Proposed Sessions

Session submissions are open until December 3rd! Submit Session

Off On the Right Foot with Drupal

Session Category Beginner Track Audience Beginner Speaker(s) James Candan

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.

Divide and conquer: A systematic approach to troubleshooting issues

Session Category Development & Performance Audience Beginner Speaker(s) Randy Fay Mauricio Dinarte

To be successful at creating things, we have to be able to solve the problems we introduce along the way. Let’s learn to troubleshoot and debug issues!

We'll organize our approach to a problem by analyzing it, simplifying it, splitting it into its component parts, and finding what part has the problem.

After dividing the problem, we'll use classic debugging techniques to pinpoint the error and find a solution:

  • Use a debugger like XDebug paired with PhpStorm or VS Code to step over and through key sections.
  • Set breakpoints where we suspect the problem may lie or where we can inspect variables and data.
  • Inspect the contents of the database to see what is happening there.
  • Use old-school techniques like printf-debugging and calling die() to find where problems happen.

For extra credit, we'll take a look at how to use git bisect to determine when a bug got introduced. We will talk about using tools and techniques, like version control and database snapshots, to assist in the problem-solving task. ChatGPT is bound to make a cameo as well.


 

Follow the Drupal Brick Road? Is Drupal Just Complex or Becoming Too Complicated?

Session Category Site-Building Audience All Attendees Speaker(s) Michael Goldsmith

Users and Admins and Developers, OH MY!  Have Drupal's increasing number of third party dependencies become too complicated for new users?  Are those dependencies breaking Drupal's more advanced features?

In this discussion, Drupal is going to be held up to a microscope, dissected, and analyzed from a historical user perspective.  Who builds, administers, and ultimately uses Drupal sites, and how has that changed over time?  Are all of these changes and added dependencies on outside technology actually for the better, or has Drupal jumped the proverbial shark and alienated its audience?  Are we now gatekeeping Drupal from new users?

Drupal is far more powerful than other CMS solutions.  That is its greatest strength.  But it is also its greatest weakness.  We will talk about the Drupal learning curves and how they're being steepened by the addition of technologies like Drush, Composer, etc. how it has been exacerbated even further by competitor website solutions such as WIX and Squarespace, that flatten their user experience learning curve.  Can we maintain the power of Drupal with a simpler, flatter learning curve?  Are those additional dependencies giving us enough benefit to justify the additional complications they bring?

Furthermore, we will discuss how some of these dependencies break some of Drupal's more advanced, but lesser known core functionalities.

Have we strayed from the yellow brick road by making the Drupal too complicated for anyone but hardcore developers to build and administer?

Captchas and other gotchas: Make sure your security measures are accessible

Session Category Theming, Design, & Usability Audience All Attendees Speaker(s) AmyJune Hineline

Security measures and accessibility don’t always play nice. Captchas, timed logins, alert pop-ups, gated content, and modals are often used for security, but not all users and assistive technology can get their users past the barriers.
We’ll look at practical and straightforward ways to implement open-source solutions that are both secure and accessible, keeping folks from abandoning ship.

Objectives

  • You will learn how some security efforts can be barriers to those who use assistive technology
  • Learn how different user agents interact with digital assets
  • You will walk away with accessible solutions to generally inaccessible 3rd party options

We’ll look at practical and straightforward ways to implement solutions that are open source, secure and accessible, keeping folks from abandoning your digital assets.
 

Adopting Fortune 500 Scaling Tactics from Day One

Session Category Site-Building Audience Intermediate Speaker(s) Hector Iribarne

Learn how to propel your website's growth by implementing proven scaling strategies used by Fortune 500 companies right from the outset. This presentation will cover:

    •    Infrastructure choices for scalable architecture
    •    Techniques for robust performance optimization
    •    Do's and Don'ts with examples from Fortune 500 companies that use Drupal
    •    Best practices for load handling and traffic management
    •    Insights into industry leaders' scaling frameworks
    •    Steps to future-proof your website from day one

Discover how to lay a strong foundation for your site by adopting these tactics, ensuring your web presence is engineered for long-term success.

The Big Shift: Prepare for new Drupal today

Session Category Site-Building Audience Intermediate Speaker(s) Chris Weber

For the past few years, an internal revolution has been brewing in Drupal. The more I see of how our initiatives are evolving the more I'm convince that the way we build Drupal sites are about to fundamentally change.  Let's me make the case for:

  • How you and your team should rethink how you make Drupal sites
  • What you can do today to being the shift to a new way of working
  • The benefits for clients if you do

In my day job, I provide long term support for Drupal sites built many different ways.  I support sites built with Acquia Site Studio, Layout Builder, Paragraphs and a couple of unique builds.  I'm seeing a convergence of ideas on how best to build these sites.  Let me share with you a strategy for getting your sites ready for the future.

