PRWD

On Friday 19th of February, I gave a presentation to the North West Drupal User Group on the Features module for Drupal.

The Features module was created by Development Seed, and provides a powerful mechanism for packaging certain changes to a Drupal-based site that normally only exist in the database. By moving the locus of change from the database to code stored in files, these changes are made available to version control systems and are made much more portable between installations.

Features makes it easy to create chunks of functionality, packaging together related Views, Content Types, Contexts and more. As I mentioned on my personal blog in December, this can be very useful in deployment scenarios, but it also has the potential to allow developers (and power users) to create features that can be distributed just like existing Drupal modules. Features is powerful enough that it’s possible to use it to create something useful and powerful without writing any code.

There are, of course, still plenty of ‘gotchas’ and Features itself is still technically a beta release, likely to change and improve before a final 1.0 release. Without doubt, there are improvements to be made. But we’re using Features in production at PRWD, and we’re confident that it will be a big part of Drupal development for all of our new projects. More than that, I would expect that Features will grow in popularity to provide a platform for packaging functionality that becomes a standard part of any Drupal developer’s toolkit.

The slides from my presentation are visible below (from Slideshare):

Last night I gave a presentation to Manchester Digital’s Developing with Adobe AIR event, speaking alongside Andrew Shorten of Adobe, John Knott of InterDirect and Paul Kinlan, lead developer of FriendDeck and a couple of other very interesting projects.

Despite a last-minute change to the running order which saw me speaking first, ahead of Andrew’s introduction to the Flash and AIR platform, it all went smoothly and it was great to speak to people after the event, answering questions from people who were obviously interested in developing on AIR themselves. Even better, a quick show of hands at the end of the presentation suggested that a significant number of people were interested in further events about the AIR platform.

There was also particular interest in the possibility of Flash/AIR as a mobile platform. Whilst the iPhone is a great device, there’s still plenty of room for competition, and Andrew’s presentation contained many tantalising suggestions about future developments from Adobe, in collaboration with hardware providers, that could make the Flash/AIR platform a viable cross-platform mobile environment.

Below, you can see my slides, and I’ll post a link to the other speakers’ slides when I have them.

Following the upload of my recent presentation to slideshare, we were delighted to be informed that the presention was featured on the Slideshare Showcase within the Business and Management section.

If my last presentation slides I uploaded onto Slideshare are anything to go by, we can expect our presentation to be seen by many more people that the attendees of the ‘Speeding Up In A Slowdown’ conference that I took part in, which included a keynote speech from Google.

The other presentations I have uploaded onto Slideshare are:

• The Importance of Usability For Internal Business Systems
• The Importance of Usability For Customer Facing Websites
• Usability Primer – Why Its So Important For Businesses

I’ve just uploaded my presentation from yesterdays enjoyable How Do conference in Liverpool, titled ‘Speeding Up In A Slowdown’. For information you can see details of the conference and speaker line-up, including a keynote from Google.

My 35 minute presentation (shown below) focused on 3 key areas that businesses need to consider if they want to make serious improvements to their online performance, and all on working with smaller budgets than what they would have had pre-recession:

• Understanding visitors – using gorilla user testing to actually begin understanding what visitors want and why they don’t complete their objectives
• Measuring performance – its not good enough to just have analytics installed on your site, you need to be looking at goals, funnels and developing advanced segments to truly begin understanding visitor behaviour
• Testing and improving – using split testing to make continual, incremental improvements to conversion rates, click-throughs from key pages and overal website performance