Tracks

Tracks are a series of sessions sorted by topic which span in experience level from beginner to advanced. Sessions are 60 minutes unless otherwise noted.

Business

This Business and Strategy track is aimed at attendees looking for actionable advice, ideas and challenges from business owners, executives, and project managers on the digital experience industry. Sessions in this track will be non-technical by nature.

Selected sessions will be a mix of product/service strategy, general management, sales and marketing and project management topics. Emphasis will given to relevant experience, story driven narratives and ideas outside of the core Drupal ecosystem. Try to submit sessions which are relevant not just to Drupal shops, but the digital experience business as a whole.

Here are a few themes and ideas to get you started. This list is by no means exhaustive, but will hopefully give you an idea of what the track team is looking for.

Suggested Topics

  • Global Delivery
    • Interfacing with global teams
    • Cross-cultural challenges and advantages
    • Bringing about more value addition than cost savings
  • Domestic (Indian) Business
    • What are the challenges? What are the opportunities?
    • How do you sell to and service Indian clients differently from international ones?
    • How are we raising market awareness?
  • Drupal for good
    • Drupal used for e-governance and NGOs
    • New opportunities in social entrepreneurship
    • Drupal as a medium to teach web development
  • Recruiting and retention
    • Building brand awareness among developers and graduates
    • How do we create learning organizations that grow talent?
    • Effective corporate culture and governance paradigms
  • Growth, mergers, acquisitions and partnerships
    • Growing your business
    • Consolidation and international partnerships
    • Effective subcontracting
    • Working with agencies, SIs and boutique Drupal shops
  • Selling Drupal as part of a complete solution
    • Handling complex RFPs
    • Integrated solutions with other product suites (personalization, middleware, analytics, etc)
    • Speaking beyond cost savings, selling to the CMO
  • Drupal as a product
    • Intellectual property combined with Free software
    • SaaS based business opportunities
    • Scalable business and licensing models

See Proposed Business Sessions

Case Studies

Drupal is an amazing, flexible system for building websites that constantly surprise. The realm of the possible is ever expanding as Drupal keeps up with the pace of the web, and the mindshare of our growing community pushes into new territory each year. With Drupal 8 this is more true than ever.

This Case Studies track is your chance to showcase your work, to show what's possible, and to inspire. Be prepared to show the inner-workings of the project, who participated, the process and methodology, the problem or opportunity you addressed, and best of all, how it was all made possible with Drupal!

Case studies should not seek to directly promote a vendor, but to genuinely share knowledge and experience (which will of course show agencies in a good light). Preference will be given to submissions where there are clear learning points, innovation and best-practices.

Suggested Themes

  • Breaking new ground, and redefining what’s possible
  • Solving common problems in new and innovative ways
  • Failure and resiliency, things we’ve learned the hard way

See Proposed Case Studies Sessions

Coding and Development

PHP and Drupal are changing rapidly and collaboration among projects is shaping a new way to create code. The Coding and Development track will show you how you can leverage evolving tools and processes to increase the efficiency, velocity, and quality of projects.

This track will help developers to be up-to-date with the new release of Drupal, not only on the Drupal island, but demonstrating the best practices and industry standards of the web today..

Suggested Topics

  • Drupal 8
    • Drupal 8 API’s, OOP Standards, Web Services, etc
    • How to manage the migration of our projects to Drupal 8
    • How to maintain contributed modules for D7 and D8
    • How to adapt our mindset to the new D8 paradigm
  • Improved Development Practices
    • Software quality as a tool, not a goal
    • Developing new methods to speed up creating solutions (feature driven development, developing with CI, pair programming, TDD, BDD)
    • Coding for performance - caching, code and query optimizations, performance analysis, performance best practices
    • Making use of PHP best practices - PHP programming in Drupal world and how to optimize
    • Software design oriented to security
  • Engaging with the wider Coding and Development universe
    • Symfony / Frameworks
    • Decoupled (Headless) Drupal - leveraging the backend
    • OOP standards, namespaces, injection
    • PSR standards & why you should care
    • Design patterns
  • The cultural component to Coding and Development
    • Collaboration over going it alone
    • Best practices & standards (includes testing)

See Proposed Coding and Development Sessions

Contributions

The Contributions track is the place for people who want to work on and contribute to Drupal core, contributed modules and the community.

Contribution is not limited to writing code, it includes event organisation, documentation writing, module translation and anything supporting the Drupal project in any way.

Most of the talks at this conference are about how to use Drupal to build websites, and deliver value to our clients. This track is filled with sessions on how to help make Drupal better by getting involved in the project. Learn how to give something back to Drupal by making a contribution.

