Presenting on the Drupal Distributions, OpenPublish and Future Drupal Architecture at DrupalCon Copenhagen.

Posted Jul 9, 2010 // 1 comments

Phase2 will be in Copenhagen! And we have selected a variety of topics that we would like to share our vision on. If you are planning to be at DrupalCon in Copenhagen, this August, check-out the list of proposed sessions and panels by Phase2 and please vote on the ones you might be interested to attend.

• A Look At OpenPublish - the Drupal Distro for Publishers OpenPublish is a packaged distribution of the open source CMS Drupal , tailored to the needs of online publishers. First released just a year ago, it has already gained a lot of momentum. With hundreds of active installations, thousands of downloads, professional support from Phase2, Acquia and their partners, 9 minor releases and two major releases later it is the obvious choice for news publishers who want to get a head-start while implementing their news outlet on Drupal.

  Come and learn why some of the largest and oldest publications have chosen OpenPublish as their publishing platform, how OpenPublish is helping widen the circle of Drupal adoption, what it can offer to publishers, what is coming in the future releases and engage in discussion with OpenPublish authors.

• The State of Drupal as a Web Application & Product platform While Drupal is usually thought of in terms of CMS for web sites, many companies and Drupal shops are starting to use the framework to build web applications/products. This panel will look at some of the products being built on Drupal and will discuss the potential of the business model, from the perspective of Drupal Shops looking to expand beyond a strictly service based business as well as from the vantage point of businesses who are looking for a platform to build their products with.

  A panel representing leading Drupal-based products, will discuss topics that include:

  • Drupal's role in products
  • Key Considerations
  • Who pays for it?
  • Monetization
  • Products as Platform Drivers
• Drupal Distributions: The Dos and Don'ts Drupal Distributions are a hot topic in the Drupal community. This session is intended to share first-hand experience building multiple, popular Drupal distributions: Managing News, OpenAtrium, OpenPublish, Tattler, recently announced OpenPublic.

  Jeff Miccolis of Development Seed and Irakli Nadareishvili of Phase2 Technology will discuss various architectural challenges of building and managing a distribution, solutions such as Installation Profiles, CTools, Features, Context, Drush etc., as well as how to facilitate two-way communications with the community, involve your users and where to get help.

• Drupal Core - Object Oriented? Drupal has been frequently criticized for its "non-OO architecture". While Drupal's architecture is very powerful, elegantly unique and uses many object-oriented design principles on a higher level, it is true that modules are not objects and most of the code is a procedural collection of simple functions. Historically heavy object-oriented design has been avoided for the sake of compatibility with PHP 4.x Now that Drupal only supports PHP 5 it's probably worth to think about more OO implementation.

  What would Drupal look like if we yielded to the pressure and created purely object-oriented Drupal Core? Could we achieve the radical switch as part of Drupal8 or Drupal9? What would be the benefits and drawbacks?

  Presenters are long-time Drupal developers who took time to extensively brainstorm about the problem, wrote and benchmarked proof-of-concept code and would like to share their findings with the community.