Accepted Sessions

We love to include images on our websites and digital assets. Images support and add context to our information and concepts. They can act as visual cues and help some users orient themselves on a page. Media, especially social media, include images for conversions; having images on posts leads to a higher clickthrough rate and ROI (return on investment).

Images can be simple and easy to add alternative text, but they can also be more complex like infographics, charts, or maps.

Let's take a nostalgic walk through some imagery from the 80s music scene and ensure our alt text conveys the information in a meaningful way for those who cannot access the images visually. From 99 Red Balloons shaking us all night long, to Burning Down the House we don’t want to leave any of our users behind.

When a closely knit and well experienced government team build their first Drupal site and then launch it on their own hosting, they run into unforeseen yet surmountable obstacles. Come with me as we go on a journey and learn how this team improved their Drupal Systems — from the site’s user experience and tagging strategy to the automation at AWS — in only six months.

This talk is suitable for people with or without Drupal experience. Even though the example is specific to a state government project, the things we learned and how we grew is applicable to Higher Ed teams as well. The talk will address:

• the very real challenges that result from a fast migration to a new platform on a tight timeline
• how we helped the Minnesota Department of Health overcome these challenges
• how we’ve started paying down technical debt by optimizing Drupal for best practices
• how strict security requirements can be your friend and that automation and speed are still possible
• the secret to achieving all of this, with every team, every time

We hope that this talk inspires teams that may be in a similar situation to reach out and ask for help — Drupal Systems can be nimble and transformations fast.

Web components are custom HTML elements that can be used across different frameworks and websites. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how to leverage libraries like Lit 3 to build lightweight, framework-agnostic components in just minutes.

We will cover:
- The benefits of web components - write once and reuse across React, Angular, Vue, and even CMS platforms like Drupal
- A quick overview of web component standards like custom elements, Shadow DOM, HTML templates and CSS scopes
- Using Lit to generate standards-compliant web components with just a few lines of code
- Building a sample component and testing it across different frameworks
- Deployment and distribution for dropping custom elements into any project

With the power of web components, you can create reusable UI building blocks and rapidly accelerate development across projects. Attend this talk to see how much leverage you can get out of these self-contained, framework-agnostic elements.

In this session we'll strip agile down to its fundamentals and build it back up again. We'll take a look at a number of different agile methodologies, including but not limited to Scrum, and discuss how Redfin is re-implementing its agile practices in a way that works. We'll discuss how we've implemented principles of agile at all phases of our project workflow. It's a work in progress, so I also hope to have a healthy Q&A piece to share ideas.  

Whether you are a developer, project manager, content designer, system architect or UX designer, you can help tell the story of your website to all those who will support it and maintain it for years to come.  This session covers suggestions, lessons learned and tools you can use to help your current team document your Drupal site for your future team.  Includes guidance on how to make your site partially self-documenting.  Many of the examples come from work on large Federal Government projects, but they easily apply to smaller site teams too.

Slide deck

The recording of this session failed to capture audio.  Here is the video from the same talk given at Drupal GovCon 2023

Content Model & Site Documentation module

Acquia Spec Tool

Want social media without all the ads, algorithms, spying and a chronological timeline? Come to the Fediverse, a group of open-source social media alternatives that give the user more control over their data and experience.

In this session, I’ll explain how it works, go over the most popular services like Mastodon, walk through how to join an “instance”, and what it means for the future of the open web.

Developers may know the ins and outs of migrations, but what do project managers, designers, or business owners do when faced with working on a large migration project? What makes a migration project different and what should you know when collaborating with developers on such a project?

This non-technical session will take you through the migration process at a high level so you can know how to get started; We’ll talk about the importance of thorough planning, what kind of issues you can expect (and avoid) and what else you should consider when undertaking a migration.

If you’re faced with an upcoming migration, whether it be from Drupal 7 to 10, from another platform to Drupal, or even not involving Drupal at all, this session will get you started on your path!

Learning objectives:

• Develop a migration plan

• Ask the right questions of your team

• Anticipate issues you might encounter

Target audience:

• Project Managers of website migration projects

• Business owners

• Website administrators

Prerequisites:

• Experience administering a website

• General web terminology

As we head into the future of Drupal, there is still one system that is very important for Drupal development: Configuration Management.

While there is a lot of information on this topic, many Drupal sites suffer on deployment because the configuration is not managed properly. This talks is a beginner/intermediate approach to a successful Configuration Management strategy.

Config Split is one of the most used configuration strategies, we will visit how this strategy works, how to set it up on your site, and how to use it with your development team.

We will explore;

- What is configuration in Drupal and why it is important.
- What is a configuration strategy and how it works with your development process.
- We will see practical examples of configuration in the day to day of a development team.
- We will discuss the challenges of Configuration Management.
- Why configurations can be different on each environment, and how to keep it straight within your development process.
- We will learn how to add our own configuration to custom modules.

"The change we made is not reflecting on prod"
"When I deploy code I get an error"
"It works in my local but not on prod"

Many of these challenges are in many, maybe most, cases caused by a failure in configuration. Not all environments and development stages are the same, a configuration management strategy will help your team keep them in line without manual changes or updates.

Workflows in Drupal, can be a challenge, but can also solve many a problem. Beyond just editorial workflow, you can build fully-featured approval processes with complex business logic.  I've used them in to help non-profits simplify travel approvals, facilitate complex academic publishing processes, vet fundraising proposals, and in a system to match donations to newcomers to Canada with appropriate agencies to distribute these donations. This broad experience has helped me identify tools that are effective and versatile.

Creating workflows that succeed at helping all parties understand the state of each approval, who needs to take action next, and what will happen after they click a button is a holistic challenge. It requires a highly consultative, transparent, and iterative approach. This session will focus on tactics and key considerations to make your next project better for the people who use it.

Some key areas we'll discuss include:

* What to do when business logic determines what the approval steps are, or who the approver should be
* Tips for making sure users always know what is happening
* Handling notifications and reminders.
* Interfaces for types of approval

I'm excited to share the valuable insights I've gained over years of developing advanced workflows in Drupal. Join the session for practical tips and best practices. Let me help you enhance your workflows!

When working with color on the web, we’ve always had a few choices: HEX, RGB, and HSL. In recent years, however, the color level 4 specification introduced a few newcomers: HWB, LCH, okLCH, LAB, and okLAB. What are these new color options, and what do they add to variety of color choices we already have? Let’s get nerdy about colors and the options we have today.

In this talk, I will discuss 

• What’s new in the CSS Color Module Levels 4 and 5
• An overview of color spaces available today
• How to use some of the new CSS color functions 
• Using CSS custom properties to change the values of color items within each color space
• Ways to ensure the colors you use on your site are accessible by using prefers-contrast, light-dark, and other modern techniques

Attendees will come away from this session with a deeper knowledge of the new color spaces and CSS color functions to make adding color to your site even easier!

Design system is a goal for big organizations who want to strictly maintain a consistent and cohesive brand representation. Within this system lies a component library, a centralized repository housing reusable UI elements, and patterns.

In the Drupal world, there have been various approaches to systematically build reusable components using contrib solutions. Until recently, when SDC goes into core, we decided to build the component library with Single Directory Component (SDC) to be able to evolve it into a Design system in the future. 

In this session, we discuss about what to consider when building a component library with SDC, defining conventions within the development team as well as restrictions on the way of evolving the component library.

In an ever evolving web landscape, it's crucial to keep up with the latest trends and technologies. If you've ever found yourself scratching your head over terms like "Coupled," "Decoupled," "Headed", or "Headless" when it comes to Drupal, you're not alone. This session aims to demystify these concepts and provide a clear understanding of how Drupal fits into each.

Join us to gain a deeper understanding of the coupled, decoupled, and headless approaches in the context of Drupal. We'll explore use cases, and best practices, and share insights into how Drupal can empower dynamic modern experiences. Whether you're new to Drupal or an experienced developer, you're bound to discover new ways to harness the power of Drupal.

A modern Drupal development environment enables the developer to work at peak efficiency to create sustainable code that meets modern coding standards and is bug-free (hopefully!) By leveraging a modern IDE like Visual Studio Code, along with a recommended set of extensions and configuring, one can put themselves in a position to succeed.

This session will demonstrate how to set up Visual Studio Code to work with DDEV and a number of code quality tools to maximize a developer's efficiency. This includes integrating phpcs, phpcbf, PhpStan, and PHPUnit with Visual Studio Code's interface as well as making it easy to run PHPUnit tests directly from the Visual Studio Code interface. Furthermore, guidance will be provided on how to configure Xdebug with Visual Studio Code.

Attendees of this session will leave with the knowledge necessary to configure their copy of Visual Studio Code as will be demonstrated in the session.

The IXP-Fellowship is a new community Initiative for onboarding inexperienced developers. We seek to address several issues:

• Even "Junior Drupal Developer" roles often require at least 6mo-1yr of experience. 
• Companies who invest in early development roles and emerging talent make a large investment in talent development, but then larger organizations in wealthier countries can hire the newly trained developers away at rates they can't compete with.

We cannot solve the differences in developer salaries, but we can try to find a way to ensure that companies are rewarded for their investment in training new developers, even if they are hired away. 

In this session, we would like to share our ideas and listen to the audience. How to ease the transition for newcomers to Drupal who just finished learning to developers who can be productive on a project.

The journey from learning Drupal to finally becoming part of a team creating ambitious websites is long and rocky at best. 

The initiative is gathering the experiences of long-time developers, trainers, companies, and new people to create a process that improves the intake of new developers into our community.

We all know we should be doing more automation of our software development lifecycle, but getting started can be challenging. Even if you have experience in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) automation, learning a specific platform's terminology and idiosyncrasies can be frustrating.   

This presentation is designed to provide an overview of GitHub Actions, a CI/CD platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipelines, and writing one's first Action, a reusable component that can automate repeatable tasks. We'll start by going over key terms and concepts in the GitHub Actions platform, such as actions, workflows, events, and jobs, and explain how they can be pieced together to build robust and dynamic automations.

Then, we'll dive into the process of building your first GitHub Action, walking through the steps of creating a new action, the types of actions you can create, defining inputs and outputs, and required properties. We'll then work together to build an action that can be immediately used in your own workflows.

Whether you're a seasoned developer looking to move to GitHub Actions, or a newcomer to automation looking to get started with your first CI/CD automation this presentation will help jumpstart your journey. 

In the world of tech, we often find ourselves tangled in a web of bugs, blockers, and 404 errors—but what if the biggest blocker is sitting right in your chair? Yep, we're talking about you. This talk, 'Debugging Yourself: How to Move Forward When the Blocker is You,' will dig deep into the human OS. We'll pinpoint those pesky internal 'bugs' that are stopping you from leveling up in your Drupal-centric career.

Just like debugging code, the first step to personal breakthrough is recognizing that something isn't working. We'll explore how to identify and interpret your own 'error messages,' from imposter syndrome to fear of failure. Then, we'll introduce 'patches' for these issues—mental tools and reframing techniques that make change not just possible, but inevitable.

So, if you're tired of roadblocks in your career path that seem suspiciously self-made, it's time to roll up your sleeves and do a little self-debugging. Because you wouldn't let a glitch ruin your code; don't let one ruin your career.

This Sunday session will demonstrate how Retrofit for Drupal works and how to make your Drupal 7 code run in Drupal 10.

Drupal 7 is the most popular version of Drupal ever. Even after the release of Drupal 10, more sites run version 7 than any other version. One of the reasons so many sites are stuck on version 7 is that there is no automated path to port code written for version 7 to later versions. To help sites port their code to Drupal 10, Matt Glaman started the Retrofit project. Retrofit provides a compatibility layer for Drupal 7 code in Drupal 10.

Darren Oh has been contributing to Retrofit to support a client that does not want to commit to using Drupal 10 as their next platform, but needs to have that option if they don’t have a different platform ready when Drupal 7 becomes unsupported in 2025.

A year ago I decided to start live streaming development as a way to motivate myself to learn new things.  Today, I stream almost every day, I've built a full stack application using TypeScript, I've learned game development, and I've done things with websockets and game engines that probably shouldn't be done.

It all started by talking to myself in front of a camera and pressing "Start stream".

In this session, we'll talk about how using live streaming became the ultimate rubber duck for me, and how it motivated me to learn and try new things, build a community, and expand my network around the globe.  We'll also cover what tools are available, how to set up a stream, and some tips and tricks I've picked up in the past year of streaming things that aren't me playing online games.

If you're interested in learning more, don't forget to click that "Follow"... I mean "Register" button and attend this session.

Did you know Drupal core and now contributed modules (using GitLab CI) are being analyzed using PHPStan to catch bugs and improve code quality?

Learn how PHPStan, a static analysis tool for PHP, can find bugs in your code that your tests and code review cannot. In this session, we will learn how to use PHPStan with the phpstan-drupal extension to perform static analysis of a Drupal codebase. The session will cover the intricacies of analyzing a codebase like Drupal's, which can have dynamic return types. And, we will explain how contributed modules can onboard to GitLab CI and how the GitLab CI templates run PHPStan.

Join us in exploring our approach to feature deployments in Drupal that shortens the release cycle and enhances flexibility. Learn how to empower your development team to deliver on-demand features, making "2 weeks" a thing of the past.

What We Will Cover:

1. Challenges of traditional 2+ week deployment cycles and their impact on development agility.
2. Introduction to a modern approach for on-demand feature deployments in Drupal.
3. Leveraging feature flags and configuration management to facilitate rapid releases.
4. Practical strategies to ensure code quality, compatibility, and user experience.
5. Real-world success stories showcasing the benefits of shorter release cycles.

Key Takeaways:

1. Understand the limitations of traditional feature deployment timelines.
2. Explore the concept of on-demand feature deployments and its advantages.
3. Learn techniques to implement feature flags and streamline configuration management.
4. Acquire insights into maintaining code quality with rapid development.
5. Discover how embracing on-demand feature deployments can enhance development efficiency and user satisfaction in Drupal projects.
    

12 years ago Matt Glaman was delivering beers, 10 years ago spoke at his first DrupalCamp, and now he’s employed making six figures and heavily contributing to Drupal core and other projects.

In this engaging keynote, Matt will talk about how he got to his current position, how you can get here (if you’re not already), and how we all can work together in open source to bring in more community members, and  to give them this opportunity.

Matt will detail who can help encourage new community members, and what specific tasks can be done to set them up for success in the Drupal universe.
 

Do you write custom modules? Build PHP with composer, use Symfony?
Then being proficient and hugely productive in Laravel is only a little effort away.
Reuse a lot of your existing PHP development knowledge, to be able to build quickly and efficiently, in a very complementary PHP Framework.
I'm sure we've all shoehorned something into Drupal to make some CRUD style App, but Drupal is a CMS, and it's not really what it's good at. 
You end up wishing you hadn't done that, after reaching for your favorite and best understood tool - Drupal. Now there's an easy alternative - Laravel.
Any CMS style work, use Drupal. Any CRUD/App style work - use Laravel instead. 
It will make you happy. And you get to reuse a lot of the Drupal/PHP development knowledge to ease you way into becoming a dual Drupal & Laravel developer.
Laravel is easy to learn, fun to use, and has a great community. It's a great tool for any Drupal developer add to their toolbox.

CKEditor5 is an important aspect of updating to Drupal 10. The Drupal community is actively working on porting plugins provided by contrib modules, however porting custom plugins might result is a large chunk of work. CKEditor5 has introduced a brand-new way on how to approach the plugin development. As the official documentation provides us with a few plugin examples, they don't cover all the needs which may occur on our projects. Both public and private sector companies might have a large content editors team, which makes it necessary to adhere to standardized components across the site. This presentation is based on the experience we gained from working with one of such clients.

From a back-end Drupal developer's perspective, we'll dissect a custom CKEditor5 demoLink plugin. Following through the plugin's code we'll explore its components, see how they interact with each other, as well as identify tricky parts

As interest in native plants continues to grow among homeowners, the challenge of making botanical information accessible to the public becomes increasingly important. In this session, President and Drupalist, Greg Lowenthal from Acquia, will showcase Long Island Native Plant Initiative (LINPI)'s solution: a Drupal-powered native plant database that also generates interactive signage.

We’ll discuss why LINPI opted for Drupal and the challenges they faced while building this non-profit database, particularly with printable generated signage. Learn how greenhouse visitors can now peruse the signs for easy-to-comprehend plant information and scan QR codes to take that information home for proper planting. From photos and common names to layman-friendly descriptions and plant characteristics, discover how LINPI's Drupal database enhances user experience for native plant gardeners.

