DrupalCon CPH day three

Summing up day 3 - the last day at the conference for us. You can also check out day one and day two.

10:00  Lesser known Drupal 7 (link) Queues

• Job queue API
• working queues (on cron run)

There also seems to be backport of this for D6. implementations of queues:

• sql (in core)
• beanstalkd (contrib)

Pluggable caches In drupal 6 you could swap the whole cache implementation, in D7 you can swap any cache bin:

• bootstrap cache (new in 7 -> variable cache, modules and theme list, registry and hook cache)
• page cache (can be swapped by a null cache on sites that already have an external cache (varnish, nginx))

Pressflow has external cache (null cache) and is actually much like a backported D7 performancewise.

• Block cache: Doesn’t work as soon as you use any node access mechanics (so same issue as in D6 ;)
• Render cache

D7 also has (crazy) built-in support for ESI (edge side includes). ESI is used to cache specific elements on the page. Renderable arrays

• Drupal 7 has a completely reworked rendering pipeline.
• Even the whole page has a renderable array.
• Heavy processing (SQL) can be delayed as late as possible using #pre_render callbacks

Flexible database drivers New database layer : php PDO Use case were this might be useful:

• automatic slave health monitoring
• site specific initialization sequence
• automatic query tagging
• document oriented storage (mongoDB)

File streaming

• no need for shared filesystem anymore

Session handling

• D7 has a completely new session handler
• Anonymous user on D7 will not receive a cookie at all
• Careful fragile: don’t store anything in sessions if not necessary because it will break your page cache

Keynote: the Design of HTML5 (link) Video is online here! This was an amazing (one of the best ever keynotes on Drupalcon) talk about HTML5. It was so fast paced and interesting I didn't even make any notes, but if you want to read about it instead of watching the video check the liveblog at drupalradar.com. Some keywords:

• pave the cowpath
• degrade gracefully

Drupal HTML 5 modules & links:

• boron
• html5_tools
• html_base
• groups.drupal.org/html5

You can really start using html5 today, IE needs js creating the new elements and be aware of the vaildation tools limitations. Quotes:

• "In case of conflict consider users over authors over implementators over specifiers over theoretical purity" (Priority of constitiencies)
• "Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept."  - robustness principle (Postel's law)

13:30 Drupal performance boost solutions (link) Pretty general talk abour various way too boost your performance. You might also be interested in our our blog-post about frontend performance in Drupal. 14:45 Views 3 (link) Views 3 has got some amazing features. There are however UX issues: (13 boxes is too much) - join/follow the discussion for that here. Also it's not yet entirely stable.

• use the dev instead of current alpha  (at time of writing)

16:00 Developing iPad/iPhone/Android apps using Drupal as a base system (link)

• speaker: @sumitk
• webkit growing
• 40% internet traffic mobile 2013
• native apps are more capable then browser framed
• titanium
• http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/developing-apps-iphoneipadandroid-using-drupal-base-system
• http://civicaction.com/blog/sumit

16:00 Writing better CSS for Drupal (link) Mverbaar really addresses an urgent problem that should be fixed for Drupal 7. See his presentation on slideshare. 17:30 Closing session Drupalradar did live video streaming covering the closing session which had an appearance from the kittenkillers (video). But the whole closing session video is not available yet I think. There was also the announcement of DrupalCon Chicago in March 2011. Dinner / Evening: Oh, just look at the pictures ;)