Sessions

Visual Regression Testing with BackstopJS

How do you tell if a change you made to your website has unintended side effects? Security updates should rarely result in anything changing visually, but how can you be sure? Visual regression testing automates the comparison process by taking screenshots of two URLs and comparing them. You can view a report that highlights the differences and use the pass/fail result to make decisions. In this w...

Historical Page Load Time Monitoring Using WebPageTest and Drupal

[Download Presentation Slides] Studies show that page load times directly impact business revenue. Longer wait times result in higher bounce rates, which lead to fewer customers. Free performance monitoring services, such as WebPageTest, allow web teams to measure load times on URLs in real-time to provide rich diagnostic information to identify potential causes of slowness. Drupal can be used ...

David Stinemetze

Fully Automated CI/CD

Use open-source tools to fully automate taking code from a local GIT push, through automated testing, and into Production.

Continuous Integration

Site Sanitization: Taming the proliferation of sensitive data

Every time a development or test environment is refreshed or a development environment is built, real data comes comes with that. On a simple brochure site that might only be account emails and passwords. This is problematic from a security perspective. On other sites that might involve a whole list of sensitive, identifying personal data. This is problematic from a privacy perspective. We develop...

Stephen Musgrave

Continuous Integration

#VOICEFIRST: READY YOUR CONTENT TO SERVE 50% OF GLOBAL SEARCHES

20% of Global searches is Voice based and in the next 2 years by 2020; this number will increase to 50%. If that does not bother a content creator or marketer! I am not sure what will! Search is changing, and so is the way consumers choose to engage with businesses locally or globally. There is a distinct move away from screens and keyboards, and into voice-based interactions. Voice-search is beco...

Content strategy

What’s awesome about the Drupal 8 plugin system

The Drupal 8 annotation plugin system allows you to define custom code which changes the look, feel, and behavior of a site while leaving a central project intact. This allows for unprecedented capacity to scale your Drupal project and make multiple sites with “last mile” changes to appearance and feature set. In this talk, we will go through the awesome possibilities the new plugin system provide...

Dr. Michael Nolan

From a Mountain to a Molehill: Tackling your content audit

Drupal websites are known for having lots of content and thousands of pages. Manually reviewing each page is just unrealistic in time and manpower. I’ve developed a way to reduce the number of pages for manual review based upon business rules that take the politics and emotions out of the process. You can be confident that your time is used wisely to review the most important and relevant pages fo...

Donna Habersaat

Content management

Local development with Lando

Are you looking for an easier way to set up a local development environment for your projects? Tired of wrestling with Acquia Dev Desktop, MAMP or VM solutions? If you answered yes then this session is for you. We will discuss how easy it is to get started using Lando to emulate your production environment and improve the efficiency of the development workflow. Familiarity with Drupal, Docker, Git...

Help! I'm Stuck In Maintenance Mode: How To Break Out of D7 Into D8 and Beyond!

Every day I'm Drupalin', every day I'm Drupalin', every day I'm....wait, what? Every day you're Drupalin' 8? Does your portfolio or your current position have you stuck in maintenance mode, fixing and extending only Drupal 7 sites? Do you have Drupal 8 envy? Are you feeling even more pressure as the release of Drupal 9 looms in the near future? Together we'll journey through an hour's worth of tip...

Make Drupal 7 Development Fun and Modern

As a support technical lead, the majority of support offerings are still in Drupal 7. With that said, your development practices do not have to lag behind those who get Drupal 8 OOP projects. I will give some neat tips about using XAutoload and composer for Drupal 7 to make developing Drupal 7 use the same muscles and continue to be fun. The Goals: Applying Xautoload Using Third Party Libraries Im...

Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Write Good Case Studies (And Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too!)

The challenge: Case studies are hard. Knowing what to emphasize and what to downplay in your case study can be difficult, especially if you’re trying to score those sweet, sweet sales leads. The solution: Attend this session! I’ll teach you how to put together case studies that tell compelling business stories about Drupal and digital technology. You'll learn: - The “challenge/solution/result” sto...

Progressively Decoupled React in Drupal 8

This session will cover a brief introduction to React, what it is and why you might want to use it for your next project. Where React and Drupal lie in the MVC architecture. The differences between Fully and Progressively decoupled Drupal, to help identify which path you should take. Lastly, we will take a walk through a progressively decoupled demo site.

Modern SEO: Reorganize Content Into Topic Clusters

The most recent development in SEO content strategy is the concept of topic clusters introduced by Hubspot in 2017. In this session, we will cover the following: 1. What are topic clusters 2. Why do topic clusters work (briefly) 3. How to reorganize existing content into topic clusters to boost search engine ranking, while making your human visitors happier.

Content strategy

Composer 101

Topics of this session: 1. Why Composer?!? 2. Installing Composer. 3. Setup of a Drupal 8 site using Composer. 4. Adding/removing modules and other dependencies. 5. Checking for outdated packages. 6. Performing updates. 7. And whatever else we have time to cover. This session is for beginners and assumes that everyone in the room will have no prior knowledge of Composer. View Slides

Driving Strategy and Inclusivity with Human Centered Design

In this session, we will review the principles of Human Centered Design, how they compliment best practices for web accessibility and how applying these principles can dramatically improve project outcomes. Presentation takeaways: An understanding of human centered design and it’s guiding principles Why we use it, How we do it and Why it works Human Centered Design/ Inclusive Design/ Us...

