2024 Selected Sessions

Our State of North Carolina Digital Commons platform supports 85 state websites that serve over 10 million constituents. As we acknowledge the growing preference for digital channels as the primary means of engagement, we work to prioritize the development and design of their websites and digital services to align with the public's expectations. We aim to deliver high-quality, user-friendly experiences that are seamless, accessible, and secure by design.

This approach is designed to elevate customer satisfaction, foster trust, and enrich the overall user experience and could be described by three pillars of accessibility practices at NCDIT:

• Design and develop with accessibility in mind.
• Test for accessibility before deployment.
• Review content for accessibility with Monsido.

   

Attendees will receive a certification upon attendance of this session that can be used toward their continued professional development through the Project Management Institute (PMI). Certification will include 1 hour toward Ways of Working PDU.

With crunched timelines and tight budgets, how do you take team members' well beings into consideration and not burn them out while also meeting milestones, deadlines, and the ever-shifting priorities of your stakeholders? Don't worry about answering that yourself; we're here to walk you through it!

Through true-to-life scenarios, challenging exercises, and Q&A that focuses on people before projects, you'll learn how to:
-- Humanize your team to leadership
-- Communicate internally and externally with practicality and empathy
-- Resource allocate realistically
-- Schedule like an actual person

And more!

Join us for an interactive session of real-world examples on exactly how to maintain your humanity and business acumen as you recourse your projects.

Accessible code is imperative for inclusion, but all the code in the world doesn’t do any good if the content is not meaningful to our content consumers.

In this session, we’ll go over what we can do as content authors to ensure inclusivity for all of our readers beyond semantic markup and structured content around images.

And because we love to include images on our digital assets to support and add context to our information and concepts, we'll do a deep dive into best practices for adding alternative text. We'll make it fun by walking through some imagery from the 80s music scene. From 99 Red Balloons shaking us all night long, to Burning Down the House we don’t want to leave any of our users behind.

There is so much focus on people, process, and product that we sometimes forget about the concept of culture as an essential ingredient for a highly effective teams. Teams who focus on building effective cultures are 15% more productive than teams who just let the culture develop and take shape on its own. 

This session will explore the value of building a collaborative, cohesive, and inclusive team culture, its effects on individual employees, as well as on the customer experience. We will also outline how to build this kind of culture from the ground up, and most importantly, how to continuously grow and evolve the culture with the team intentionally, not by accident.

When selecting a place to host your Drupal site (or any kind of website) you may feel stuck between the many commercial products out there, from Plesk and CPanel to third-party ISP hosting.  There is another option: you can still build your own fully open-source web server in the tradition known as LAMP (Linux, Apache HTTPD, MySQL, PHP).  We'll step through the process of standing up a LAMP server in the modern era, including how to configure it for multiple sites through virtual hosting options, and how to keep things reasonably secure.  It's not as easy as using a third-party ISP, but it's not rocket science and it's a whole lot cheaper in the long run.

Session Slides

When working with color on the web, we’ve always had a few choices: HEX, RGB, and HSL. In recent years, however, the color level 4 specification introduced a few newcomers: HWB, LCH, okLCH, LAB, and okLAB. What are these new color options, and what do they add to variety of color choices we already have? Let’s get nerdy about colors and the options we have today.
In this talk, I will discuss

• What’s new in the CSS Color Module Levels 4 and 5
• An overview of color spaces available today
• How to use some of the new CSS color functions
• Using CSS custom properties to change the values of color items within each color space
• Ways to ensure the colors you use on your site are accessible by using prefers-contrast, light-dark, and other modern techniques

Attendees will come away from this session with a deeper knowledge of the new color spaces and CSS color functions to make adding color to your site even easier!

Session Slides

In an ever evolving web landscape, it's crucial to keep up with the latest trends and technologies. If you've ever found yourself scratching your head over terms like "Coupled," "Decoupled," "Headed", or "Headless" when it comes to Drupal, you're not alone. This session aims to demystify these concepts and provide a clear understanding of how Drupal fits into each.

Join us to gain a deeper understanding of the coupled, decoupled, and headless approaches in the context of Drupal. We'll explore use cases, and best practices, and share insights into how Drupal can empower dynamic modern experiences. Whether you're new to Drupal or an experienced developer, you're bound to discover new ways to harness the power of Drupal.

In 2024, Google and Yahoo have instituted more stringent email requirements for senders who wish their email to be delivered to Gmail or Yahoo Mail accounts. Failure to meet these requirements is expects to result in email not being delivered.

While IT teams may be aware of different authentication and monitoring standards (e.g. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, ARC, etc.), organizations frequently don't understand how these standards work together and underestimate how widely these standards need to be configured to ensure all legitimate email is delivered.

We will review the changes at Google and Yahoo, discuss how correctly implementing authentication and monitoring standards (and adhering to good email sending behavior) is required to ensure deliverability to Gmail and Yahoo Mail (and likely other email services).

This sessions is about three ways to move your development environments and production hosting to your own cloud provider (like AWS or Digital Ocean). High-level overview of what it takes to migrate from managed hosting to your own cloud providers. We address setup, dev tools, cloud dev and staging environments, scalability, security and release management. We will look at an actual case study from start to end and consider their options and decisions.