Leveling Up Content: Integrating Drupal with Godot for Game Development

Session Category Sessions off the "Drupal Island" Audience Intermediate Speaker(s) JD Flynn

What happens when the flexibility of Drupal meets the interactivity of Godot? In this session, we’ll dive into how you can harness the power of these two platforms to create dynamic, content-driven games. Whether it's trivia games, virtual worlds, or gamified experiences, the combination of Godot and Drupal opens new doors for interactive storytelling and user engagement.

Together, we'll walk through practical ways to connect Drupal and Godot using various APIs and authentication, while showcasing how content managed in Drupal can power in-game features like levels, quests, leaderboards, or dynamic puzzles. If you’ve ever wondered how to expand your Drupal skills into game development or bring game-like features to a Drupal project, this session will offer you inspiration and practical advice.

Choose your battle: trade-offs when building a website

Session Category Sessions off the "Drupal Island" Audience All Attendees Speaker(s) Bernardo Martinez

You may have heard this before:

  • I need a website, could you help me?
  • How long will it take to build my website?
  • What tech stack would you recommend for my website?
  • What will a website cost me?

This session has different items one should consider when building a website.  Some that we will take into consideration are: 

  • The type of websites:
    • Marketing landing page.
    • Family and friends website.
    • Small business
    • Medium size business.
  • The requirements of their site: 
    • Number of editors
    • Number of pages
    • Average number of visitors. 
  • The different forms a website can take:
    • Static websites
    • CRUD apps vs Websites.
    • CMS websites: WordPress and Drupal.
  • Their budget, market, and long-term maintenance goals
    • 1k - portfolio project to play with new tech.
    • 3k-5k - Small websites, basic needs. Likely set it and forget it.
    • 10k - Includes one or more editors. Maybe a set it and forget it.
    • 50k - Includes multiple editors and likely includes an ongoing maintenance and support.
    • 100k - Agency style websites. Multiple editors. 

The purpose of this session is to help answer those questions for them but also help you as the developer find the fastest, simplest solution for each type of challenge.

Maximizing Project Success: High-Value Partnerships

Session Category Project Management & Consulting Audience Intermediate Speaker(s) Norah Medlin

The contract is signed, the project team is defined, and goals are set. So you’re probably thinking, let’s kick the project off. Although it’s exciting to jump in and make progress on a new project, there’s a lot to think about before getting started.

Successful projects are a result of great partnerships, and it’s important to establish a strong project team and be on the same page from the start. In this session, we’ll cover the importance of:

  • Business and client team building
  • Encouraging Trust through transparency and delivery
  • Empowering decision-makers with a discovery-first approach
  • Performing phased projects to deliver success when dealing with high-risk and uncertainty\

Synopsis

In the tech agency space, agencies may perform poorly because they act as a "middle man" instead of a "facilitator". Whether you’re an agency or work with one, join us to learn the best practices for successful project management and a successful agency partnership.

Learning objectives

At the end of this session, attendees will be able to host valuable and transparent team-building activities with their partner businesses and produce successful projects

Enjoy your editorial experience with Markdown

Session Category Sessions off the "Drupal Island" Audience All Attendees Speaker(s) AmyJune Hineline

We have all been there. We submit an article or technical content and the editorial team formats it in a way that changes the content or breaks accessibility.

Often, writers will submit their content in Google Docs. An editor then has to strip out all of Google's Gremlins to paste into the Drupal editor, so they end up with just a wall of text, left to add headings, links, bullets, and code blocks, and maybe in a way that changes the content.

Enter Markdown! 

Markdown is very popular for authors and developers. It's lightweight and straightforward to learn. Its open format allows it to be used across environments and tools, and you can keep control over your editorial experience. And guess what? It's in CKEditor 5.

In this talk, we'll learn about the benefits of Markdown and move through some of the basic syntax so you can start using Markdown immediately (live demo). We can also do a quick review of editors that have gentle learning curves.

Three takeaways

  • Platforms can easily convert Markdown to HTML
  • Markdown has a very gentle learning curve and is human-readable
  • Drupal Core and contributed modules support Markdown
     

Drupal Recipes for themer's : How to leverage default content among other items.

Session Category Theming, Design, & Usability Audience All Attendees Speaker(s) Bernardo Martinez

This session includes a quick intro to recipes and insights on improving the out-of-the-box experience for people on new themes.

We will follow the YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It) principle to improve our feedback loop and allow others to get started quickly.

Be ready for an interactive session, rich in examples and prompts that encourage attendees to wonder and think about the wide array of possibilities this might enable.