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DrupalCon SF 2010: The Heart of Open Atrium: Context, PURL and Spaces

In this presentation I'll look at three core technologies that drive the IA and user experience of Open Atrium: Context, PURL and Spaces. I'll explain the history and development of the ideas behind each, explain their respective roles, and show how they can be used together to create something greater than the sum of their parts.

* Context is a module for triggering reactive behaviors within a page load. Controlling block visibility, menu trails, page classes, and page template layouts are examples of things that fall into its jurisdiction.
* PURL is a library for capturing and abstracting request handling that goes beyond what the Drupal core menu system provides ($_GET['q']). Detection of request components, like subdomain, path prefix, user agent, or file extension, and sustaining their presence is its primary role.
* Spaces is a generalized configuration override framework. In theory it allows you to "customize everything, for anything." In practice it allows things like custom group colors and features, per-user dashboards, and multisite-like usage of a single Drupal install.

Audience & format

This presentation

* Will be technical. We will read code, look at database tables, and generally geek out.
* Will help you better understand Atrium. If you are an experienced Drupal developer or user and were utterly confused by what is going on in Atrium, I will explain the guts of the system fully.
* Will show you how to use these tools in your own projects. I'll walk through common site building problems that can be addressed with one or more of these modules.
* Will give you things to think about. The problems addressed by Context, PURL and Spaces are not new, not solved, and not easy. There are other strong approaches inside and outside of the Drupal community and I will explore future approaches to these problems.


This movie is part of the collection: Community Video

Audio/Visual: sound, color
Keywords: DrupalCon 2010; education; entertainment; library; marketing; media; non-profit; Intermediate; Advanced; Expert

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Reviewer: video2010 - - April 23, 2010
Subject: Glad to be of help
My team and I were glad to get these files up on the site so Drupalers around the world who could not be in SF can take advantage of. I will be adding 'lessons learned in video recording and uploading' to DrupalCon organizing documents; so the future conference organizers can take advantage of. Thanks for your feedback

Reviewer: Whatdoesitwant - - April 23, 2010
Subject: Brilliant
Gowri and the 2010 DrupalCon SF's video team have achieved the unprecedentend feat to upload most of the conferences session videos before it was even over, hitting a hundred (!) sessions the very next day with most of the wednesday sessions still to come. Volcano victims from Europe and others all over the world have been downloading like crazy. The smart trick here was to record only the (live) slides together with the presentation audio. Since any action happens on the screen, this works wonderfully. Presenters are only visisble in the keynote sessions. We need to build on this for Kopenhagen.

Drupal strives to be at the very edge of Internet development and these sessions contain some of the richest information available, much of it not just Drupal specific, enriching the open source community in general.

Young Hahn's session on context, persistent url and spaces is very Drupal specific and one of the more brilliant ones to check out. Serious Drupal front end developers do not want to skip this one. Young Hahn is UI lead at Developmentseed.