Suggested Topics

  • How to encourage and support your team to contribute back to the Drupal project
  • The business case for contribution (attribution, profile, reputation)
  • Drupal processes (documentation, patch workflow, module maintainership, tools, etc.)
  • Drupal mentoring process
  • Drupal community management and governance process
  • Subsystem and Module maintainership
  • Non code contribution - events, documentation, mentoring, project management, testing, review
    • Organizing Meetups
    • Organizing Code Sprints & Mentoring
    • Organizing Drupal in a Day trainings
    • Organizing Drupal Camps
  • Tools to help people contribute. eg dreditor, code sniffer, simplytest.me, PAReview.sh, local tests

See Proposed Contributions Sessions

Frontend

The Frontend development ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly. With new tools, techniques and practices constantly emerging, and an ever-increasing diversity of devices and contexts to consider, our roles as Frontend Developers have never been more complex, or more essential. On top of all this, the release of Drupal 8 promises to significantly change how we approach theming. In such a world, what are the new baselines for Frontend Developers? What are the essential skills one must have, and what should we keep our eyes on in the months to come?

Suggested Topics

  • New and Emerging Web Standards (CSS, HTML, ES6, etc)
  • Drupal 8 Frontend Development (layouts, Twig, better workflows, etc)
  • Working with Frontend Libraries (JS frameworks, CSS libraries, etc)
  • New Tools for the Frontend (task runners, pre/post-processors, polyfills, etc)
  • Building for multi-device contexts (Touch vs. Desktop vs. Hybrid, etc)
  • Frontend Performance (UI design, delivering content as quickly as possible, etc)

See Proposed Frontend Sessions

Mobile

There are more mobile devices on earth than people. There are over 2.8 billion people online today. The next 1 billion will be mobile-only. Companies are making dual investments in apps and mobile web experiences to reach audiences across smartphones and tablets. In addition, the Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly growing and evolving around us, myriad devices collecting nuggets of data from a wide variety of sources that must be collected, stored, analysed and displayed in a meaningful manner.

You have to think about mobile touch points as the first experience your prospects have with you – whether browsing your site from their phone, or downloading and installing your app. For many this may be the only device they ever use. Learn how Drupal helps build, extend, enhance and optimize your existing applications, and build new mobile websites and mobile apps to tell your story as you intend it.

Suggested Topics

  • Mobile only
  • Mobile App development best practices
  • Responsive as part of Mobile-First strategy
  • Device-agnostic development
  • APIs / Headless Drupal or Frontend decoupling
  • Mobile Support in Drupal 8
  • Mobile testing tools / frameworks (Appium, Calabash, Robotium, etc.)
  • Internet of Things (IoT), embedded and wearable computing, NFC, RFID, etc.
  • SEO

See Proposed Mobile Sessions

Site Building

The power of Drupal lies not just in itself, but also in the 17000+ contributed modules that allow one to build sites quickly and efficiently. The Site Building track is designed to teach you ways to let Drupal do the hard work without writing any code.

The Site Building track is aimed at people looking to build sites using the Drupal framework but are not PHP masters, people who need better tools to layout their site, and people who want to add functionality to their site but aren’t sure where to start. This includes students who are new to Drupal, developers just getting started with Drupal, seasoned developers and freelancers.

Sessions in this track will be technical in nature, although they would not usually involve any coding.

Suggested Topics

  • With Drupal 8 around the corner:
    • What’s new with Site Building in Drupal 8? Eg: Drupal’s new multilingual capabilities
    • Have you already built a site with Drupal 8? Share your site building experience. Drupal 8 is now ready enough that you can build examples of real-world sites like Youtube
    • D8 Status of popular Site Building modules: Like Views (Already in core), Panels, Display Suite, Rules, Context etc
  • Migration without coding - With migrate API in core now, migrating sites to Drupal becomes even more easier. Migrate Upgrade Module and Migrate D2D modules, Upgrading older Drupal Sites to D7/D8
  • Configuration Management - Best Practices to managing configuration in Drupal. How does the new CMI in D8 help Site Builders?
  • Information Planning and Content Architecture
  • Layout and Theming using UI : Tools like Panels, Display Suite that allow you to build and control layout without even writing any code. Comparison of these techniques.
  • Distros & Platforms for Site Builders: Drupal Gardens, Lightening, Panopoly, COD, Open Atrium, aGov, Erpal, Commerce Kickstart .. Come talk about the next platform you are building exclusively for Site Builders!
  • There is a recipe for that! Building a shopping cart, Building Faceted Search, Building custom RSS feeds, are all something that you can do in Drupal without writing any code! If you wish to showcase any of your Special ways or New Recipes of putting modules to work the way you want, the stage is all yours!

See Proposed Site Building Sessions