Sessions

A growing number agencies and development teams today work remotely or at least co-located. In fact, the Drupal Project itself is almost entirely developed by individuals in different locations. 

As developers, we’re all aiming for simple, easily documented code. Which is great as professionals. But we forget that we can still have fun with it. Code can be complicated and elegant, creative and amusing. SCSS mixins and formulas, javascript functions and DOM manipulations can be art.

The search world is all about social graphing today.  Just look at Google's quick results sidebar when you search for a local business.  You see a picture of the business, rating/reviews, hours, menu and more.  Structured SEO data can help you define and shape what is shown about your site on search results.

Website development tools have come a long way over the past decade and if you are just getting started you can feel lost pretty quickly. To do something simple like spinning up a CMS and installing a few plugins comes with a handful or pre-requisites that may be out of your skill set and more suited for someone in devops. What tools do I need to use? Do I need a server?

Backdrop CMS is the Drupal fork. It is a faster and less-complex version of Drupal 7 with more features you want, and fewer you don't.

This session will highlight the Backdrop Mission, it's intended audience, and it's guiding principles.

Are you looking to improve the handoff between your design and development teams? In this session, we’ll share our approach at Lullabot for how the design team works with the front-end team throughout the entire design process to help improve the design handoff.  We’ll discuss:

So you’re thinking about decoupling your Drupal site because the Drupal’s API-First initiative is making it easier than ever to plug in your favorite front-end framework and get to work. But what are the gotchas that you might encounter?

In this session we'll learn how to gather, clean, and visualize Drupals usage statistics using essential data science tools. 

Participants will leave the session with a host of ideas on how they can use these tools to analyze their own data; both for client work and within their organization. 

We'll cover:

High demands, high anxiety clients are a reality of agency life. Their stresses, deadlines, and sometimes lack of understanding of the technology can create tension and take a project (or the client relationship) off track. Together we’ll discuss common challenges and the strategies that satisfy the clients need while insulating your team; allowing them to be more effective.

If you've worked on large enterprise site themes, you're probably tired of writing Twig to map in your hand-built pattern libraries to Drupal templates. If you're building sites solo, it'd be nice to not have to use 20 different modules to get all the blocks you need to make your front-end look just right after theming, or have to resort to using the pre-build Bootstrap bundles.

Nearly every new project focuses heavily on the flashy design and fancy tools it'll make for its visitors. So much focus is driven into the site user's experience to make it intuitive and pleasant, but in many cases this ignores the users that will visit the site more than anybody else: the content editors.

Come for the code, stay for the community.

Drupal thrives on community contributions in the form of patches and documentation to both contributed modules and core. This helps the project move forward and stay relevant.

I’m JD and I have mental illness. I’m also not alone. Every year, roughly 20% of the US adult population deals with some form of mental illness, however that number is MUCH higher in the tech community.

With the inclusion of JSON:API in Drupal core, we now have a solid, stable path to support decoupled Drupal through standardization of payload structures and query string parameters.

This session will cover:

Emotional labor is, in one sense, the invisible thread that ties all our work together.  Emotional labor supports and enables the creation and maintenance of our products. It is a critical community resource, yet undervalued and often dismissed.

Design systems are all the rage these days, but what exactly is a design system? How do you know when you need one? In this session we'll cover the following:

In a user-first world, content is the basis for ensuring great user experience. A content audit lays the groundwork for aligning organizational objectives with site visitor needs. It is the preparatory work for the site architecture, content model, and page layouts. It addresses content governance and the content creation process.

Email remains one of the most powerful and direct ways to reach your audience and this session will explain how you can track its performance on a detailed level without impacting your Drupal infrastructure.

A smart programmer is not the one who fixes all the problems, but rather, the one who understands what the problems worth fixing are. When discussing quality software, everyone talks about unit tests and test-driven development, only a small piece of building good software. In this session, we'll explore validation and verification beyond software tests.

Drush cr… drush cr… drush cr!!! We all know the scenario where you’ve made a change to the site, but when you load the page it just doesn’t seem to show. Oftentimes the solution is to clear your cache and move on, but why is that?