2025 Selected Sessions

Granite is a new frontend framework build around HTML5 elements to provide accessible UIs with the least development possible. Granite provides a solid foundation by templating accessible elements and limiting the customization of elements that's require to scaffold out a website. The Granite Drupal module provides bindings for the Granite element with Drupal's single directory components and make launching a new site theme easier then ever.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the demand for fast, flexible, and intuitive site-building experiences is only growing. In this session, we’ll explore DXPR and the Experience Builder as powerful tools for reducing development overhead and empowering non-developers to create compelling Drupal experiences with ease.

Through some examples,  showcase how DXPR can streamline content creation, enhance collaboration between marketing and development teams, and accelerate time-to-launch—without compromising on flexibility or Drupal best practices.

We'll also look ahead at what these kinds of tools signal for the future of Drupal, and how adopting low-code or no-code methodologies can make the platform more accessible for site builders and marketers.

Takeaways:

• Understand the core features and advantages of DXPR and Experience Builder
• See practical demos of building pages and layouts with minimal custom code
• Learn how these tools can speed up delivery cycles and reduce reliance on developer resources
• Discuss the implications for the Drupal ecosystem and its long-term evolution

This session is perfect for site builders, marketers, developers, and decision-makers interested in making Drupal more agile and approachable.

Are your Drupal updates a source of stress? Drawing from nearly a decade of experience as a Technical Account Manager, this session transforms the often-dreaded update process into a reliable, repeatable workflow that any team can implement. Through a combination of best practices, live demonstrations, and practical tools, attendees will learn how to confidently manage their Drupal updates, including how to prepare their custom code for version changes and avoid common API pitfalls.

Learning Objectives

This session will introduce attendees to:

• A structured approach for planning and executing Drupal updates
• Best practices for maintaining composer.json files
• Effective use of configuration management during updates
• Methods for tracking custom code dependencies and API usage
• Strategies for monitoring API changes that affect custom modules
• Practical use of the Upgrade Status module
• Real-world testing and deployment workflows

Going from freelance to working in an agency can be overwhelming, but don’t let the fear of a collaborative workflow scare you.

What is Git?? Better question, what is version control? And what the heck is a local environment?

We’ll cover the basics of

• Local environments, multidevs, and branches
• Version control
• Overview of a git client

And all to the tunes of some of our favorite 80s tunes!

There's a lot of resources out there on how to give a good conference presentation, but how many are actually geared towards putting you truly at ease with the process?  Come and learn about presenting from a web developer with over twenty years of presentation experience who is also a twenty-year veteran professional puppeteer, giving him unique insight into public speaking from the theatrical perspective as well.  Learn how to set yourself up for success by making yourself as comfortable as possible from the time you submit your proposal to the time you conclude your presentation.  Who knows?  Maybe next year you'll be the one at the podium!

This session is for anyone who's ever remotely thought about giving a presentation, yet has hesitated to do so.  However, even if you have a few presentations under your belt, you can learn how to improve your craft while reducing your anxiety.

For many Drupal professionals, the economics of small-budget projects just don’t make sense. Between setup complexity, ongoing maintenance demands, and hosting costs, it can feel impossible to serve clients who have limited budgets in a way that doesn't create regrets. But there's something special about building smaller projects, as well as personal projects, with Drupal, and we've got it down to a science.

In this session, we’ll explore practical strategies for delivering low-budget Drupal sites efficiently and sustainably—without compromising on quality or maintainability. We'll cover technical patterns for rapid site delivery, using modern tools and techniques to increase efficiency, managing scope to keep expectations realistic, and how to structure maintenance in ways that reduce overhead while creating recurring revenue opportunities.

This talk is geared toward freelancers, agencies, and site builders looking to expand their client base, diversify their offerings, and build smarter—not just harder. Whether you're supporting nonprofits, startups, or small businesses, you’ll leave with concrete ideas to serve these clients profitably with Drupal.

Images can make or break your Drupal site.

Get them right — and your site looks polished, professional, and beautiful.

Get them wrong — and suddenly everything feels… off.

In this beginner-friendly session, we’ll go beyond the basics of Drupal’s image styles and show you how to finally take control of the way images show up across your site — without needing custom code or complicated workarounds.

We’ll cover:

• Planning your image styles — so you don’t end up with a confusing mess later
• How Drupal’s Focal Point module makes sure the most important part of every image stays visible (even in weird crops)
• Cool extra tools like Image Effects Kit (IEK) (and others) for adding creative image effects
• How to use image styles right inside CKEditor — so content editors can resize and crop images without breaking a sweat
• Real-world tips for setting up flexible, reusable image styles that work across your whole site

This session is perfect for site builders, content editors, and anyone who’s ever said:

“Why does that image look so bad on this page?”

