Session 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 and Strategy

This Business and Strategy track is aimed at attendees looking for actionable advice, ideas and challenges from business owners, executives, project managers on how to manage a Drupal business successfully. Sessions in this track will be non-technical by nature.
We are in a good market position - Drupal is expanding and companies are growing, are being founded or are being merged. Growth and change make Drupal businesses face various challenges. This year we will talk about how we grow, how we make our good culture sustainable and which processes and tools we need.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

The list of topics results from interviewing six executives that work in Drupal agencies with between 4 and 30 people. It is not meant to be complete and should serve as inspiration for your submissions. Please feel free to submit a session of any business topic you are passionate about and convince us with a great description! We are seeking speakers that are ready to talk honestly about failures and lessons learned, as well as success, so we can truly learn from each other.

  • Growth and team size
    What are the challenges in a certain stage of growth or consolidation of a Drupal business? Are there metrics to follow that are connected to a certain size of a team / company? How to grow especially in Europe with a large number of small countries, culture and languages? Are there team structures recommended depending on the size of a Drupal business? Are there structures and initiatives that make it easier to attract new talents?
  • Business Diversification
    Businesses diversify within the Tech area, to serve other platforms, as well as diversifying outside of Tech into areas such as User Experience and Digital Consulting so that businesses can serve all their clients requirements. We are seeking high level, strategic advice on why and when to diversify as well as tactical advice.
  • Culture
    Where does an engaging and motivating team culture come from? How do growing teams manage to keep or adapt their culture. Presentations about new forms of collaboration, like distributed teams and digital nomads are also welcome.
  • KPIs and Processes
    How can the happiness and success of your team and clients be measured? It would be great seeing people sharing their dashboards, KPIs, tools and processes on how they manage their business effectively.
  • Resource Planning and Profit Growth
    Presentations about concepts, approaches and advice to achieve an even workload of your team would fit this topic.

This year we would like to offer a more in-depth business session, a two hour Lab Session. It should be led by a minimum of two and up to four people. The goal is to take one of the bigger topics mentioned above, to split it up into three short lightning talks by different speakers followed by a short questions round/ discussion with the audience.

Business Showcase

For companies serious about growth in today's world, having the right suite of tools and knowledge of current trends is critical. Come hear sponsored business-level content and meet with Drupal businesses to fill up your toolbox with helpful resources from leaders in our industry.

This track is for curated sponsor content and is not open to general submissions. To inquire about paid speaking opportunities, contact our sales team.

 

Coding and Development

Drupal 8 is knocking the door and both the Drupal community and developers are maturing, making it the perfect time to show it off. The Coding and Development track is focused on these new techniques and patterns to come.
There is a big list of interesting topics, but will be mainly focused in Drupal 8 and their new challenges, like integration with external technologies, testing framework(s), and performance improvements. However we can’t forget Drupal 7 community and how they can make easier the jump to all the upcoming stuff.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • Drupal 8:
    • New tools and techniques such as OOP standards, APIs, Web Services, etc
    • Caching and performance
    • Use of testing frameworks such as Behat or PHPUnit and all the tools that compose their ecosystem
    • Project architecture
  • Prepare developers to Drupal 8:
    • How to manage the migration of our projects to Drupal 8
    • Use of OOP and modern programming techniques in Drupal 7
    • How to maintain contributed modules for D7 and D8
    • How to adapt our mindsets to the new D8 paradigm
  • The world does not end in Drupal, if think you've a topic that will add value to the track, don't hesitate in proposing it or contact us about it. Don't forget to also check out our sister tracks, PHP and Symfony in case you've got ideas for those too.

Content Strategy

Over the course of the last years, organizations started to realise that quality content is king. We’ve seen an exponential growth in the number of people involved in web content creation as well as number of channels through which organizations can publish that content. Just when we were about to loose oversight, a new area of expertise has developed: Content Strategy, which simplified, answers the question on how to best use content in order to fulfil user needs as well as help you obtain your organizational goals.

We can either settle for our Drupal websites to be just another publication channel or, better, let them become the content powerhouse that organizations will use to manage the content required by their content & digital strategy. (Drupal as a content API) In order to achieve that, we’ll have to understand the content strategy principles and consequences, hence the need for this track.

If you want to learn how content strategy principles can help your web projects to become more successful, then this is your track. Sessions will be non-technical in nature.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • Content strategy principles
  • Digital strategy
  • Information architecture, content modelling, adaptive content, findability, smart taxonomies - folksonomies
  • UX, User & Usage analysis
  • Web accessibility
  • Content Auditing
  • Editorial workflows, content calendars

Core Conversations

Core Conversations are a place for people actively working on and contributing to Drupal core to meet, discuss, and plan the future of Drupal.
This is the place for big ideas about the future of Drupal, as well as discussions about where we want to go and how we're going to get there. Where regular tracks and sessions focus on the present and immediate future, Core Conversations are about long-term.
Each session is either a 30 minute presentation or a 15 minute presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion with the audience.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • Targeted, actionable proposals for improvements to:
    • Drupal core
      • Drupal development process
      • Drupal mentoring process
      • Drupal documentation process
      • Drupal community management and governance process and the challenges of its rapid growth
      • Drupal subsystem and topic maintainership
  • Plans for Drupal 8.1.x, 8.2.x
  • Retrospective / lessons learned from 8.0.0 release
  • Additional proposals for how Drupal can get further "off the island" and more actively embrace the broader open source community, not only PHP world, but Javascript and modern frontend
  • Concrete discussions about major/larger architectural changes or ongoing pain points.
  • Where do we plan to go for next Drupal releases