Together we will:

• Understand LINPI's rationale for choosing Drupal and the development challenges they encountered
• Explore the implementation of signage and QR code technology, enabling online and offline access to plant information
• Learn how LINPI's Drupal database improves user experience with simplified plant details tailored for amateur gardeners

Being an effective developer is more than just writing clean code. Documentation is an important skill that has numerous benefits to developers and their teams throughout the life cycle of a project—whether in the form of meeting notes, decisions made during development, or technical implementation details. But even beyond that, these notes have long-term benefits for maintaining projects and building team skills.

In this session, attendees will learn best practices on writing effective technical documentation. Early in the course of a web development project, it helps with the early planning and decision-making that help make a project successful. Later, it provides clarity that eases website maintenance and helps build collective knowledge that your team can build upon in future projects. And as artificial intelligence tools play more of a role in our daily workflows, the value of written documentation will only increase for you and your team. This session will highlight how an early focus on documentation, written by and for developers, can have lasting benefits.

Layout Builder is great - right?  Not really - “out-of-the-box” it’s pretty terrible.  Despite a few initiatives that are trying to create a better experience, we’re probably a couple of years away from seeing anything specific.  

This session is going to present Layout Builder in a way that actually makes it easier to use with beautiful results that anyone can implement.  You’ll come away with a list of recommended contrib modules, a list of configuration settings, and a completed site with styles, pre-set blocks and more - all without a line of code and without locking in to any vendor.

We’ve been using this approach to convert non-Drupal sites over quickly, along with making the content editor’s job a LOT easier.

Notes are available at https://rodsurl.com/layoutbuilder 

This session will show how Astro and Drupal can create powerful and flexible web applications. We will set up Drupal to manage our content and provide APIs for your Astro application, and we will explore the basic web service configuration for Drupal. Astro will then be used to build our web application's front end. We will see how to create queries to retrieve content using the Drupal API. We will set up dynamic routes to handle content, allowing fast and efficient applications.

Learning Objectives

- Understand the approaches of a fully decoupled Drupal Application

- Configure Drupal Webservices.

- Set up and build an Astro application for Drupal.

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of Drupal JSON:API, JavaScript and TypeScript.

Synopsis

This session will provide valuable insights and techniques for building dynamic, scalable, fully decoupled Drupal applications.

The WHO estimates roughly 1 in 6 people globally have some type of disability. Those who don’t currently have a disability are all but guaranteed to have one at some point in their life. Whether facing the temporary challenges posed by a broken arm or the tenacious adaptations that accompany the journey of aging, we find ourselves interconnected by the threads of resilience and adaptability. 

I was born with a disability called Cerebral Palsy (CP), CP represents a group of neurological disorders that affect muscle control. My case is mild, yet it transforms everyday tasks into intricate and unnecessary puzzles. Throughout my life, my struggles have afforded me a unique perspective on problem-solving. Meanwhile, my struggles with self-acceptance have dragged behind me like an anchor- often slowing me down more than my physical limitations.

In this session, I invite you to join me on my journey toward self-acceptance. I'll share the profound impact of the opportunities and individuals who have guided me along the way. Through award-winning poetry and personal stories, I'll illuminate my struggles and triumphs with CP. By the end of our time together, I hope that we will all leave with a deeper sense of self-love and a better understanding of the power of storytelling to bridge our shared human experiences.

Regional drupal camps like Florida Camp, MidCamp and NERD Summit are great ways to get together, learn, grow and have fun seeing everyone. But what exactly does it take to put on one of these camps and how do you even get started?

In this session we will discuss the inns and outs of the past 15 years of Drupal4Gov. We'll show you how to:

• put on a small event for little to no budget 
• put on a medium sized event (more than 150 attendees)
• run a large scale event (more than 400)

We'll take a look at:

• budgets
• venues
• fundraising
• ticketing
• metrics

And most importantly, we'll share our data points and experiences in running a camp of over 1000 attendees 

Join the Drupal4Gov team as we tell you all about creating avenues to building and sustaining a local community of Drupal developers, designers and the Drupal curious.