Beginner

Are you new to DruaplCamp LA? Want to get the scoop on how things work and what to see?

Join us for a pre-camp cup of coffee and a quick introduction to how to get the most out of DrupalCamp LA. We'll have some recommended picks for beginner sessions, and we'll answer any questions you may have.

Agenda:

UC Irvine Conference Center

• Parking: $10/day, must display permit on dash
• WiFi: UCInet Mobile Access - Register as a Visitor of UCI
• Anteater Steps: just outside lobby doors
• ATMs: upstairs on plaza
• Anthill Pub: upstairs, 6PM private party
• Starbucks: upstairs on ring road (Sat only)
• UCI Bookstore: 10% off coupon Saturday only
• Lounge area: between Doheny Beach & Pacific Ballroom (tables, power)
• Open campus, do not leave things unattended

Pacific Ballroom Lobby

• Elevator (between Pacific Ballroom C & D)
• Restrooms (across Pacific Ballroom lobby)
• Registration Desk (badge pickup, check-in)
• Help Desk (Questions & Answers)
• Coffee & water table (please recycle)
• Sponsors (thank them for supporting DCLA)
• Jobs Board, also http://groups.drupal.org/la/jobs
• Schedule: subject to change, check frequently
• Twitter: #dcla #drupalcamp #drupalcampla

Saturday Schedule

• 9:00a-12:00p: Morning sessions: Beginner Track
• 12:00p-1:15p: Lunch on your own - walk over Watson Bridge to University Center
• 1:30p: Keynote: Kieran Lal of Acquia - Pacific Ballroom D
• 2:30p: Afternoon Session
• 3:30p: Group Photo & break: Anteater Steps
• 4:00-6:00p: Afternoon Sessions
• 6:00p-10:00p: Private Party at Anthill Pub

Sunday Schedule

• 8:00a: registration, check-in
• 9:00a-12:00p: Morning sessions
• 12:00p-1:15p: Lunch on your own - walk over Watson Bridge to University Center
• 1:30p-4:30p: Afternoon Sessions

Sessions: skill level

• Beginner
• Intermediate
• Advanced

Sessions: Categories:

• Site Building
• Design & User Experience
• Business & Strategy
• Code & Development
• Commerce
• Performance & Scalability

Sessions/Rooms:

• Pacific Ballroom C & D
• Moss Cove A & B
• Doheny Beach A & B
• Doheny Beach C & D: BoFs (Birds of a Feather, informal discussion)

Questions?

• All Volunteer camp, help out where needed
• Help Desk (Pacific Ballroom Lobby)

Join Kieran Lal, Technical Director of Business Development at Acquia for our Keynote session: The Drupal Revolution

Come contribute to Drupal Friday before DrupalCamp LA. We'll be coordinating with Midwest Drupal Summit and Capital Camp on a Drupal codesprint! Come contribute together. This will be an All-Day event ... and all levels of contributors welcome to join! If you don't know how, we'll teach ... or you can just watch, learn, ask questions, hang out and have fun!

A few of the organizers likely won't be able to help (or even show up) before lunchtime. However, we'll have space available and IRC #drupal-contribute is sure to be busy. But the doors are open (even if you're early) and if you'd like to help lead in the morning, just come do-it! If you want to help coordinate in any other ways to make this sprint more effective -- please contact me!

What is the Drupal Association and why should you care?

Once you care, what should you do?

The Drupal Association does much more than presenting DrupalCons. Find out what is on our agenda (other than total world domination, of course).

If you make some or all of your living using Drupal (or want to) or you own/run/work at a Drupal shop, you should take a look at what we do.

New to drupal theming and site-building or still learning? Do you really want to know "Am I doing this right?" Or maybe you're tried of doing things the "hard way" or just not sure what are the best practices? This session is tailored specifically to beginners who want to check in with their process, learn some new tricks, and ask questions. There is a lot to know about Drupal and there are many ways to accomplish the same goal. So there are no absolute right answers here, just suggestions and discussion.

Overview of Potential Topics:

• Leveraging contributed modules.
• Interpreting Design and Backend needs.
• Slow site? Common performance pitfalls.
• Do I really need to know PHP?
• Tools that will make your life easier.
• Sub-theming and responsive theming.
• Site building and successful content strategy.
• Coding standards.

Beginners of all levels are welcome, but we will be talking "drupal" so a basic familiarity is helpful.

Your Drupal site launched! Now you need to know the best ways to support your site as it grows. Or maybe you've had your site for awhile (or taking over someone's work) and its starting to show some wear and tear. In this session, we will talk about methods and tools for supporting your site over the longterm.

How to manage the different groups that might be contributing to your website and their various levels of Drupal know-how.
How to audit your site and detect problems.
Security Reviews
Monitoring your site for trends.
Updates and Upgrades
What are the best ways to turn to Drupal.org and the Drupal community for support?
How to create awesome documentation.

Join in and share your best practices (or horror stories :)

Responsive Web Design, because progressive enhancement is better than graceful degradation. You probably need responsive web design and you don't even know it. Responsive web design is the concept of developing a website in a way that helps the layout adjust according to the user’s computer screen resolution. Take SONY.com. Wouldn't it be wonderful if that beautiful site would render correctly no matter what screen size it's being viewed on?

It does: http://mattkersley.com/responsive/?http://sony.com

More examples:

• http://mattkersley.com/responsive/?http://foodsense.is
• http://mattkersley.com/responsive/?http://earthhour.fr
• http://mattkersley.com/responsive/?http://w3conf.org
• http://mattkersley.com/responsive/?http://mediaqueri.es
• http://mattkersley.com/responsive/?http://fourkitchens.com

You get the point.

You need responsive web design when:
YOU’RE STARTING FROM SCRATCH
Developing a whole new website or web application is a challenging process. You won’t know if the site will be successful until it’s live and in the world, so creating a separate mobile site or a mobile app in tandem with a website project could be a big waste time and money. It’s more efficient to get your new site performing well before you create an additional mobile site or application.

YOU WANT TO KEEP COSTS LOW
Solid responsive solutions require additional design and front-end development time, but doesn’t too heavily impact application development. It could take around 20-30 per cent longer to develop a responsive site, but it’s still faster than creating an additional mobile site or app. Developing a site this way also means that you only need to develop, manage, and maintain the one site, so it can reduce these costs too.

YOU WANT IT TO WORK EVEN WHEN NEW DEVICES ARE RELEASED
A mobile site needs to be able to recognize the user’s device; when new devices are released, the site needs to be updated. As the responsive solution only recognizes the browser’s width, no new updates would need to be made. This means it’s much more future-proof and scalable.

Come to this session and learn about bleeding edge topics like:

Progressive Enhancement consists of the following core principles: 

• Basic content and functionality should be accessible to all web browsers.
• Sparse, semantic markup contains all content.
• Enhanced layout --> external CSS.
• Enhanced behavior  --> external JavaScript.
• End-user web browser preferences are respected.

Focuses on the content. (not browsers)
Media Queries consist of a media type and zero or more expressions that check for the conditions of particular media features.

For example:

@media screen and (min-width: 480px) {
   .content { float: left; }
   .social_icons { display: none }
   // and so on...}

Update: Here are the slides and the video .

Drupal offers a lot out of the box, but most likely you'll be drawing on the enormous contributed module repository for more. If you haven't been using Drupal for long, you might not be aware of the goodies that long-time users know. This session will offer an overview of the some of the best contributed modules for Drupal 7, helping you get off to a good start. I put "top" in quotes because that's subjective, although I think what I show will be considered the good stuff.

I gave a presentation like this last year as well, so depending on the audience, I might either skip the modules I talked about last year, or cover the same stuff, but leave off everything that was only for Drupal 6.

If you have suggestions or ideas, leave a comment!

Join us for a group photo on the Anteater Steps, just outside the back of the conference center. Exit through the doors near Pacific Ballroom lobby.

Look at drupal code and all it is a mysterious text? This session aims to fix that.

We will go over basic PHP/programing, including:

Functions
Variables
Loop structures
Arrays
Objects
Other Interesting Things.