Session Slides

Imagine starting your week with the discovery that all your AWS-hosted photos have vanished. This unsettling scenario became our reality when AWS S3 bucket keys were compromised, leading to the unexpected deletion of essential digital assets. While our websites continued to operate, the loss highlighted the fragility of our digital storage practices and sparked a journey towards securing our assets against future threats. This session will share insights into the incident, focusing on the loss and recovery of photos, the implementation of robust backup strategies, and the importance of securing sensitive information. We'll explore actionable strategies for preventing data loss, enhancing AWS security, and ensuring that your digital assets remain safe and recoverable.

Processing large volumes of data in a long-running task is neither performant nor scalable.  If you've ever had to bulk update entities with an update hook and Batch API, or with a script run via drush, you know what I'm talking about.  If you've ever had to send thousands of emails with Drupal and a hook_cron() implementation, you know how tricky that can be to process them all in a reasonable amount of time.

What if there was another way to process lots of jobs in a fast, safe, and scalable manner?  In this session, I will introduce you to Drupal's Queue API and the database queue, which are baked into Drupal core.  We'll discuss:

• When to use queues
• Types of database queues in Drupal
• Queue workers, including how to build your own scalable, dynamic queue workers
• Automated testing of queues and queue workers

Are you committed to using the Paragraphs module and have thousands of paragraphs in use? Are your content creators wanting a better authoring page building experience?

NCDIT Digital Commons platform has 85 North Carolina State agency web sites and thousands of paragraphs on a Drupal 10 multi-site platform. Our content authors want a better authoring experience than long scrolling form pages to build their complex page layouts. We developed a solution using Layout Paragraphs module and customizing the Claro admin theme using Bootstrap and the paragraphs using Single Directory Components to render a WYSWYG author editing experience on the admin. The admin theme was customized and converted paragraphs to single directory components to achieve a WYSWYG content editor authoring experience that comes close to other popular page building tools while preserving Drupal’s Structured Data Model. This presentation will walk through key steps of the technical process of converting paragraphs to Single Directory Components, configuring Layout Paragraphs, using Drupal Migrate module to migrate paragraphs into Layout Sections and adjusting the Barrio Subtheme SASS build to render components correctly in the admin theme.

We all know we should be doing more automation of our software development lifecycle, but getting started can be challenging. Even if you have experience in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) automation, learning a specific platform's terminology and idiosyncrasies can be frustrating.   

This presentation is designed to provide an overview of GitHub Actions, a CI/CD platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipelines, and writing one's first Action, a reusable component that can automate repeatable tasks. We'll start by going over key terms and concepts in the GitHub Actions platform, such as actions, workflows, events, and jobs, and explain how they can be pieced together to build robust and dynamic automations.

Then, we'll dive into the process of building your first GitHub Action, walking through the steps of creating a new action, the types of actions you can create, defining inputs and outputs, and required properties. We'll then work together to build an action that can be immediately used in your own workflows.

Whether you're a seasoned developer looking to move to GitHub Actions, or a newcomer to automation looking to get started with your first CI/CD automation this presentation will help jumpstart your journey. 

DDEV provides a powerful suite of commands and tools that often go underutilized. You may have read about some of them, but have you seen them in action?

This session provides a quick overview of DDEV architecture and how it can empower you and developers of all levels to get up and running in minutes.

We will also look at the DDEV top 10 most-asked questions for insights into what the DDEV community might have found challenging at first and how one can save that time.

An empowering and engaging program tailored for professionals within the Drupal community who are passionate about fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In this session, Mariah will guide participants through actionable strategies to become agents of cultural change and champions of inclusivity within the Drupal ecosystem.

Drupal Commerce is an ideal platform for associations and other non-profits who use their websites to educate, engage, and market products, services, and fundraising campaigns to their constituents. Centarro has worked with numerous such organizations who:

• Use Drupal's CMS features to publish rich content targeting multiple audiences
• Sell the content itself or else goods and services related to the published content
• Sell memberships or collect dues or donations that are one-time or recurring
• Sell continuing education course access, credits, and certificates
• Integrate with CRM and marketing automation tools to market to their constituents
• Integrate with ERP and fulfillment systems to automate thousands of orders per year

Most organizations use multiple platforms to accomplish all of the above when they could consolidate their expenses and unify their digital experience with a single platform, Drupal Commerce. Come to this session to learn how. Note: no technical background required, but this will include live demonstration of the platform's feature set and open the floor for questions about specific capabilities or development patterns as led by the audience.

I can't wait for Starshot (Drupal CMS)! Literally - it's going to be awesome - but I can't wait. I have sites to build right now.

“Out-of-the-box” Layout Builder is pretty terrible. This session presents one way of configuring Layout Builder that makes it easier to use with beautiful results that anyone can implement. You’ll come away with a list of recommended contrib modules and configuration settings, and a completed "Startersite" launched with one click of your mouse. The Startersite is hosted on Gitpod (I have support videos on the entire setup) and comes with a complete set of styles, pre-set blocks, and more - all without a line of code and without locking into any vendor.

We’ve been using this approach to convert 30 non-Drupal sites over very quickly, along with making the content editor’s job a LOT easier.

Session Slides | Manual

DoD developed the After Action Review (AAR) as a way to to learn quickly from soldiers' experiences in the field.

Today, AARs have been adapted to allow software developers and security professionals to address issues as they come up with the focus being what can be learned and then put into practice.

We will also take a look at how to use a template for conducting an AAR, who to invite to the meeting, conducting the meeting and follow up post AAR.