Seems like only yesterday we were putting the finishing touches on our presentations for DrupalCon Chicago.  (Who am I kidding? It feels like ages ago...could this winter have dragged on any longer??)

The slowpoke spring of the northeast US notwithstanding, DrupalCon London 2011 is coming up fast!  Our smartypants team members have pitched a whole new slate of sessions to feed your brain and inspire you to new heights of Drupal greatness!

Energy.gov Case Study

Roger López (zroger)

Later this year, the US Department of Energy will re-launch Energy.gov on Drupal. The technical requirements of the project were driven by an internal need to consolidate the publishing and editorial resources of dozens of program offices. This session will discuss the challenges of developing a platform that will serve the current and future needs of the department, and the tools and techniques we developed along the way. We will also be discussing the projects that will be contributed back to the Drupal community on behalf of the work done for this project.

Beyond Project Management: Program and Portfolio Management in the Drupal Space

Nicole Lind (nicki0867)

When you go from a few big projects a year to a few big projects at a time, a whole new set of challenges and questions emerges.  In this session, Nicole takes you through these new considerations and draws from her experiences as SVP Operations at Treehouse Agency (and beyond) to help guide you through the process of understanding the differences between project, product, and program management, and the key issues that arise when you have multiple major projects on the table.

Deploying in Drupal 7 Without Features

Neil Hastings (indytechcook)

In Chicago, Neil took us through advanced Features usage, including discussion on when you should not use Features.  In this session, he continues the exploration of using (or, in this case not using) Features in your Drupal projects with topics including better development processes, reusable configuration deployment, code-centric development, and code-based entities, bundles, and fields.

Creating a Block Interface your Editors Will Love

Neil Hastings (indytechcook)

Roger López (zroger)

Stop me if you've heard this one...."I hate the Blocks admin!!"  Despite the usability advances of Drupal 7, Blocks administration remains an area of confusion for many content editors.  In this session Roger and Neil take a look at what's causing all the confusion and how you can create a custom interface that works with (and for) editors.

Pages on a Silver Platter: Automated Front-End Testing and Tuning with Jenkins

Steven Merrill (Steven Merrill)

Brian McMurray (bmcmurray)

Continuous Integration (CI) tools have become incredibly popular for helping to maintain and deploy Drupal sites. Steven Merrill introduced some of these ideas at DrupalCon Chicago earlier this year. But wait, there's more! While CI is usually thought of as a tools for moving code and running utility scripts like cron, it can also be a valuable tool for QA teams and front-end developers. In this session, we'll talk about how we've been using Jenkins to help QA teams and front-end developers to ensure that business-critical functionality stays working, to monitor front-end performance over time, and to automate processes like compressing CSS and JavaScript.

BONUS: Check out this post on tidying up HTML with Jenkins for a sneak peek at what we're talking about.

I'm Leaving You: The Risks of Dumping your Old CMS for Drupal and How to Manage Them

Nicole Lind (nicki0867)

Obviously, we love Drupal. We also, however, realize that it is a very big deal to decide it's time to move an enterprise-level site from its old CMS. No lie, there are risks inherent to such a migration, and failing to address those risks is not doing stakeholders or providers any favors.  In this session, Nicole will discuss these risks and what to do about them, along with setting realistic expectations and getting reluctant end-users on board.

Vote for us!

Like what you're seeing?  Hop on over to our session pages on the DrupalCon London site and let the organizers know with your votes!