Session Tracks

Session Tracks

Coding and Development

Track Chairs

The Coder track is designed to facilitate communication between developers that write code for their projects or Drupal. We are interested in sessions that focus on Drupal 7 and are looking for three categories of presentations: Drupal core, Drupal contrib, and solutions in other projects or technologies that Drupal can learn from.

A good Coder track session should introduce people to new tools and techniques or expand on existing tools and techniques to make developing for Drupal better and easier. Leaving a session, people should want to run to the nearest computer and start writing code based on what they just learned. Most sessions should include at least some sample code.

Main themes

Leveraging Open Source
What can we learn from other web developer communities and how can we integrate existing solutions in Drupal projects via web services or libraries.

Leveraging Drupal 7
What new options and capabilities are available now that haven't been before, and how do we do amazing things with them?

Contributed Advantage
Leverage the vast array of Drupal contributed modules to make better sites better. For example, show developers how to interact with contributed module APIs like Views and Panels.

Audience

All levels of Drupal skill and experience, but it is assumed that they are already familiar with PHP and Web development in general.

Community

Track Chairs

  • João Ventura
  • Karyn Cassio

    • The Drupal motto is "Come for the software, stay for the community". In the Drupal Community track, we will discuss how to strengthen and grow the community.

    In recent years, and with the increasing success of Drupal, the community has been organizing itself in different organizations, at global level (the Drupal Association) and at regional/national level. How do we share this experience with each other? How should the DA interact with the lower level organizations and better involve the community?

    Main theme

    Integrating new contributors
    An important element of the growth of the community is the integration of new contributors. How do we train new developers? What can be done to introduce Drupal development in university curricula? How do we ensure that new developers can contribute to Drupal Core? How do we avoid the burnout of the existing developers?

    Drupal is a flexible framework that can be used to develop fantastic solutions, but that doesn't mean that outside innovations are useless. How should the community open itself to collaborating (or even competing) communities?

    Audience

    Everyone who is interested in the Drupal community.

    Frontend

    Track Chairs

    The Frontend track covers all aspects of front-end design, from initial concept to theme implementation.

    Main themes

    Design ecosystems
    Social websites, design for scale, design for the loss of control, design for data: Mapping, single sign-ons, content syndication, canonical copies. Designing rules, patterns and behavior for ecosystems. How to design for flexible delivery across many channels while maintaining value and purpose?

    Design for connecting people
    The art and science of designing for attention, engagement, persuasion, gamification. Building trust, turning consumers into producers. Looking forward to sessions about how people work, how interaction works and case studies in community & social tools and sites designed on Drupal.

    Open Design
    Discuss, demonstrate and perform talks, workshops and sprints on open design. Open up the process, explain the craft, show how design gets done and how it impacts both the content and how it lives in the network. Show your process, present case studies on multi-channel design strategies or teach about the value of design.

    Design for the loss of control
    In an ever more fragmented yet interconnected online landscape, designing your message, product or service comes with it's own set of specific challenges. Join the experts in discovering how to design for the interconnected web.

    Cutting edge frontend development
    How can the design in the open, cross-platform era be beautiful, modern and still accesible across different browsers, systems, devices & platforms? Learn about modern theming/frontend development technologies, techniques & tweaks.

    Audience

    Web designers, front-end developers and everyone who is interested in design, usability and theming of a Drupal site.

    Business and Strategy

    Track Chairs

    Designed for technology executives, business owners, project and product managers, and everyone else responsible for leading projects or guiding technology decisions and processes in his or her organization. Come see how technology teams across the globe are successfully adopting Drupal in business, government, education, and non-profit sectors and hear lessons learned from project leaders in the Drupal community.

    Main themes

    Open source software solutions vs. proprietary systems

    Selecting and adopting Drupal as a platform for your project or company

    Migrating existing systems to Drupal

    How to effectively build sustainable Drupal applications

    Best practices in project and product management, software development and managing teams.

    Audience

    Technology executives, business owners, project and product managers, and everyone else responsible for leading projects or guiding technology decisions and processes in his or her organization.

    Sitebuilding

    Track Chairs

    The art and ease of building and running rock star Drupal sites without a single line of code – from grasshopper to black belt master.

    Main themes

    Sessions cover organisation and presentation of content, site configuration and structuring, administration and workflow, extension of functionality via modules, optimization, deployment, and how to glue it all together.

    Audience

    You and Drupal can do so much without writing code – come to this track and see how easy it is!

    DevOps

    Track Chairs

    Devops is trying to bridge the gap between developers and operations, making sure deployment and (security) upgrades of sites will go smoother than ever before. By changing culture, improving automation , improving measurement and sharing these experiences life will be better for everybody, including the business.

    Main themes

    The devops things therefore will be focussing on all things Drupal and infrastructure with a focus to automated deployments, continuous delivery, measurement, security and monitoring.

    Audience

    If you want to learn how to host Drupal or learn about Drupal infrastructure from the specialists, come join this track.