Off On the Right Foot with Drupal

Session Category Beginner Track Room 158 Audience Beginner Time Slot Sat 9:45am to 10:30am (2/22/25)

Often when embarking on a new technology project, your first attempt feels good when you deliver it, but you look at it later and think, that could have been done better. Sometimes, that means it ends up being rebuilt from scratch.

It helps to know what resources you can pull together to get started--to get off on the right foot. This session is perfect for those who have been through a Drupal In-One-Day training or other beginner trainings and are looking to begin their journey to a production deployed Drupal website.

Whether spinning up your first or wanting to do it better next, this session should help you lay the ground work for a more successful Drupal project launch in your near future. 

We'll go over 

  • project initiation concerns, 
  • local and remote development environment options,
  • available production hosting resources, 
  • content structure theory, and 
  • theme selection considerations.

We'll also introduce resources for non-developers who want to realize their project without custom theming and development. My hope is, you launch a nice looking, functional, and productive CMS to production when you apply the opinions and follow the steps laid out in this session.

About the Speaker

James Candan

Lead Instructor at Stack Elevate

Jacksonville, FL, by way of Chattanooga, TN, by way of Los Angeles, CA

A self-taught PHP programmer turned Drupal developer circa 2012. His artistic talents met his technical prowess when life circumstances pushed him to nail down a career change in just 3 months. Since that first job in the industry, he's reached milestone after milestone leading teams in enterprise software development. He has taught students spanning from beginner to advanced. A consistent open source contributor and speaker, James has a talent for organizing students' understanding of complex subjects. He brings a passion to teaching that is founded in his deeply held personal belief that self-directed education is both an imperative personal journey as well as a responsibility we have to guide others to desire.