Workshops

DrupalCon Europe provides the following 4 in-depth 120 minute workshops for each attendee included with your DrupalCon ticket! Work on your content strategy, caching and performance, client relations or frontend performance. The workshops are held by experts in their respective fields with years of experience in the covered topics. Register for DrupalCon Europe to participate in either of these workshops.

Your first steps to a successful content strategy

Baddy Sonja Breidert

 

Every web project needs a content strategy with clear goals, a great UX/design, and a thoughtfully modeled information architecture that is implemented in a CMS system.

Above tasks are done by different people: Content strategists, analytics experts, UX- and graphic designers, accessibility experts, solution architects, and software developers. 

The challenge is to create a mutual understanding of all stakeholders and an easy to understand workflow for people to collaborate.

At our company we have developed an intuitive model for the workflow that we apply in all web projects.

Our model has 10 steps: 

  1. Define business goals
  2. Create a content strategy
  3. Segment website user audience
  4. Plan user journeys and content personalisation
  5. Create UX and site structure
  6. Create Design and Frontend
  7. Create Backend (CMS)
  8. Create content
  9. Setup tracking
  10. Run monthly analysis on websites


Each step is very important for the success of the project. In this workshop I will walk through steps 1-4 and give real examples and share templates that you can use in your next project.

This workshop is intended for everyone that is interested in learning about how to create and apply a content strategy for a web project.

Track: Users & Editors
Theme: Content & Digital Marketing
Date: Wednesday, 09 December - 16:15 to 18:15 CET
Experience Level: Intermediate

Caching and performance deep dive 2.0 - A practical workshop

Fabian Franz

 

Drupal has the most advanced caching system of any CMS out there right now. This leads to many opportunities to create the fastest Drupal sites ever and easily cache content directly at the edge, but there are also many challenges, problems and learning curves to overcome. This session wants to provide every participant with the tools and knowledge via practical exercises to understand caching and performance optimization deeply.

Building upon a successful session at DrupalCon Global 2020, this session will be in Workshop form and feature practical exercises - so bring your Laptop if you want. I will invite participants to the stage (via a conferencing tool) to share their screen, show their solutions to exercises, discuss questions, and let us all learn together.

Changes from last time
In the first part we will also discuss in more detail:

 

  • How to create your own cache bin
  • A real life example of using a cache context
  • Cache Contexts with decoupled Drupal (it's possible!)
  • Testing out various placeholder strategies
  • In the second part we will go even further and discuss the most requested feature after my last talk:
  • How to do efficient authenticated user caching
  • How to combine that with a Content Delivery Network

 

The session wants to teach you via a practical approach what the fundamentals of performance are, so that everyone is empowered to improve performance of their sites so that we can finally have a fast web!

It is targeted as a beginner-friendly session, but will show concepts, patterns, exercises and insights that can help everyone that is interested in learning more about the caching mindset.

The session outline will roughly be:

  1. What is caching?
  2. What should you cache?
  3. Where should you cache?
  4. Common Caching Problems
  5. Caching Beyond Drupal

 

By very popular demand it will also show:

  1. Authenticated User Caching
  2. Authenticated User Caching at the edge


Learning Objectives
At the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

  • Cache Content manually and know how to vary it and when it needs to be invalidated
  • Understand what fundamental ideas lie behind caching and apply it to all instances of caching
  • Have practical tools and ideas at hand to solve common caching and performance pitfalls within Drupal 8 - including placeholders and authenticated user caching


Prerequisites: Participants should have a basic understanding of PHP and Drupal 8 and if they want to participate should be able to install, run and modify a site including basic usage of drush.

About the speaker: Fabian has architected large parts of the Drupal caching system. Unfortunately a lot of potential of the caching system has not been realized, yet. His motivation is to empower the Community to make the most out of this system.

Track: Makers & Builders
Theme: Back-End Development
Date: Wednesday, 09 December - 16:15 to 18:15 CET
Experience Level: Beginner

How did the COVID-19 crisis affect client relationships and what can we take out of it?

Josef Kruckenberg & Dan Lemon

 

This retrospective workshop is for everyone working at the intersection between open source delivery and the customer side. Would you like to reflect how COVID-19 has affected yourself and the work you do or would you like to experience an agile retrospective format? Then this interactive workshop is for you.

Facilitated by a team of agile coaches, we will use the retrospective format to share and learn from our experiences with the COVID-19 crisis. We will celebrate achievements and collect insights on what we can learn and improve for the future.

You will be able to sign-up for this workshop two weeks up until one day before the session within the capacity of the facility. We will mix and match participants in group to make sure the groups have relevant content to reflect together.

Track: Clients & Industry Experiences
Theme: General Open Web & Drupal Digital Experiences
Date: Wednesday, 09 December - 16:15 to 18:15 CET
Experience Level: Beginner

Front-end Web Performance Clinic 2020

Michael Herchel & Ben Morss

 

We all know that your website’s performance is critical to the success of its mission. Conversion rates are proven to plummet if with every second of page load time. Our speakers Mike Herchel of Lullabot and Ben Morss of Google are here to help you work through these questions.

What can we do about this? Why is the web still slow in 2020?

In this clinic, we’re going deep, deep into modern web performance, and you will learn how to identify and fix performance bottlenecks in your website / webapp through topics such as:

 

  • Web performance metrics you should be measuring and how. Which are the most important?
  • How do I optimize my site for each of these web performance metrics
  • How browsers render web pages, and how to use this knowledge to optimize the loading experience.
  • What is the critical path? How do I account for this?
  • What is the JavaScript main thread? How can I optimize for this?
  • Identifying, profiling, and optimizing for third party scripts.

 

In order to get the most out of this session, the attendee will have to 1) have some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, 2) have a basic understanding of browser-based developer tools, and find slow websites extremely annoying.

Track: Makers & Builders
Theme: Front-End Development 
Date: Thursday, 10 December - 15:00 to 17:00 CET
Experience Level: Intermediate