Come learn how to make your images smart, consistent, and way easier to manage — all using Drupal’s built-in tools (plus a couple of powerful extras).

No design degree required. No developer magic needed. Just smart Drupal tricks you’ll wish you knew sooner.

We worked with the Duke Office of Clinical Research at Duke University to create the new My Duke Research website to improve engagement between Duke and people who participate in clinical research. A key component of connecting with this audience was delivering a smooth experience for site users relying on assistive technology. We worked with Ablr, a full service accessibility vendor to produce a site that went beyond merely meeting standards to genuinely improving the user experience for people with disabilities. Unlike many accessibility sessions, we will talk about the process of working with an accessibility partner from design concepts through beta delivery, remediating at each step, and how this collaboration delivered a great website.

Want to know how to create more complex page layouts with Drupal? This session will introduce you to the different building "blocks" you can use as a Site Builder to create multi column and multi row page layouts using Blocks and Paragraphs. We will look at how to configure and add blocks, install and create paragraphs, and briefly compare Layout Builder and Layout Paragraphs as options for creating complex page layouts. At the end, we will have a bonus preview of what is coming with Experience Builder as a super powered page building tool.

The IXP-Fellowship, a Drupal community initiative for onboarding inexperienced developers has its initial goal of using Drupal's contribution credit system as an incentive for Drupal organizations to hire new and inexperienced Drupal developers. 

One of the major challenges for new Drupal developers is landing their first paid gig. As a community, we can't expect Drupal to grow if there are limited ways for new, inexperienced Drupal developers to gain that important initial experience.

Over the past year, the IXP community initiative has worked to define and implement a process to utilize existing drupal.org functionality to incentivize Drupal agencies and other organizations to hire trained, inexperienced developers in exchange for drupal.org commit credits.

In this session, you'll learn about the overall scope of the initiative, its current status, and how you and/or your organization can get involved.

Have you been postponing the Drupal 11 migration after a difficult shift to 10?  Have you been refreshing that Upgrade Status page, waiting months for the last few modules to release Drupal 11 versions? Are you almost ready to deploy, but stuck in a composer.json dependency loop?

In this session, we will go over the lessons learned from our migration of 125 academic websites from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11. We will discuss practical strategies for iterative module migration, parsing error messages, module patching, and more. You can do this!

The YMCA’s mission is rooted in community impact—and in today’s world, that includes a strong, unified digital presence. Enter Open Y, an open-source, Drupal-based platform built specifically for YMCAs to streamline content management, marketing, and integrations.

In this session, we’ll dive into how Open Y empowers local YMCAs to deliver scalable, accessible, and user-friendly websites while reducing development overhead through shared community resources. Whether you're a developer, site builder, digital marketer, or decision-maker, you'll come away with:

• An overview of the Open Y distribution and how it builds on Drupal 10
• A look at how the YMCA network collaborates to enhance the platform
• Real-world examples of YMCAs using Open Y to increase engagement and reduce tech debt
• A roadmap for getting started with Open Y (whether you're upgrading or launching new)

We’ll also cover key modules and architecture choices in Open Y, and show how you can contribute or customize it to fit your organization’s unique needs.

Ready to enhance your Drupal development capabilities with AI? This practical session explores how to integrate artificial intelligence into your workflow. In this engaging presentation, we'll cover:

• Drupal & AI
  • Explore the AI suite and contrib modules
  • Uncover intelligent content creation techniques
  • Build effective agents and site chatbots for enhanced user experience
• Drupal Development With AI
  • Navigate the landscape of freemium vs paid AI solutions
  • Progress through increasingly powerful AI tools:
    • Web-based solutions like ChatGPT and Claude
    • Leveraging OpenAI's Projects, Custom GPTs, and API integrations
    • Desktop applications, including Claude Desktop with MCP integration
    • Advanced development with Claude Code
  • Augment your workflow with specialized tools like Cursor and Windsurf
  • Implement AI capabilities into JetBrains and VSCode
  • Establish practical workflows that combine human expertise with AI assistance

Through practical examples and insights, you'll discover highly applicable techniques for developers of all experience levels. This presentation offers concrete strategies to immediately enhance your Drupal development workflow and take your first steps toward becoming one with the robots.

Drupal’s theming layer has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years. We’ve seen new Twig filters, theme generation tools, and the introduction of Single Directory Components.

Those changes, however, will pale in comparison to what’s coming in the next few years. The introduction of Experience Builder paired with modern artificial intelligence will revolutionize how we work.

In this presentation, I’ll walk you through 

• Developing components for Experience Builder
• How will AI fit into your front-end workflow
• What should be a component and what is not?
• Best practices that will reduce code bloat
• How to future proof the code that you’re writing now

To get the most out of this session, it’ll help to be familiar with general Drupal theming practices, gotchas, and painpoints. 