Tracy D. Hinson

Media Entity Setup & Media Migration

Description - Quick introduction to a media entity setup, media browsers, and how to use the media migrate module to migrate old file fields like images to a new media entity reference field. Step 1 -What modules to install, how to configure and create media browsers to be used on the new media entity fields. Follow Tutorial Drupal 8 Basic Media And Media Browser Setup For Beginners Step 2 - In...

Jaime Contreras

Practical Steps Toward an Accessibility Mindset

Tips for crafting your sites with accessibility web standards and best practices in mind. Including accessibility gotchas you may not be aware of when building and testing your sites to be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. In this session, we will cover web accessibility evaluation tools such as WAVE and how website accessibility is more of a mindset of how to approach the design/build/maintenance of website...

Marcus HarrisonArt Williams

Drupal and Salesforce: A Fresh Look

Join me to take a fresh look at Drupal/Salesforce integration capabilities provided by the Salesforce Suite for Drupal 8 family of modules. We will cover what the Suite provides, examples of complex integrations between Drupal entities and Salesforce Components, how to leverage the Salesforce API throughout Drupal 8 with ease, and cover other modules are ready to join the fun. Audience Many ...

Avoiding Burnout: Sometimes It Pays To Be The Hare

In the old fable, "The Tortoise and the Hare", the tortoise wins the race by moving slow and steady while the hare loses despite his speed due to the numerous breaks/naps he takes. What if I told you by being more like the hare you can not only win the race but also avoid developer burnout? Join me for an hour as we discover signs of developer burnout and the strategy that I have employed over the...

STOP BUILDING MODULES! 'How Drupal can coexist in a microservices world' or 'How to progressively decouple your backend'

OK, so the title starts off a little extreme. Don't scrap your module development just yet (if ever). At the same time, think outside the Drop, and not just on the front end. Inspired by personal experience, a vision of a way forward for Drupal, and this recent article: https://about.gitlab.com/2019/06/17/strategies-microservices-architecture/ - Drupal's oft-overlooked killer feature, and how it c...

How to do the splits, Even if you are not flexible!

http://i.imgur.com/RJwBhxT.gifv Since the dawn of Drupal 8 and its fantastic Configuration Management system, we required an excellent way to inject this into our development workflows. Enter the Config Splits module, and we finally had an answer, or did we? Config Splits have given us a way to involve CMI in our dev workflows, including local, dev, stage, prod, and any other environments that may...

Designers working process with sketch app and zeplin

Many development teams struggle when working with external design teams because most of the time we don't have the time to sit designers and developers to talk about the details. Sometimes we end working long hours on things that are not that important for the final result of the project. I found that working with sketchapp and zeplin will made design process faster and help communications between...

How we used Drupal to build one of the most used and biggest government websites of Panama

In the last two years we have been working with the Panamanian government to build the new version of the website www.panamatramita.gob.pa which is part of Panamanian's government digital strategy. This site is powered by Drupal 8 and it is used by all government institutions, ministries and departments of the country on which each of them is in charge of managing and updating all of the informati...

GraphQL and JSON:API in the wild

Out of the myriad of API design standards two are top of mind these days: GraphQL and JSON:API. We at Four Kitchens have a had the unique experience of running both side by side for an API serving millions of requests per day powering one of the nation’s leading media companies apps, devices and websites. In this presentation we'll explain: A quick intro to each standard What we learning about the...

Using Machine Learning to Create Content Faster and Smarter

As a content-focused digital agency, Four Kitchens is familiar with how organizations struggle to create the large amounts of content required to keep a website relevant. Sometimes even if they have the resources and capabilities to create content, they’re faced with the challenges of keeping the website fresh and usable through proper governance and constant maintenance. The technologists at Four...

Content management

The Sunny Side of SAML

Leveraging the simplesamlphp_auth module to enable a Drupal 7/8 site to support SSO can be a daunting task for a beginner. Where do I start? I don't know what I don't know, so how can I even get started? How can I see what is going on behind the scenes? How do I debug this locally? What is SAML metadata? Spend an hour with me as I share with you how I have answered these and many other questions w...

Introduction to Performance Analysis

Load testing and New Relic One of the most effective ways to ensure that your site will have a successful launch is to load test it before you go live. Even after a site is live, performance tuning is an ongoing – often incremental – process. This session will cover some basic tips on how to tune your out-of-the-box Drupal site. Then we'll dive into to setting up a simple load test and how to revi...

Winning the UX game

Drupal is an amazing framework that provides incredible tools for developers and site builders... and yet, the UX is pretty poor. This is not news, and there are some ongoing initiatives that are aimed at improving it. However, that doesn't help us now. As the lead for Acquia's Demo Team, part of my job is to make sure we are able to show the best UX we can with Drupal today! We have to provide a ...

A Crash Course in Progressive Decoupling

In a world where "decoupled" is super hot, and there is a new JS framework everyday... it can seem like things are tough for a more traditional CMS. Of course, Drupal has never been traditional. Progressive decoupling is a term that Dries came up with to describe a hybrid type of decoupled app - one where part of the interface is served via the CMS, and part is completely decoupled. Its a way to h...

Intro to Cloudflare Workers

Special thanks to Rob, who filled in for us last minute due to a cancellation!