Drupal Camp Asheville 2018

User personas are good tools, but they have limits. They take a narrow look at what a specific "person" is going to do on a website. Personas don't give us a bigger picture of what drives our users and why they do the actions in the first place.

This spring, our team built a high performing, ultra fast search interface for a client Drupal site using React JS, Apache Solr, and the Drupal Search API module.

This project allowed the client to leverage some of the well-established benefits of decoupling Drupal's content from the presentation layer, while also avoiding many of the challenges that complete decoupling involves.

The session will be devided in 4 parts: 
 
Part 1: Getting specifications: an approach to bring a number of very smart people in a room and go away with a plan everyone agrees on. 
 

For some, accessibility conjures nightmares of garish focus rings and high-contrast fonts. For others, it's snooze-inducing checklists ad nauseam. 

Drupal Commerce has never looked nicer out of the box than it does on Drupal 8 thanks to Belgrade, the project's new default store theme. Developing the theme and an attractive demo store proved challenging for two key reasons:

Decoupled Drupal is all the rage, but getting going can be intimidating. How can one get started without having to understand, install, and configure all of the components needed in a Decoupled Drupal backend?

Hello Contenta CMS!

You’ve gotten familiar with Drupal 7 theming and are starting to feel comfortable with it, just in time for development to start shifting to Drupal 8. Or perhaps you’re new to Drupal theming and aren’t sure where to start. Either way, this session is for you!

The Drupal 8 configuration system can provide great advantages to managing the configuration of a site, but it can also cause massive headaches if used improperly.

DevShop is an open-source Drupal hosting platform that can be used for production, development and testing environments. 

Powered by a Drupal web interface, simply enter your websites source code, name your environments, pick your branches, and start running Behat tests on every git push.

The Drupal Content Management System offers a wealth of opportunities to crowdsource gathering information and to distribute content, but what happens when you are looking to server multiple institutions, each wanting their own Drupal site?

Ethereum, a blockchain based technology, empowers you to write decentralized applications (dApps) utilizing smart contracts and the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Sound scary? It’s not.

The pace of modern front-end development doesn’t let up. New standards, APIs, techniques, and best practices are being introduced on a monthly basis.

This presentation will walk a front-end developer through vital new standards that we will be seeing more frequently. 

This includes

(ALL skill levels; ALL team sizes.)

That heart-attack-moment. Your client is freaking-out, right now; right in your face with a full-blown meltdown! At the end of it all they always ask that same question, "So what are you going to do about this!?..."

We’ve all heard the old adage: you spend more time with your coworkers than with your family. While it’s still true, things are a little more complicated for remote teams. The “work family” you may have had when stuck in cubicle farms isn’t quite the same when you work for a distributed company.

Want to learn about GatsbyJS?  What it is and how it can help you and your team?

Is it a framework?  Is it a static site generator?  GatsbyJS is an exciting way of thinking about building sites for the modern web.  

I will cover some of the main benefits that you or your team could experience with Gatsby:

With all of the advances in DevOps, it is easy to focus on delivering more, faster, as our important measures of success. However, DevOps is as much about listening as it is about delivering. How do we know we are delivering the right things? How are we informing our customers of this work and getting their feedback effectively?

In this talk we will be discussing a project that was built using NativeScript (Angular), Drupal 8, and JSON API to build a navigation app for a North Carolina Community College.

In this session we will discuss:

With 40 years of scientific research, development programs in 70+ countries, and technical services for hire to other NGOs, FHI 360 needed (and found) a better way to organize and feature its abundant website content.

Transparent and accessible data is vital for advancing scientific insights and achievements. When governments, nonprofits, and universities make their data publicly available, the resources can then be used by citizens, researchers and journalists in new and innovative ways.

If your business runs on Drupal in some capacity, you understand the need for having great software teams to keep everything running smoothly. Finding developers, themers, project managers, designers, and the like that have great Drupal experience and mesh well with your broader team is essential. Creating an environment that keeps them around can be just as important.

The drupal-project repository is quickly becoming the defacto starter for all Drupal 8 projects. In this session, I'll show you:

⚡Lightning Talks ⚡ are short (5-minute) impromptu sessions on anything you want. Do you have something you’re proud of? Do you have a new technique that’s saving you time? Have you learned about something cool? We can't wait to see what you have to say!

Asking members of your team to spin up local copies of your Drupal application can result in all sorts of different solutions to the same problem. Some might spin up VMs, some might spin up their own combination of Docker Containers, and some might struggle with native solutions on their own machines.

Migrating from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 felt a little hacky to me, simply because there was no obvious core based method or standard convention at the time of my employer's upgrade to Drupal 7.

Drupal 8 supports multiple ways to test your code, which gives developers the confidence to change functionality and ensure that regressions are caught early.

This session will introduce attendees to the following methods in Drupal 8 for providing test coverage:

Learn to change tires on a moving car! 

In this session, you'll learn efficient and bulletproof(-ish) ways to roll out significant changes to new/existing sites without any manual UI changes. No more scribbling, code-pushing, and clicking: enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing your configuration will automatically cascade into all your environments.

We'll touch on:

Gone are the days of having one massive JavaScript or CSS file. In this session we'll explore using libraries to conditionally load assets and resolve dependencies.

We'll cover the following topics:

I don't know about you, but I'm very familiar with the feeling that I'm just sitting at my keyboard "faking it 'til I make it." But let me tell you a secret: We're all just making it up as we go...and that's the best part of our job!  Impostor Syndrome holds us back and tells us that we don't deserve to be here, but it's wrong. In tech, we're especially likely to struggle with Impostor Syndrome

Design systems are a powerful tool in any company’s arsenal. They provide consistency, support brand recognition, and streamline the design process itself. There are many benefits, but implementing systems across a large product portfolio can be cumbersome for the most nimble of teams.

As a Project Manager, Strategist, Developer, Designer, or Stakeholder, we are all part of the puzzle—and it's crucial to keep sight of the big picture—even when we’re required to pivot from the original plan. Pivots come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They can be a minor change that’s quickly integrated into scope, or a major departure that alters the entire course of the project.

SimplyTest.me has been a long-standing tool that has served Drupal community members with  an easy-to-use tool for creating Drupal sandboxes.

This session is a "how to" overview / case study of things learned by experiencing GDPR Security audits, DoS attacks, brute force login attacks, annoying robot crawlers, and hackers doing security probes.

The session will cover: