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.

Being Human

New Track!

This track puts the software and tools aside to focus on the human beings who are behind it all.

We want to hear about your experiences, challenges and wins on supporting others and looking after yourself. Do you have success stories about happy healthy teams, human communication or finding your place within a team or in the Drupal community? We want to hear them!

This track also aims to discuss the hard topics that unfortunately affect human beings all too easily anywhere at anytime. How can we deal with conflict, support mental health, overcome imposter syndrome and prevent or recover from burnout?

We also want to hear your ideas on supporting the Drupal community. So many of us put so much time and energy into projects and into helping others. How can we support each other with the many roles and responsibilities that each of us take on? How can we also make sure to look after ourselves as well as others? How can we balance our work commitments, contribute and have a healthy lifestyle on top of that?

We invite you to be open, honest and proud of your human achievements. We also very much welcome your experiences, solutions and frank discussions on the tough topics that we see everyday in the Drupal community and the wider world.

Suggested Topics

  • Diversity and inclusion
  • Mental health
  • Best practices for communication
  • How to deal with communication challenges
  • Maintaining a healthy work-life / Drupal-life balance
  • Preventing burnout at an organisation/community/personal level
  • Overcoming imposter syndrome
  • Supporting / mentoring others
  • Knowing how and when to ask others for help
  • Creating / maintaining healthy happy teams
  • Approaching and overcoming conflict
  • Finding your place in the community
  • The human benefits of contributing to Open Source
  • How to contribute to Drupal minus the code
  • Drupal community success stories / lessons learnt
  • Empathy

Business

The Business and Strategy track is aimed at attendees looking for actionable advice, ideas and challenges from business owners, executives, and project managers on how to manage a Drupal business successfully. Sessions in this track will be non-technical by nature.

At DrupalCon Dublin this year we will talk about how to grow a sustainable Drupal business in an increasingly competitive marketplace and how we can innovate and diversify to stay ahead. We will also be looking to the future to see how the release of Drupal 8 will impact our businesses going forward. If you want to bring your business to the next level, then this track is for you.

We are seeking speakers that are willing to talk openly and honestly about their approaches, what worked, what didn’t and lessons learned. In order for attendees to get the most out of the sessions, we would encourage speakers to include real examples, hard facts and high-level numbers where possible.

Suggested Topics

  • Marketing Drupal - Drupal faces tough competition from open source and proprietary content management solutions alike and which can vary across sectors and markets. We are looking for sessions which outline approaches for selling Drupal to clients and educating them to its benefits, as well as how to best identify and attract new potential clients.
  • Going for Growth - growing and scaling your business can be a tricky and daunting task. We are seeking presentations on strategies for sustainable growth for both the small 2 person agency to 30 and beyond, adapting organisational structures to match and maintaining company culture.
  • Business Innovation - Drupal agencies are increasingly offering additional services to attract more clients and combining services to provide a more unified solution to customers. We are looking for presentations on why and when you should consider diversifying your business, and approaches in doing so to ensure it fits and aids your business growth. Sessions on leveraging Drupal as one tool as part of a wider solution are also welcome.
  • Drupal 8 - we want to hear from you on how the release of Drupal 8 is impacting your business, your sales process and demand for Drupal services. Presentations on how to convince clients to upgrade, along with those covering the effect it has had on project delivery and development teams would fit this topic too.

Coding and Development

The path to Drupal 8 saw the project and developer community mature in its approach to software design and development. Drupal 8 is now living in the wild, with more and more applications being deployed. This track is the place to share your experience and ideas on using D8 on real projects: to inspire, influence, and share the ways that we work with Drupal, and improve as developers.

The track is focused on developing for Drupal 8, the tools, patterns and challenges that surround it. We all know “The Drupal Way” for Drupal 7, but Drupal 8 has brought new paradigms, and the new kid on the block is changing the rules. We have the documentation, but there is a huge opportunity to use our experience to discuss and shape the best-practices for working with Drupal 8.

Suggested Topics

  • Design Patterns in D8. How/why/when they can be used or applied to own code
  • Coverage of specific Drupal APIs (e.g. config system, entity api...)
  • Ideas on project architecture (at application level, or otherwise)
  • Tools and workflows for developing with Drupal
  • Drupal as an application framework as well as a CMS
  • Testing, debugging and the tools/frameworks used for this as part of the development process
  • Integrating Drupal with other systems (perhaps as micro-service architecture or a wider network of applications), the APIs/Modules and techniques.
  • Higher level software engineering concepts applied to Drupal?
  • Anything innovative, interesting, exciting or useful that we haven’t listed!

 

Core Conversations

Core Conversations are a way for active and prospective core contributors to share their ideas and open a forum of discussion around their idea.

Now that we can make potentially big additions to Drupal every 6 months the Core Conversations track is even more integral to planning Drupal's future.

In New Orleans Dries announced several new proposed and planned initiatives, and suggested ways to propose further initiatives. This track is an ideal place to discuss these. Each session should be a conversation, so it has a short presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion with the audience.

Suggested Topics

  • Actionable plans for Drupal 8.x.y backend: Workflow, Menus and Blocks, API First, Media, or any other planned, proposed, or suggested initiatives.
  • Actionable plans for Drupal 8.x.y Core frontend: Frontend changes, improvements for core themes, inclusion of new core themes, decoupled core, etc.
  • Improvements in User Experience and Accessibility: UX/a11y studies, results, presentations and action plans for improving Core's user experience..
  • Working with core - planning, processes, and issue queues

DevOps

Today, we live in an engineering culture where we embrace many other technologies and we integrate them in our workflow. This means building dedicated tools/API’s and deploying and maintaining those in a highly-available fashion. It’s not uncommon that we look at existing cloud services to help us with that task. Infrastructure suddenly becomes a part of our codebase.

On the other hand, the same people that build this infrastructure and, not uncommonly, also the ones who write the software are also the best resource to help when there are problems. With this structure we can no longer have the overhead of having separate software engineers, infrastructure engineers and operation engineers. This track would like to inspire the facilitation of automation and the removal of the unconscious divide and go to a shared responsibility between those roles.

Secondly, even if you don’t think of yourselves having one of those roles, we’re sure many of us have been part of it. We build automation scripts because in the end, we all try to avoid repetitive tasks. Making sure we do not repeat ourselves, allow sustainable, maintainable infrastructure that is part of the project it was built for and supporting it at the same time. While doing all of this, we can make the culture of continuous experimentation and learning thrive. This year we would like to focus on those engineers within a development team (DevOps/SRE/...) that approach infrastructure as code as well as learn how we can utilize new technologies such as embedding serverless architecture within our stack.

Suggested Topics

  • Integration of external tools such as API’s in your infrastructure
  • Serverless architecture and Drupal
  • Business value of a DevOps/SRE role for companies of any size
  • DevOps Communities & Culture
  • Configuration Management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack, Cloudformation, ...)
  • Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (Jenkins, Travis.ci, …)
  • Utilization and management of containers (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Rancher, Swarm)
  • Monitoring and Logging (ELK Stack, Graylog, Sensu, Sumologic, ...)
  • Drupal Testing Process (DrupalCI use outside of drupal.org)
  • Chatops (Hubot, Stackstorm)
  • How do you utilize the cloud and how to prepare and automate for it.
  • Process of Incident Management, post mortems, etc.

Drupal Showcase

This Drupal Showcase track is your chance to showcase your work, to show what's possible, and to inspire. This year, sessions are to be case studies only to help provide the most educational environment possible.

Cases Studies are an opportunity to reflect on your work, and share your successes and insights with the community. We are interested in hearing business-level content from leaders in our industry to fill up the audience's toolbox with helpful resources and knowledge. Don't just tell the What; the best case studies will always delve into the How and the Why particularly how the "How and Why" pertain to the audience.

Be prepared to show the inner-workings of the project or product you are presenting. Who participated? What process and methodology did you chose? What was the problem or opportunity you or your software addressed? Most importantly of all, how was it all tied into Drupal!? Think about getting your client involved so we can hear how it helped them from their side of the story. If you're a software vendor, consider teaming up with Drupal agencies to help showcase the value of your product from a Drupal industry professionals!

Case studies should not seek to directly promote a vendor, but to genuinely share knowledge and experience (which will of course show businesses in a good light). Audiences will always prefer sessions that provide clear learning points, innovation and best-practices.

Suggested Topics

  • Breaking new ground, and redefining what’s possible
  • Failure and resiliency - How you overcame the problem
  • Solving problems using Drupal or for Drupal (Drupal 8 specifically wouldn't hurt!)
  • Beyond Drupal: offering products, strategy, services and integrated solutions
  • Interdisciplinary topics: accessibility, performance and security

Front End

The Front end track will cover the inspiring world of delighting the end user. From the design conception to the end result of HTML, CSS, SVG and JavaScript, there is a lot to talk about.

Join us and discuss about project experiences, exciting ideas, tools, hacks, engineering efforts and workflows that the frontend community is using to create compelling web experiences. Where headless Drupal is just one of the many possible ways of blending Drupal to adapt to new trends.

This year, we'll pay special attention to the the new possibilities of Drupal 8 theming, JavaScript, and UX with a practical approach.

Suggested Topics

  • Your experience on using a new cutting-edge technology with Drupal. Tell your story, fails and successes.
  • Improving developers’ lives through tooling, best practices and process. Sharpening the saw.
  • Tools and thoughts about responsive web and smart approaches, like style guides.
  • Animations are not only for eye-candy. How are you using them?
  • Accessibility and security in the frontend.
  • Whatever topic that inspire you as a frontend developer and you want to spread the word about.

Horizons

New Track!