Join this session to learn how to leverage the latest tools and trends to stay ahead of the curve, and ensure your themes are ready for the next generation of Drupal.

In today's rapidly evolving work environment, successful teams embrace diversity in all its forms, especially neurodiversity. Neurodivergent individuals—those with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other cognitive differences—bring unique perspectives, creativity, and problem-solving skills that can supercharge team performance.

This engaging talk will explore how neurodivergent team members enhance collaboration and innovation by leveraging their strengths. From heightened attention to detail to out-of-the-box thinking, neurodivergent minds offer invaluable assets that drive productivity and foster a culture of inclusion. Attendees will learn how to create environments that support all employees, encouraging each team member to contribute fully.

Drawing from personal experiences and research, we’ll dive into practical strategies for building neuro-inclusive teams and how embracing cognitive diversity can lead to better outcomes, greater empathy, and long-term success.

Are you a front of the front end developer who focuses on CSS, semantic HTML, and presentational Javascript, and do you wonder if your skillset matters in the world of modern web development? Do you think about the best way to mark up an SVG to be as accessible as possible, and write Twig templates with (relative) ease? You’re not alone and your front of the front end development knowledge is still important today.

This session discusses why your front of the front end development skills are still relevant in today’s web development ecosystem, how to convince your team that a front of the front end developer is a valuable asset, and how front of the front and back of the front end developers can work together to develop powerful front end solutions in Drupal and beyond.

Let’s show the web development community that front of the front end developers contribute so much to a team!

Drupal 10.3 quietly introduced a powerful new tool for handling complex access control: the Access Policy API. And if you missed it, you’re not alone.

Roles have always been Drupal’s primary tool for granting permissions. But as projects grow more complex, teams often end up battling role explosion — creating more and more narrowly-defined roles just to capture specific business rules. And when roles aren’t enough, access logic gets scattered across hooks, services, and conditionals.

The Access Policy API gives developers a flexible alternative: a clean, centralized way to grant permissions based on real-world conditions — without overloading  or multiplying roles, or scattering access logic throughout a codebase.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• What changed in Drupal core with the introduction of the Access Policy API
• The anatomy of an access policy — how policies are structured, how they work, and how to write your own
• How to decide when to use roles, policies, or both
• How access policies can save time for site administrators by reducing role clutter and simplifying permission management
• What documentation and community resources exist for understanding it 

If you’ve ever struggled to model complex access rules cleanly in Drupal, this talk will give you new tools — and a new way to think about permissions.

Your designer has come to you with a card layout, a masterclass in spacial awareness, client communication, and marketing prowess. You want to use it (or a variation of it) across your Drupal site with reckless abandon. But how? How can you make it consistent? How can you implement it once and make it work everywhere so site builders can take advantage?

In this presentation, we’ll jump into the transformative potential of Single Directory Components (SDCs) in Drupal—a new(ish) approach that can simplify how we organize and manage front-end code. With SDCs, developers can encapsulate all the assets related to a component (template, styles, JavaScript, and configuration) into a single directory, improving reusability, clarity, and maintainability. 

We’ll also explore how the UI Patterns module integrates seamlessly with SDCs to bring structured, reusable design components into the hands of site builders and front-end developers alike. By combining these two tools, teams can create more consistent user interfaces with less duplication and more flexibility. Real-world examples will illustrate how to define and render components cleanly, while avoiding the pitfalls of traditional template sprawl.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand the fundamentals and structure of Single Directory Components in Drupal.
• Learn how to implement and register SDCs in your theme or module.
• Discover how the UI Patterns module enhances component-driven development.
• See how SDCs + UI Patterns streamline collaboration between developers and site builders.
• Learn whats next with SDCs, UI Patterns, and their integration with the upcoming Experience Builder.

Drupal’s Event Platform is a community-built, open source solution for organizing and promoting a Drupal camp or similar community event. In this session we’ll discuss what inspired its creation, how it got started, and most importantly how it can help with your event. We will cover recent additions like:

• A configurable theme that will let your site reflect your camp’s personality within minutes of installing your site
• A dedicated, built-in system to score and bulk moderate sessions
• Tools to bulk generate time slots and drag-and-drop to schedule accepted sessions
• A template on Drupal Forge you can use to spin up an Event Platform site in seconds
• An updated content architecture designed to let a single site host content for multiple events (e.g. many years of an annual camp)

We will also explore the roadmap for the Event Platform, and how the next major version will embrace recent Drupal features like recipes and site templates to be even more flexible.

We will cover the modular architecture, and how you could use specific parts of the Event Platform if that would better suit your needs. We will demo the initial setup, session selection and scheduling, and more.

You’ll learn about the current technical approach, and most important of all, how you can help!