Drupalcon Szeged: What I'm Missing

Well, I'm not in Hungary, and it's a drag. Drupalcon has begun! It looks pretty exciting, but at EchoDitto I think we're collectively keeping our fingers cross for Drupalcon DC.

Still, I'm doing my best to review the stuff coming out of Szeged. So far it's just a few sets of slides, but I'm optimistic that we'll get some podcasts or maybe even Qik streaming before too long. Inspired by Alex's list, here are the sessions I'm bummed to be missing — not that I could have physically attended them all, of course. But these are the ones that look particularly interesting to me:

Drupal Search: Where are we? Where are we going?

This is a session I would've loved to attend, as ExoDitto Justin Miller gave a talk about his work with Apache Solr at a DC Drupal Meetup a while back that left me intrigued. Unfortunately a lot of our projects wind up with the client saying "Drupal search is kind of lame", us replying "Yeah we know, want to spend some hours on implementing something better?" and them deciding, "Nah, it'll do." And, you know, fair enough. It's definitely okay, and usually that's going to be good enough to meet users' needs. But I would like to get my hands dirty with a sexier search solution one of these days. It's at least good to know that Core Search is getting some new features.

Caching and performance improvements

How to make your Drupal site's backend speedy. The moral, based on the description: when you finally move your site to D6 it will get magically faster. If it's not fast enough, look at memcached. Oh, and install XCache or APC, for pete's sake. It's easy!

No slides yet, unfortunately, but based on the description and having recently had to deal with a number of unwieldy sites, this is a panel I would've loved to attend. For my part, I'll add that all the caching in the world won't save you if you're missing an index on a column — and you might be surprised where they're missing. I recently got burned on some geographic queries because location.module doesn't index its eid column (which usually corresponds to nid). Adding indices is rarely a bad idea (although of course sometimes it is — I'm awfully helpful, I know).

Front End Performance – How to make your website blazingly fast

How to make your Drupal site's frontend speedy. The moral, based on the description: turn on CSS aggregation before launch (early enough that you can fix whatever problems it causes). Use YSlow for Firebug and do what it tells you. The mention of Apache tuning in the description makes me think he's probably also going to talk about gzipping content, which is a good idea but also something that can lead to weird and hard-to-diagnose problems. I would've liked to hear any other tricks the presenter recommends, though — this is frequently a bigger factor in client satisfaction than backend performance.

A new aggregator for Drupal 7

I really like hacking around with RSS. I've heard Alex talk about the new aggregator a bunch of times, and it's exciting stuff. I've come across a dispiriting number of homebrew aggregation projects built around Feed on Feeds. It's okay, I guess, but Drupal is poised to overtake it (at least within the realm of cron-based PHP aggregation solutions — at some point you'll still want to write a long-running daemon in something less webby, of course).

Spaces and Context Modules, Tools for Site Building

Another presentation from our friends at Development Seed. I've heard Jeff speak about Context before, and it sounds interesting — I'd like to get a clearer sense of how much of it is a tool to put easy, efficient code-requiring tasks into userspace and how much of it can replace section-detecting code I'd rather not write (and rewrite, and rewrite). One thing's for sure: I am happy to let other people muck around with Drupal's menu system, and for that reason alone I wish I could be in Szeged to have Jeff explain Context to me. I'll admit to being less interested in Spaces, if only because I hate anything that has to do with Organic Groups and am deeply suspicious of efforts to build on top of it. But it'd probably be good for me to learn more about it.

I, Drupal: Leveraging Drupal 7's introspective code registry

Drupal 7 examines your code and splits seldom-used parts into separate include files to reduce bootstrap time. In other words: D7 == magic. Coming from Crell and chx, two guys with impeccable Drupal credentials, this is among the Drupaliest of the Drupal presentations at Drupalcon (whew). Crell has a good explanation over at his own site of what this is all about. I haven't yet touched Drupal 7, I'm ashamed to admit — we tend to need a lot of contrib modules for our projects, and don't want to stick a client into the early part of a version's lifecycle. But this all sounds extremely cool — even if its necessity does make me a little sad about PHP's essential lameness.

jQuery in Drupal, part 2: advanced

I love all things jQuery, and have to admit that I haven't done much AJAX stuff in Drupal recently.

Field API and Fields in Core

Figuring out the CCK module developer's documentation is painful. I could definitely use a guided tour.

RDF storage back-ends

Frankly, I just need someone to explain why I should be excited about RDF. I've been playing around with Crowbar recently, a headless DOM-space screenscraping tool that spits out its collected data in RDF, and so far it just seems like a huge pain in the ass (particularly if you're not a Python devotee -- good luck finding a working Ruby gem to parse it). I may someday drink the RDF Kool-Aid, but I need someone to mix it up for me first.

The Panels API: Diving Down the Rabbit Hole

We've begun using Panels2 for nearly all of our client projects for a while now, but we mostly just leverage the simplest parts of the module's API. I've love to hear about what I'm missing.

Messaging and Notifications frameworks

JP's had to write some workaround code recently to make some old, high-email-volume sites utilize PEAR libraries instead of trying to shove out tons of messages on a single HTTP request. It sounds like not only is this problem being solved, but that we're getting a bunch of new goodies along the way.

Drupal Databases: The Next Generation

In my experience whenever changes are coming down the pipe that will break everything, it's a good idea to learn about them as soon as possible.

But the above is just what I find personally intriguing. Check out the schedule — what good stuff have I missed?