Site Building

What started out as a simple brochure website has become a file repository with workflow automation replacing MS Word documents, that were tedious to fill out. The entire site is built from contrib with no custom code!

Drupal has been promoted as being modular like a set of legos and this session demonstrates the capabilities that Drupal offers to non-developer site builders.

This session was well received at an April Chardug meet up. The process, issues, and modules used will be discussed.

A case study on using Docker to develop from multiple machines. Covering docker-compose, docker files, basic commands and a few clever nginx hacks to round things out.

Takeaways:

• Learn how Docker can be used to build consistent platforms
• Discover how Docker can make your workflow faster
• Better understand containers and how they work

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is the largest school system in Virginia and the 10th largest in the United States, with more than 200 schools and centers serving 186,000 students. It's network of 195 school websites keeps this large community of students, parents and the public informed.

Tired of the standard Drupal Search layout and want more Google like information? Looking for a replacement for Google Custom Search Engine? Don't want to code unless you have a really special need? Then this session is for you.

The session will cover:

The vast changes to the core architecture of Drupal 8 forced changes to even the most trivial contributed modules. For a robust project like Drupal Commerce, the changes amounted to a complete re-architecture that takes full advantage not just of Drupal 8 but of object oriented PHP and Composer as well. However, rather than just make sure the base feature set of Commerce 1.x continued on in Commerce 2.x, we took the opportunity to rethink some the fundamental philosophies of the project itself.

Winning Drupal websites live at the intersection of psychology, technology, and brand- a place that can get very complicated for users.

In June 2016 I hiked about 50 miles of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,189 mountainous route from Georgia to Maine. Starting in March 2017 I plan to take time off from Drupal and hike the entire trail from end to end.

What does hiking have to do with Drupal? A lot more than you might think.

Thought there are obvious differences between the simple, low-tech activity of backpacking and the complex, intensive work of Drupal development, there are many parallels to be found.

UNC Asheville recently completed a 2-year project to design, develop, and implement 2 new Drupal themes for our 100+ websites. One theme was externally facing, the other an administrative theme.

This talk will discuss the challenges of having hundreds of users (of various skill levels) editing your site. How do you ensure consistency? Good content? Proper formatting? Accessible content? How do you train everyone? Where do you find the balance between giving editors a flexible toolset, while preventing them from going off the rails?

Commerce 2.x is still under heavy development for Drupal 8, with the most recent major merges including the full Payment API (which itself represents a major leap in functionality over what was provided in 1.x). In this session, you'll get a quick overview of the major new features in Commerce 2.x by way of a short technical demo that's sure to embarrass the presenter.

Before Drupal 8, changes in site configuration could only be stored and moved between environments by using the Features module. This practice was less than ideal, as Features was not originally conceived for this purpose. Since there was no other better way to manage configuration outside of the database, this became the standard practice.