Course description

The best website is a fast website. Users are proven to be happier and more willing to spend time and money on your site when it loads fast and responds quickly to their actions. Adding performance to the ever-growing list of development responsibilities can seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be.

In this full-day training we'll cover development best practices to make your Drupal site fast, making the frontend as performant as possible. We will discuss how to set and maintain a performance budget, which helps prioritize site performance over the life of a project. Finally, we will explain the basics of workflow automation, which helps a team stick to a performance budget during development, and serves as a warning system when heavy, slow features are added to a site.
 

Learning Objectives

  • Create a foundation of knowledge which allows you to optimize an existing site.
  • Confidently build a performant site from scratch while balancing other priorities like feature backlogs and deadlines.
  • Use automated processes to check every change you make to a site, ensuring that major changes in performance do not go unnoticed during the development cycle.

Syllabus

Use contributed modules to tune the frontend of a Drupal site.
Learn about automated workflow tools that keep your theme's assets lean.
Discuss and implement a simple performance budget on a sample site.
Combine GitHub and Travis CI to set up automated tests that are run on every pull request you create for a project.
 

Who will gain the most from this course?

  • **Developers** that want to improve the frontend performance of their projects.
  • **Technical leads** that want to consistently deliver performant sites while managing multiple teams and projects.

Prerequisites for this course


Hardware 

We prefer users have a Mac, Linux, or another Unix-based computer, but it is not required. All examples provided are tested on OS X and Ubuntu 14.04.

Software

  • git, node.js, and npm
  • Drupal development will occur on a hosted platform

Skills

  • Familiarity with the command-line interface.
  • Familiarity with the text-editor of your choice.
  • Familiarity with the browser DevTools of your choice.
  • Knowledge of Sass/Compass would be helpful, but not required.
 

Course Information

Date: May 11
Time: 9:00-5:00
Cost: $500 - includes breakfast, lunch and coffee breaks
Training Company: Four Kitchens
Experience Level: Advanced
Drupal Version: 7.x

When & Where

Time: 
Monday, 11 May, 2015 - 09:00 to 17:00
Room: 
505

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