Expert

This will not be a deep technical talk about how to make your site fast, nor will it be a marketing piece. I will take an in-depth look at the technologies that help Drupal perform and scale to the masses.

I will point you to the technologies and best practices that have been going on lately in the Drupal community, give you a rundown of where we came from and show you where we are going and how to get involved. I would suggest that you have at least a basic understanding of LAMP stack and basic Drupal tuning to get the most from this talk.

Strict juridical agreements can direct the development into predetermined narrow fixed path instead of encouraging agile approach, hence compromising achievement of the best possible results. At our company we have managed to negotiate project contracts that have resulted projects complished in time, below budget and with high client satisfaction. The basis for a great contract is to appreciate the nature of the modern way of constructing a complex website. You must dig into the business goals and abstract the main components of the desired big picture.

"The Cloud" is more than just hyper-hand-waving. There is a monumental shift under way in the global software industry. In the last fifty years software innovation has moved from the mainframe, to the desktop, and now to the internet, aka "The Cloud". This move will upend entire segments of the industry and will have a huge impact on the Drupal project. In the near future, the majority of Drupal sites will be hosted on cloud services and an increasing number of cloud based services will be available to enhance the Drupal platform.

There is an enormous choice when it comes to theming your data. The theming layer makes it possible to create suggestions and create an insane amount of template files, you can override existing theming functions, CCK has the display fields screen and with views you can either choose fields, nodes and other display methods. In big projects, this can lead to an unmanageable amount of places where theming can happen.

Leon Tong, Director of BrightLemon, describes why, who and how to build your own online community using Drupal. This is a strategic presentation focusing on the planning, strategy and implementation of a 120,000 user community by discussing the principles that enabled the successful delivery of a number of large Drupal based social networks.

By specific case studies and examples this presentation will explain how to build your own 120,000+ community.

Questions answered will be:

Why build your own online community?
Who else is building their own online community?

Get the design specifics on taking your site to a higher level of sales effectiveness in 2010, with an inspirational, interactive talk with Ben Finklea. Ben is CEO of Volacci and author of Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization. He describes how to get 40-50% improvements in conversion from conversion-rate-focused design adjustments to a exisitng, well-executed SEO initiatives. Ben offers results from Volacci clients, such as an online retailer in health and wellness. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) efforts yield big results with relatively minor changes.

Running a Drupal consulting firm requires much more than Drupal development or design skills. You need excellent customer service, sales, project management, operations, accounting, recruiting, human resources — the list is huge! So how do successful Drupal firms make it all work?

We'll look past Drupal for an hour and focus on what it takes to run a successful consulting firm. We've assembled a top-notch panel of Drupal firm owners and managers to discuss what works for them and why. Addison Berry of Lullabot will moderate the discussion, and the floor will be open for questions.

Staying on top of the mass of knowledge assets and the flood of news in the enterprise is critical but increasingly hard. In order to address this problem SCMS integrates semantics, knowledge discovery (KD) and collaborative curation.

Apache SOLR is an emerging new technology to support all major Drupal site's powerful search. But it's not just searching that it does.

With Apache SOLR your site can do a lot more than just faceted searching fast and easy. You can use SOLR to power your Views, Panels, Übercart and a lot of other stuff, with some new contrib modules.

During this session we'll take a look at what a distributed company is and why they're a good idea, especially for low capital start-ups. Then we'll dive right in and what I think are the essentials in running a distributed Drupal shop:

• Essential skills you need
• SOHO setup
• How to find the right people
• How to maintain relationships at a distance
• How we get paid
• How to maintain quality
• Keeping projects on track
• Client reactions, trust and full disclosure
• Contracts and our SLA
• Why we choose a niche market