DrupalSouth Wellington 2010 - The New Zealand Drupal Event Wellington City Waterfront, Saturday & Sunday 23-24 January 2010

Wellington Drupal Meet-up

fiasco — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 02:39:33 +0000

Its been some time since DrupalSouth earlier this year and about time there was another Drupal event in Wellington. So, we're gonna have a Drupal Meet-up on July 8th at Catalyst IT on Willis St from 6pm. We're aiming to have about 3 speakers followed by a general discussion. If you're interested in coming along, please RSVP on facebook

so we can get an idea of numbers.

DrupalSouth Wellington A Success

Bevan — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 07:47:59 +0000

DrupalSouth Wellington 2010 was a booming success! And that would be an understatement. 100 Drupallers from NZ, Australia, North America and Europe came together for 2 Wellington-wet days in a brewery and couldn't stop talking about Drupal!

Here is DrupalSouth by the numbers;

1: Code sprints
2: Tracks (simultaneous sessions)
2: Duration in days
2: Lunches provided
2: Organisers
2: Attendees from parliament (Green party)
3: Keynote speakers from North America (Liz Henry, Emma Jane Hogbin & Angela Byron)
3: Platinum Sponsors
3: DrupliBeanBags
4: Attendees from the IRD
5: Gold sponsors
5: Percent of attendees from Hawkes bay
5: Months to organise
6: Companies involved in the wireless internet
6: Wireless access points
7: Value of each bar token in NZ dollars
8: Silver Sponsors
9: Varieties of beer brewed on-site
10: Start time on Saturday
11: Thousands of dollars turned over in event production
15: Attendees from NZ government agencies (IRD, Greens, NZ Police, various ministries, etc.)
16: Sponsors
16: Percent of attendees from Australia
16: Percent of attendees from Christchurch
18: Age of youngest attendee
20: MBs of synchronous bandwidth
21: Percent of attendees from Auckland
26: Speakers
28: Attendees who also attended LCA the week before
29: Sessions
30: Percent of female attendees
32: Percent of attendees from Wellington region
36: A3 sheets of printed sponsor logos
60: Registration cost
64: Cost of food and snacks per attendee
100: Registrations sold
220: Bar tokens printed

Some of my personal highlights were;

Spontaneous code sprint on Saturday night
Drupli-bean bags
Natasha's Dr Seussian poem about Drupal Permissions
Getting the group photo (unfortunately a lot of attendees were not present at that time)
Drupli-Thank-You-Card signed by attendees
Fast and Rockin' internet
Dave Spark's session on managing clients
Webchick's energy
Satisfaction of pulling off such a magnificent event
Energy among others to organise the next DrupalSouth (See DrupalSouth 2011 and Beyond)

Thank you to;

The organisers for all their hard work and their families for their patience and support.
DrupalSouth's sponsors
Everyone who helped make the internet great
Katie Graham at Delicious Mint and Josh Campbell at Zype and Egressive for their awesome design contributions
Packt, Pearson, O'Reilly and others for great book give-aways and other swag
Speakers for such great presentations
Attendees for just rocking the house!
Mac's Brewery and Restaurant for being so accommodating and keeping the drinks flowing

Read other's post-DrupalSouth write-ups at;

DrupalSouth 2011 and Beyond

Quartz — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:01:37 +0000

Hi there Drupalers and Drupalistas,

It's only been one month since DrupalSouth 2010! Can you believe it?

Already there are ideas floating around about where, what and how the next DrupalSouth will take shape - just look in our forums!

We'd like to consolidate and standardise what the community is thinking.

Help us to help you by taking our 3 minute, 1-page survey.

http://bit.ly/aXFnzB

Please spread the word.

Thanks

How Was DrupalSouth's Internet so Awesome!?

Bevan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:21:56 +0000

DrupalSouth — a 100-person technical conference — had awesome internet. This is how we did it.

DrupalSouth might well be the first Drupal conference with internet that didn't suck. For the first time, I didn't hear anyone complain about connectivity or speed. Everyone had internet access! If I didn't hear about any issues you were having, or if you had any complaints or problems, please let us know in the comments.

Egressive pulled most of this together. Egressive provides both Linux and Drupal services and know a lot of people in the industry. In particular, Rob Fraser's technical networking know-how and contacts at Effusion, IOPEN, Unleash and elsewhere are what made this possible.

Thanks Rob, and thanks Egressive!
IOPEN and members of the Effusion group built a robust scalable wireless network for Kiwi PyCon 2009, just a few months earlier. DrupalSouth's wireless requirements were very similar to PyCon's. DrupalSouth was a little smaller in number of attendees. One difference was that the network data analysis and the Wireless Weather Report (see below) generating were not done on-site but 400 km away in Christchurch using a small real-time data stream from DrupalSouth. Also, Brian Chatterton of IOPEN made a few minor configuration enhancements, renamed the the networks in honour of Drupal's founder and changed the passwords.

