The 2011 edition of DrupalCamp Montreal is here! And this year’s feature presenters – including Angela Byron and Jen Simmons – are the cream of the crop. Starting this Friday afternoon, this fourth annual event even has a fresh new concept.
Let me guide you through the numerous sessions being offered this year, all the while adding a little history and context. I will only be touching on the program options that kindled my own passion for Drupal!
Friday
The first day starts strong with Louis-Éric Simard, who will probably attempt to break down the myths about translation modules and translation in general. Last year, Louis-Éric showed us how to use the Services module to develop mobile apps on the Drupal platform. He also invited us all to parachute out of a plane!
Christopher Gervais will be presenting business models based on Aegir, a tool enabling you to manage numerous Drupal sites. Aegir is a particularly useful tool for sysadmins, as it allows them to perform small miracles when managing their sites – for example, updating and migrating between different versions of Drupal is a snap. In 2010, Christopher and Sofian demonstrated how Aegir and Ubercart can be used together. Development of Aegir continues to move very, very quickly and it’s become far more simple to install.
The next session addresses advanced techniques for optimising development internally. Albert Albala’s presentation will talk about Aegir and (mostly) dCycle as tools for managing configuration between the development site, the staging site and the site in production. This session is reserved for the experts.
Saturday
Jen Simmons will open Day Two with a discussion about the web right now, in which HTML5 is becomingly increasingly more present. Jen Simmons created the Bartik theme for Drupal.
And then… My heart is torn! Webform 3.x or i18n in Drupal 7?
Suzanne Kennedy will be describing the very many changes that have been made to the translaiton modules. For the Quebec delegates, translation is a passionate – and inevitable – topic of discussion.
Meanwhile, Andrew Lindsay will be unveiling the new version of Webform.
Feeding Drupal is next, brought to us by Omar Bickell, a strong advocate of open source. During this session, we’ll learn how to use the Feeds module to easily pull data from numerous sources (RSS, videos YouTube, Flickr images, etc.) This practical little module could use a simplified and more user-friendly interface… but this session is a must.
Gábor Hojtsy from Acquia follows, describing how to securely manage a Drupal site. This session is mostly for developers (SQL Injection, XSS, etc.)
The day ends with Poutine Maker, an introductory tutorial to the new Field API. With Drupal 7, the indispensable CCK has been completely integrated into the core of the software and renamed Field API. This also is a can’t-miss.
Sunday
The last day of DrupalCamp Montreal also welcomes Angela Byron, better known as Angie or “Webchick” in the Drupal world. Her presentation – delivered with much verve, I’m sure – will look at how programmers can contribute to the development of Drupal. Angie is truly a high-calibre speaker and probably has many, many groupies around the world.
The two presentations by Jake Strawn and Logan Smyth also look very interesting. I’ve never seen them speak, so this year will be a first!
Gábor Hojtsy from Acquia will deliver a second presentation to give us an overview of the multilingual changes we can expect for Drupal 8.
If open source video doesn’t grab your attention, there’s always Mises à jour Drupal avec Aegir which seems to offer a good opportunity to learn more about Aegir.
DrupalCamp 2011 ends with a presentation by Sylvain Aubé on theming. Attendees will learn how to use sub-themes to avoid having to start from scratch every time. This session will be very interesting to those that like to dabble a bit with Drupal themes.
Have a great camp! Hope to see you there.
