Developer

Working with Drupal brings the power of its community to work for you. But it also involves you in that community in ways that you might not expect. We'll cover some of the hidden costs of bringing Drupal into your organization, plus the resources you will need in order to keep your project sustainable.

This will feature lively panel discussion covering best practices for Drupal contributions maintainers and the rights and responsibilities of Drupal users.

Topics that we will cover:

* What are the rights and responsibilities of Open-Source developers?


Out of the box, Drupal is a great system for creating and managing content. However, there are cases where your needs require additional requirements for which users can create, view, edit and delete content. To solve this problem, Drupal provides its Node Access system.

Node Access provides an API for determining the grants, or permissions, that a user has for each node. By understanding how these grants work, a module developer can create and enforce complex access rules.

We will cover some (or all) of the following topics.

The first time I was forced to create a test for a core patch I wanted in D7 I really hated it. But now some months and some pain later I can say it was worth it.

Testing makes our modules more reliable. Even if we have todo a lot of work at start creating a test later on we will spend less time on debugging stuff. Even if our module ceases to work correctly we will be quicker at finding the problem.

Let us take a look how we create tests for our modules by using simpletest. It's easier than it looks and I will help you getting into it! :)

My session will cover:

RRDtool is an established way to log time series data. The algorithm compresses the data to allow you to store it efficiently and averages data to achieve this.

RRDtool is the back-end of many well-known tools such as Cacti, munin, or mrtg, that will be well-known to anybody who has managed a website.

The RRDtool Drupal module was developed by Jeremy Andrews and Gerhard Killesreiter of Tag1 Consulting to allow using RRDtool for measurements that are known by Drupal only and can not be measured externally, such as the invocation of specific hooks.

Selenium is a testing framework which allows anyone - developers, designers, project managers or the client - to record user journeys in their browser and have those user journeys be replayable on anyone else's browser. It also supports whole suites of tests, automating in the browser and automating outside the browser using a dedicated testing server.

Selenium's a great choice for Drupal testing because so much of the functionality you or your client will want to build is browser-based. Also, with a few extra tweaks, Drupal can integrate very nicely with Selenium to produce robust tests.

This is a case study of the work involved migrating a Drupal 5 site to Drupal 6.

If your D5 site only has only core modules enabled, migration is pretty straightforward. Start adding contributed modules to the mix and - as long as you don't use unknown or unsupported code - you can still migrate with a minimum amount of pain. But what about when:

• The migration will seriously break the theme
• The client decides that migration is a good time to completely re-theme
• ... and add new functionality

SQL Server is ask about a lot in enterprise drupal deployments, but since there is no D6 support and D7 support is still in the works, whats a developer to do? We'll explore options from direct SQLServer support for both versions of drupal (and how its taking place), to using migration tools that will synchronize drupal with data in external sqlserver databases.