We had a very busy weekend at DrupalCamp Montreal over the past two days. All the sponsors and lots of volunteers from the community came together to make the event a success. About 200 attendees showed up, some from as far away as Boston and Guelph. We've certainly grown a lot as a community since our first camp of about 50 people in 2008.
McGill University hosted the event for the second year in a row, this year at the McIntyre Medicine Building. The venue was perfectly suited to the event, with two large lecture halls and a room providing translations for sessions in the main lecture hall. There was also a room open for BoFs, which allowed for lots of useful conversations on subjects like GPL, front-end performance, Ubercart, and Aegir.
There was live streaming video of the main lecture hall, so sessions were available in real time for those who couldn't make it to the camp. Videos of all the sessions will be online in the coming weeks. The camp was the most bilingual we've ever had, with lots of sessions given in French, translations of certain sessions provided, and almost all of the content on the camp website posted in both French and English.
Evolving Web presented at five sessions during the camp. Descriptions and slides from all our sessions are listed below.
Solr Architecture & Ajax Integration
The session on ApacheSolr, Lucene, and Solr-Ajax integration was given by Matt Corks, from Koumbit, and Jeff Wallace and Alex Dergachev from Evolving Web.
Matt covered the ApacheSolr module which integrates Drupal with the Solr search engine. He also discussed some related modules, including as Apache Solr Views, Apache Solr Facet Builder, and Apache Solr Multilingual. Matt's slides are online at http://www.koumbit.org/en/articles/using-apache-solr-drupal.
Alex followed up with a segment on Lucene, the full text search API, and Solr, the search engine which implements Lucene. He explained how Lucene generates search queries and listed some useful extensions, including Spell Checking and Highlighting, and PDF indexing.
Jeff presented a segment on integrating an Ajax layer on top of ApacheSolr, so that the browser can interact directly with Solr, leading to a more responsive search experience.
Architecting Drupal Sites with Panels
Suzanne Kennedy gave a talk on using Panels 3, including a demo of creating custom Panels pages.
Breaking down a Drupal module (For beginners!)
In his presentation, Jonathan Pullano provided an introduction to Drupal module development. His presentation revolved around a taxonomy revision module he created. He reviewed the list of hooks that he used to create the module, and provided a glimpse into some of the challenges that developers new to Drupal will encounter.
Monitoring Your Drupal Server and Site
Jonathan Villemaire-Krajden presented on monitoring your site with Nagios. He included topics such as writing Nagios plugins, setting up automated responses to problems, and using Nagios extensions for logging and graphing.
Configuration Management with Chef
Jeff Wallace gave a presentation on setting up configuration management with Chef. He gave an overview of configuration management tools, the advantages of using the Chef framework. He also provided a demo of the Chef.
Using Drush
Daniele Degano and Alex Dergachev presented on how to use Drush. It included step-by-step instructions for installing Drush, using Drush commands, and writing your own Drush commands.
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