Brian Chatterton really understands networking. Technical conferences have such demanding wifi and networking requirements that can not be tested under load ahead of time. And usually they fail. Brian's experience and knowledge has been twice-proven by Kiwi PyCon and DrupalSouth's great wifi.

Thanks Brian!
R2 installed the purple VSDL cable and connection from the DrupalSouth network hub, out the window, up to the roof of Mac's Brewery, across the roof, up the wall of the NZ Stock Exchange building, through a window of TradeMe's offices, and into a spare wall-mounted network port nearby; which was re-patched directly into Citylink's fibre network in TradeMe's server and patch room.

Richard Naylor of R2 is very respected and well known in Wellington when it comes to internet connectivity. As a City Council employee in the 90s he founded the project that later became Citylink. He now runs a private consultancy with his son, specializing in video streaming, and live video recording and hosting online. R2 did the video recording and streaming for Linux.conf.au Wellington.

Richard and his network of industry and business contacts made this possible; he provided a missing link between the wifi LAN and Citylink's high-speed fibre network, temporarily extending it to the venue.

Thanks Richard!
Citylink's high speed city fibre optic network in Wellington connects hundreds of businesses, buildings and data centres city-wide with fast low-latency network speeds. Karen Lindsay-Kerr at Citylink was kind enough to arrange a sponsored VLAN from TradeMe's data centre to Unleash's point of presence across town. That's fibre all the way!

Thanks Karen and thanks Citylink!
Unleash, the last point in the hardware chain, provided a high speed connection to the Internet. They generously sponsored 100Gb of data, a 20Mb symmetrical link, and a whole block of 256 IP addresses. (Unfortunately we couldn't assign the public IP addresses to devices due to time constraints.)

Unleash is an ISP based in Christchurch with four data centres across New Zealand, and nationwide network coverage with fibre, wireless and ADSL2+. They provide virtual and dedicated hosting, co-location and high-speed Internet services.

Thanks Unleash!

The last component is a software layer: IOPEN created a network traffic monitoring tool that collects data about the network and monitors load and resource usage. A "wireless weather report". This is useful to fix any issues if they arise (which they didn't!) and analyse network traffic to make improvements to network configuration for next time. They also made the data from tool available to users connected to the DrupalSouth network. Here is a screenshot:

Most of the companies and individuals mentioned here donated their time and services. You can see all of DrupalSouth sponsors on the sponsor page.

Thanks everyone!

Interview with Berend de Boer - Xplain hosting

Bevan — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:28:53 +0000

What is your elevator pitch?

Customers: once your site has been developed, it ordinarily becomes abandonware for developers.

You're at great risk from security vulnerabilities unless your site is patched regularly. We will automatically patch Drupal core + supported modules.

Another risk is changes introduced after development has finished. We give you a staging site, you can test/see changes from a developer, but a button is pushed to automatically update the live site.

Developers: developers face having to keep several sites in sync: their own machine(s), the staging, and the live site.

Through SVN we make that very simple. Our control panel also allows you to easily manage the staging and live sites, and propagate changes between them. If you work with multiple developers and multiple sites, we also allow you to specify what developers have what rights. All in all, developing Drupal sites and bringing them live has become a great deal easier.

Send a message to DrupalSouth attendees in less than 140 characters.

Best value Drupal hosting at unbeatable prices.

Why did you choose to sponsor DrupalSouth?

To attract new customers.

What have you contributed to Drupal (or Open Source)?

I've contributed both a base theme, YUI Grid, and two small modules.

What products or services do you offer?

My company offers Drupal hosting. As this doesn't need my full time attention, I also work as Drupal contractor for other companies. Works various from pixel perfect theme development to advanced Drupal modules, third party integration, and database migration.

What can you offer to other users of Drupal? Developers? Designers? Site owners? Others?
What other similar services or products exist in the Drupal marketplace? What stands yours apart from the rest?

Everyone knows Acquia of course, who also offers Drupal hosting. But they're more targeted at really big companies. We target smaller companies and Drupal developers who seek hosting for their clients. We are unique in that we offer a development support process and tools around Drupal hosting. For example a check-in into SVN will automatically update the staging site, nothing needed from a developer. You can leave Drupal's CSS/JS caching enabled, we even flush the cache after an SVN check-in to make sure the staging site accurately reflects what's in SVN.

Also we do not just chop up one server into parts and everyone gets a piece. Because we're hosted in the clouds, additional servers kick in when the load gets too high. The scalability you can achieve there is fantastic.

How can DrupalSouth attendees contact you, use your services or get involved?

Contact: support@xplainhosting.com.