sources by Ken Rickard + *
• Mail, Notifications, and Messaging by Jose Reyero +
• Selling with Drupal: Ecommerce and Ubercart by Greg Bear +
• Drupal Security - Best Practices and Process Discussion by Greg Knaddison + *
• Druplash and Druplex: Content-Managed Flash and Flex sites powered by Drupal by Brian McMurray +
• Training Drupal Developers by Karl Scheirer
• Drupal as a GIS/Mapping Platform by Jim Craner +
• Themeing with the Theme Developer module by Moshe Wietzman
• Mapping business requirements to Drupal modules: a gap-fit process by Boris Mann *
• Building a groups site - explore the backend of groups.drupal.org by Moshe Weitzman
• Site Recipe: Tracking Event Results With CCK and Views by Karen Stevenson *
• Panels 2 and Nodequeue by Earl Miles *
• Drupal and the Knight Foundation by Gary Kebbel +

+ Indicates a multi-presenter session.
* Indicates an invited presenter.

We tried very hard to hit the themes we laid out during session planning. Our thinking was that we wanted to cover some topics that affect the day-to-day operations of Drupal-powered web sites. We also wanted to emphasize some of the cooler aspects of Drupal -- particularly how it can be used by non-technical people to accomplish amazing things. Our target topics were to help people :

• Create a foundation for development and deployment of Drupal sites
• Rapidly create a site with a Drupal specific workflow
• Build sites without coding
• Use Drupal as a platform

I think we came pretty close to hitting these goals. We also had to combine several topics into larger sessions. At least three of the panel discussions started life as solo presentations, a tribute to the spirit of collaboration in the Drupal comminity.

Well, lastly, I want to apologize to those of you who are learning that we did not select your panel through this format. We simply did not have the resources to send individual notes to all of the people who proposed sessions.

And if you're coming to Boston, give Charlie a call for some hockey tickets....