Long-held notions of publishing 'pages' to the 'Internet' fall in the face of our distributed, decoupled, multi-channel web. Horizons is the new interdisciplinary track with a focus on technologies and ideas outside the Drupal ecosystem, which complement and inspire our favourite CMS. This track is for all the sessions that don't fit the traditional Drupalcon tracks, for ideas that are too big to be just one category, and for all the interesting problems and challenges we face at the edges of using Drupal.

Suggested Topics

  • Working with Drupal and the latest front end technologies and best practices
  • Decoupled Drupal
  • Drupal as an application framework
  • Accessibility Performance and security
  • Multi-channel content publishing
  • The content authoring experience
  • What perspectives can the Drupal community learn from alternative, complementary, or even competing platforms

Performance and Scaling

New Track!

For the first time, DrupalCon will be hosting the Performance and Scaling track where we’ll share real-world solutions for making Drupal and your organization more performant and scalable.

As adoption grows, performance and scaling have become critical for Drupal, the underlying Stack and those who use the websites and applications. It’s been shown that faster performance drives increased user engagement and yields better conversion rates. But performance isn’t only about happy users and better business. Performance is giving international audiences with limited bandwidth access to new information and services. Performance is also allowing sites to scale and serve more users than ever before. Better performance can also mean that upgrading to newer technologies leads to less resource usage and lowers operational cost.

Suggested Topics

  • HTTP/2
  • Frontend / Client caching strategies & optimizations
  • ESI & Page fragment caching
  • CDNs / Global site performance
  • Performance in emerging countries
  • Infrastructure & database tuning
  • Performance monitoring
  • Refreshless (aka Turbolinks™), BigPipe, & other innovative 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 with the release of 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.

Suggested Topics

  • PHP 7 / Strict Type Hinting / New Features
  • Unit testing
  • Building from cross-project components (Composer, etc.)
  • Web services / REST / Guzzle
  • Web security best practices
  • Debugging PHP
  • Code quality tools, practices (Code reviews, pull request, etc), and methodologies
  • Software architecture patterns and techniques
  • Interoperability and integrations between Drupal and other PHP projects

Project Management

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

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

Suggested Topics

  • Real-world Project Management: Tips & tricks from lessons learned and stories about what went well and what could be improved.
  • Getting things done:
    • Applying a methodology: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Scrumban, Agile Agencies… what did you choose, why and how did you implement it… and stick with it?
    • Project estimation: How do you answer the question “Is it done yet?” and “How much will it cost me?”
    • Project planning: Sprint planning, resource allocation, Backlog management
    • Scope, risk, and change management strategies
    • Project and portfolio reporting tactics: “how to” with specific tools, charts, reports. (PMs like spreadsheets)
    • Leadership and Coordination: working with teams, whether they’re local, remote or distributed. Facilitating self-organising teams, building cross-functional teams.
  • Project Manager For Hire: How to make it as a freelancing PM or Scrum Master?
  • Project Managers in Open Source Communities: Using your PM knowledge to contribute to Open Source Projects.

Site Building

The Site Building track is designed to teach you ways to let Drupal do the hard work without needing to write code. By assembling the right modules and configurations one can create rich and complex features without worrying about reinventing the wheel and write complex logic and code.

In this track you can learn better tools to manage content management and publishing, control website's layouts, integrate other data sources or platforms via web services, and master any other advanced functionalities that are common requirements in Drupal projects. This track is directed to students who are new to Drupal, developers just getting started with Drupal, seasoned developers and architects.

Suggested Topics

  • Improving Accessibility, UX and Content Admin UI
  • Information Planning and Content Architecture, Applied Content Strategy
  • Configuration Management Best Practices, and beyond CMI core functionality
  • Layout and Theming using UI : Tools that allow you to build and control layout
  • Distros & Platforms: Come talk about the next platform you are building!
  • Recipes ! There is always a recipe already baked in Drupal that can get others start easily! If you wish to showcase any of your special ways of putting modules to work the way you want, the stage is yours!
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  • We want to feel the pulse on Drupal 8:
    • How are you using its new features related to Multilingual, Blocks, Context, Responsive Images, CMI, etc.
    • Share your site building experience with Drupal 8 and how it changed from previous versions.
    • Resume the current state and usage of popular Site Building modules: Like Panels, Display Suite, Rules, Context, Media, Flag, Paragraphs, etc and newcomers to the Drupal scene introduced by Drupal 8.

Symfony

The Symfony track is dedicated to exploring the Symfony ecosystem that built Drupal 8. Learn about the new Drupal 8 concepts powered by Symfony and Twig. Join industry-leading experts for a full day of Symfony, Drupal, and Twig. Whether you're a Symfony aficionado or a novice eager to learn more, this track will have something for everyone.

Suggested Topics

  • Console
  • Dependency Injection
  • EventDispatcher
  • HttpFoundation
  • HttpKernel
  • Routing
  • Serializer
  • Validator
  • Twig (templating system)