Another month of camps!
Before I say anything… DRUPAL 8 IS RC1!!! Great work to all the contributors that poured themselves into it to get it “done when it’s ready”. It’s looking like a really solid platform to build on down the road. Now..
I spent much of July traveling to Drupalcamps and it was so fun I’m doing it again! ELMS Learning Network will have presentations in the following locations over the next few weeks so if you are looking to learn about ELMSLN or how to optimize your existing Drupal sites and servers they run on, meet up with me at one of these locations!
BmoreDrupal
Baltimore, MD (Oct 9th)
We’ll look at how to improve the performance of Drupal by optimizing the stack it runs on. This talk covers all aspects of Drupal optimization including: Tools for identifying issues, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Varnish / Pound, cache bin management, and contributed modules you can get to make D7 fly. While these concepts will be shown within Drupal 7, many of the same techniques can be applied to Drupal 8 (or Drupal 6 for that matter).
We’ll point to multiple purespeed and other optimization posts on this site, as well as the ELMS Learning Network repository where we keep many of these recommended defaults. I’ll then take a bare-bones Virtual Machine that’s juuuuust powerful enough (at a baseline) to run Open Atrium 7.x and apply the techniques and changes I’m recommending so we can see the performance gains in real time. This is effectively the process I undergo when I come across any inherited server and recently used this to save a Drupal site that was effectively dead when it started missing it’s reverse proxy on calls prior to applying these settings.
This talk draws on a lot of documentation both in and out of the Drupal community and consolidates many of the recommendations by mikeytown2 (@mcarper) of advagg, boost and httprl fame.
DrupalCamp Atlanta
Kennesaw, GA (Oct 16th - 17th)
ELMSLN: Rethinking Systems Design
In this talk I’ll quickly outline the technology architecture powering ELMS Learning Network and how you can utilize this concept in the design of systems going forward. ELMSLN uses lots of smaller scoped sites that are all REST capable in order to achieve a unified user experience for end-users, while allowing for continuous and distributed innovation in educational technology. We don’t know what we’ll have to build to match the pedagogical needs of faculty, we just know that we have to.
It is also important to note that I said we; because ELMSLN is now a distributed group of developers and instructional designers at multiple institutions and organizations collaborating to build a better learning ecosystem. There are now multiple full time developers donated to this effort with adopters outside of Penn State now utilizing the platform.
Come learn about ELMSLN’s architecture which you can apply to any project as well as the state of the project and where we’re going next (hint: http://codepen.io/michael-collins/pen/memxpe ).
DrupalCamp Ohio
Columbus, OH (Oct 23rd - 24th)
Same talk as Baltimore above though this session submission is more detailed.
Ignite talk: Drupal, a Thesis
This is the story of the secret life btopro lived the last 8 years of my life in pursuit of a Master of Sciences in Information, Sciences & Technology… boiled down into 5 minutes. I recently achieved this degree for my work using Drupal to facilitate social change within an organization. The thesis outlines a concept I’ve coined Information Altruism (the new title of my personal blog on the topic) which states that the donation of effort and work devalue and eliminate market potential in existing spaces. This socio-technical theory can be applied to existing information markets to fundamentally alter the way they operate.