Configuration, Set-Up & Performance

The Features module is mostly known for the possibility to share, distribute and re-use bundled sets of configuration. But how can it help you in the development of your next Drupal project?

Aegir is a distributed provisioning system for Drupal that allows you to manage thousands of sites across as many concurrent instances of Drupal on as many servers as you need. It's built on Drupal itself, so that your user interface to the system becomes a 'meta-drupal' site, with nodes representing all of your hosted sites and all of the components of your hosting environment.

Whether you are new to Aegir (or Drupal!) or an experienced developer, you will get a very good idea of where we are in the development of this project and the latest new features we are giving to the community.

Drupal’s taxonomy system helps you to organize content on your website. This robust categorization system is one thing that sets Drupal apart from other CMSs and in combination with taxonomy-enhancing modules the system gets even more powerful.
During the development cycle for Drupal 7, the system received a big overhaul. Besides important API improvements, taxonomy term fields have been introduced. These fields open up many new possibilities and change the way of using the taxonomy system.

Are you using Rules yet? You should! The Rules module can take care of a whole lot of things that previously would require you to write a custom module, and can help you automate processes on your website.

This session will give you:

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This talk will give an overview of using install profiles, aegir and features to manage multiple websites with similar (or identical) requirements. Drupal multisite has been around for years, but upgrading and managing sites in batches can still be a lot of work. These techniques will come in handy even if you have only a single site and want to improve the dev -> production workflow (i.e., no longer making changes in a live environment).

Jacob Singh (Drupal core developer, Acquia DrupalGardens engineer and Media module maintainer) will be showing off some of the new media file management functionalities in Drupal 7 core and contrib.

This session is geared toward site builders and developers, but most of it will be non-technical and appropriate for business leaders trying to grasp the possibilities. We'll be looking at:

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The Apache Solr Search Integration can give you great results right away, but have you taken the time to look in depth at its configuration options? Do you understand how changing those setting can provide a better search experience for your users and focus attention on the content you think is most important?

This session will explain the basic concepts behind the different configuration sections in the admin interface and then show the effect of different configuration options on what goes into the search index, and how search results are found and ordered.

Drupal is a powerful tool that can be configured many ways, sometimes insecurely. Knowing attack vectors against your site and how to prevent them is important for everyone building a Drupal site. In this session, aimed at site-administrators, we'll discuss some vulnerabilities, proper configuration, and what you can do to maintain your site's security.

Topics include:

• Common vulnerabilities and what they mean
• Drupal defaults and why you should care
• Trusting site visitors
• How to recover from attack

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.

We will cover:

• What is page load speed? – Tools used to measure performance of your pages and site – Six Key Improvements to make Drupal “run fast”
  ++ Performance Module settings and how they work
  ++ Caching – biggest gainer and how to implement Boost
  ++ Other quick hits: off loading search, tweaking settings & why running crons is important
  ++ Ask your host about APC and how to make sure its set up correctly
  ++ Dare we look at the database? Easy changes that will help a lot!