DevOps

DevOps continues to bridge the gap between the world of developers and operations. The Business value gained with the solutions achieved, makes DevOps an important mind switch on system’s end-to-end processes, amplification of feedback loops and the culture to experiment and learn.
In this track we want to expand these core concepts, of DevOps, to the Drupal community, and have a broader overview on how they are being achieved and used out there.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • Testing Frameworks (Behat, PHPUnit, PhantomJS, etc)
  • Other command line tools (Drush, Symfony/D8 Console, etc)
  • Container Virtualisation (w/ docker, lxc, etc.)
  • Search Infrastructure (Apache Solr, Elasticsearch)
  • Infrastructure Management (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt)
  • Logging / Log Data Handling
  • Dashboard Design / Data Visualisation / Monitoring
  • Automated Deployments/ Continuous Integration
  • Performance and Global performance Strategies
  • Security
  • Business value of DevOps
  • Establishing DevOps Culture

Drupal.org

The Drupal.org track is a collection of sessions about Drupal.org the website. The Drupal Association Engineering Team will attend the sessions to provide feedback and participate in discussions. Community members leading Drupal.org-related initiatives are welcome to submit sessions to share progress on their initiatives, solicit community feedback, and attract more volunteers to help push their initiatives forward. If you are an experienced Drupal.org volunteer and you’d like to pitch an idea for Drupal.org; would like to help with and/or start an initiative, your submissions are also welcome. Make sure that your idea is ready and well-thought-out, with a clear use case and benefit for the community. Include a detailed description in your session submission and links to previous discussions / posts about the idea.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • Drupal.org Testbot 2.0. What's coming next?
  • Supporting Drupal 8 translations on localize.drupal.org
  • Making issue queues better for mentoring; merging http://drupalmentoring.org/ with Drupal.org
  • Improving Drupal.org documentation; plans from the Documentation Working Group
  • Managing large initiatives on Drupal.org: How we do it? How can we improve?

Front end

Front end developers are always finding new ways of simplifying. and complicating, their work. New tools are released daily and new techniques are constantly being developed. Together we’ll navigate through some of the best practices you can employ today to improve your workflow, while also having a broader look at the state of design for the web.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • Preprocessors
  • Performance
  • New HTML5 specifications & browser features
  • Automation tools
  • Javascript Libraries
  • CSS architecture
  • Grid and UI frameworks
  • Solving new design problems
  • Typography

Project Management - New!

Good management is an integral component to successful projects, and this track aims to discuss and innovate on the practices and principles that make projects run better and faster. We hope this content will speak to project managers/directors, scrum masters and other “PM” profiles looking to fine-tune their skills and interact with an engaged community.

Join us to learn how to better coordinate, estimate, lead, review, report on and strategically plan your projects and portfolios.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • Project estimation and planning techniques
  • Scope, risk, and change management strategies
  • Project management methodologies and experiences
  • Project and portfolio reporting tactics
  • Leadership and coordination approaches

PHP

Drupal is not its own island but a part of the larger PHP and web ecosystem. Becoming a better PHP developer directly helps you become a better Drupal developer, especially come Drupal 8.
The PHP track is for intermediate to advanced sessions relating to PHP development or software development as a whole rather than specific to Drupal. Concepts and techniques discussed here can and should reference Drupal use cases where applicable, but sessions should be approachable for any PHP developer.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • What's new in PHP 5.4/5.5/5.6/7
  • Unit testing with PHPUnit
  • Building from cross-project components (Composer, sharing, etc.)
  • Creating web service clients with Guzzle and service definitions
  • The Framework Interoperability Group
  • Code quality tools, practices, and methodologies
  • Software architecture patterns and techniques
  • Interoperability and integrations between Drupal and other PHP projects

Site Building

Building complex sites without coding is one of the most powerful strengths of Drupal. Learn what can be achieved by using the best tools, practices and strategies, from the wide contrib space of the mature Drupal 7, to the fascinating new features and possibilities of the upcoming Drupal 8.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • What we can achieve right now using Drupal 8
  • How to build sites with Drupal 7 that will be easy to upgrade to Drupal 8
  • There is a distribution or module for that! Studies and real life examples
  • Layouts and theming through UI
  • Improving UX

Symfony

The Symfony track is dedicated to exploring the Symfony Components that build Drupal 8. Learn from the Symfony core team new and elegant approaches to coding with PHP. Enhance your knowledge of the Symfony components and understand how Drupal8 runs, save time when you code.  Join industry leading experts for a full day of Symfony, Drupal, Twig, and PHP talks. Whether you're a Symfony aficionado or a novice eager to learn more, this track will have something for everyone.

If you are an experienced Symfony developer submitting a talk, don’t forget to adapt your talk from a Drupal perspective, to let the Drupal community understand as much as possible the Symfony ecosystem and components.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • ClassLoader
  • DependencyInjection
  • EventDispatcher
  • HttpFoundation
  • HttpKernel
  • Routing
  • Serializer
  • Validator
  • Yaml
  • Assetic
  • Forms

This track is hosted by SensioLabs.

Submit a Session