Day 2 was definitely a GTD day here. The sessions that I attended focused far more on rubber meeting the road and far less on gee, wouldn’t it be nice… stuff. That is not to say that any huge visions came to me, but it reconfirmed notions that the problems I am having are actually problems and that smart people are going to have to solve them. Ok, so it just made me feel like I’m not dumb for having certain problems.
The first session I attended was called Best Practices in Development, Staging, and Production environments. Eric Mandel, founder of Blackmesh our hosting partner, sat on the panel here as we talked through the various issues facing us all. It focused around the fact that Drupal is a file based system, but also has a lot of metadata and setting IN the database and specifically in HOW the databased is structured (think CCK tables/columns).
This session talked around the edges of how to move things b/w environments. Some focus on SVN/CVS and checkouts, others use a filesystem and rsync. Everyone agreed though that no matter how you do your deployments there is incredible importance placed on having a tested rollback plan for when things eventually go wrong, and that things have much more important restrictions when you are on a clustered/load-balanced environment.
The next solid session of the day focused on performance problems in Drupal. If you have ever done a Drupal site that anyone uses you have most certainly come across problems. This session was chaired by a few industry people that have had experience with large scale high traffic heavy content sites and they broke the problem down into specific areas that they each had some solid expertise in. They focused on web server & database tuning and caching. There were some really good MySQL nuggets in this session, as well as a good explanation of good caching tools to use like Squid and the newer “Varnish”:http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/.
The shining gem of the day though was a roll over session for me. The Training Drupal Developers session was a bit too rudimentary for me, so I went to the Actions, Triggers, and Hooks” talk. The panel consisted of John VanDyke of Pro Drupal Development and that was it. He went into the architecture and concepts behind the Actions and Triggers modules and how they can be used as building blocks to much larger and wonderful sets of functionality. I was kind of blown away and thrilled to see some good architectural pattern and concepts work their way into a pretty procedural and old school architecture of Drupal. John stopped short of saying that all of Drupal could benefit from this type of framework, saying that it is not for building complex workflows or state machines, but the potential for building block functional reuse are dramatic. I will definitely be looking forward to using this in the very near future.
Overall Drupalcon Day 2 was a much bigger success from a technical perspective. I have a VERY long list of new tools to look into and will be posting details about them at “The Agile Approach”:http://www.agileapproach.com