Session Ideas

Have you read the DrupalCon Minneapolis call for proposals and now need some help forming a session idea? The program committee has brainstormed a list of session topic ideas to help get your creative juices flowing. This list is by no means all they want to see, and eagerly await your unique ideas as well!

Being Human, Contributions, & Community

  • Contrib 101: rolling, re-rolling, and more: Many folks new to the community don't know know the contrib vocabulary and procedures.
  • Easy environment or cloud setup for new contributors: Easiest possible path(s) to a working instance for contributing back would be helpful.
  • Getting clients to contribute
  • How we can make the community more welcoming to all
  • I'm not a coder. How can I contribute?
  • Addressing the challenges facing our open source/Drupal community
  • The challenges of contributing and how we can overcome them
  • The path to contributing: How do I do it?

 

Content & Digital Marketing

  • Build your own content sharing: Building the equivalent of a content hub to share content between different sites using Drupal modules
  • Creating effective editorial workflows
  • Driving better engagement with audience research
  • Editor experience in a headless CMS
  • Google Analytics vs open source analytics option(s): For example, Matomo
  • Integrating style guide with editor/author experience
  • Marketing automation and Drupal
  • Paywall best practices
  • Personalization
  • Privacy-respecting marketing strategies
  • Reminders, expirations, and editorial calendars
  • Role and permissions schemes for decentralized teams

 

Development & Coding

  • A testing setup that works: Walkthrough of a successful methodology and toolchain for maximum *useful* test coverage
  • Accelerate development with Drupal Console
  • API 101: What is an API? How do I use it? How do I write one?
  • Building custom user interfaces for Drupal editorial tasks
  • Getting the most out of Drupal’s caching system: Including information on how caches can be expired or cleared ina targetted way, and how to architect things so that they take caching into consideration
  • CSS custom properties and how to use them in your Drupal theme
  • Debug in Drupal
  • Decoupled hard problems and how I/we solved them: An in-depth look at the hidden challenges of decoupled Drupal development and novel solutions to them
  • Drupal architecture patterns: Plugins, events, controllers, factories, when and how to use each
  • Drupal as an application backend: Using Drupal to power web/mobile applications
  • Drupal as an editorial component in a decoupled site ecosystem: Specifically around dev considerations, but may overlap with the Content & Digital Marketing track
  • Events vs Hooks: Could be beginner or intermediate focused depending on depth
  • Interfacing with external data stores - decoupling when Drupal is not the source of truth
  • Javascript and accessibility
  • Making best use of the plugin system
  • React and decoupled
  • Using Drupal with multiple decoupled clients: Using a single Drupal site as a backend for multiple decoupled consumers. For example, a native app, a kiosk and a web app.
  • Using modern JS frameworks (React, Vue, Ember, Angular) with Drupal

 

DevOps & Infrastructure

  • All things related to logs: security, debugging, etc. 
  • Automated Drupal updates
  • Caching JSON:API is the best thing sliced bread - when operating decoupled apps at scale 
  • Case Studies: How we improved website ROI via DevOps/Infrastructure Changes
  • Devops and SRE practices
  • Disaster/crisis planning
  • Diversity + DevOps 
  • Drupal on Kubernetes
  • Horizontal Scaling for editorial/authentication Drupal traffic in Kubernetes
  • Intro to DevOps for business owners
  • Intro to DevOps for developers 
  • Intro to InfoSec
  • Local environments - which do I choose?: With so many local environment options, folks get confused. Be good to compare and contrast various options - and provide resources.
  • Measuring progress toward improvement: May include blameless post mortem, or understanding how problems occurred, and measuring progress toward success. 
  • Observability/How to make best use of Drupal logging
  • Visual regression testing

 

Leadership, Management, & Business

  • Career journeys: How did you get where you are?
  • Creating and maintaining an effective business model for your agency
  • Digital governance models: How to create a governance strategy, case studies, etc.
  • Hiring challenges and how to create career paths into Drupal
  • How to find and maintain a relationship with a good vendor / how to be a good vendor
  • How to look critically at hiring practices and incorporate techniques to reduce opportunities for bias
  • Moving from technical role to manager role: what to know
  • Organizational design (for your whole team, or sub-teams like devops, UX, etc.)
  • Strengths and opportunities of a neurodiverse workforce

 

Quality Assurance & Testing

  • Accessibility testing
  • Automating QA
  • Automation architecture or Design Patterns in automation for Drupal based website
  • Best QA practices, QA processes to be followed in a Drupal project
  • Drupal QA as a career option
  • Drupal Spec Tool/behat
  • Onboarding a new QA employee (completely new to Drupal)
  • QA Contributions to the Drupal community
  • Testing for many browsers/devices

 

Site Building

  • Advanced views tricks
  • Best practices for managing user profiles & content on community sites
  • Debugging your site building changes: You enable a new module and set some configuration and now you have the white screen of death. How do you approach this?
  • Integrating 3rd parties/APIs
  • Layout Builder
  • Metatags (specifically optimizing for social media, not SEO)
  • Migration for noncoders
  • Multilingual landmines: Mixing multilingual, layout builder and/or content moderation. How to make the various combinations work, what to avoid.
  • Paragraphs
  • Views: Could be basic or intermediate, depending on level of complexity delved into
  • Webforms

 

User Experience, Accessibility, & Design

  • Designing beyond vision: audio interfaces, haptic feedback, AR, and more
  • Designing for an aging population
  • Designing for an international audience (cultural differences, language differences, symbolism)
  • How to sell UX: UX is often confused with visual design and tends to be difficult to sell. We would love to see a session that directly addresses this with a UX-specific sales strategy.
  • Interaction design for screen readers and/or dictation
  • Intro to Twig
  • Motion design and accessibility considerations
  • Preserving a strong UX through project changes and limits
  • UX Design as an advocacy tool
  • Why accessible experiences are also more beautiful

 

Wellness

  • Avoiding DrupalFlu and other convention sicknesses
  • Preventing Burnout
  • Preventing RSI (repetitive strain injuries)
  • Insurance for Contractors - Health Insurance & Life Insurance: What do I need & How do I Get It?
  • Yoga
  • Sketchnotes
  • Meditation

 

What's Next

  • AI-driven Drupal smart search: Conversational processing of search queries, mapped to query key terms
  • Anything about AI or Robotics with Drupal (or Symfony) as content producer/consumer/controller
  • Disassemble and swap Drupal components storage/discovery: Routes discovery not from yml files, Entity live storage in JSON/YAML files rather than db, and many more crazy ideas which can be the beginning of a new era
  • Drupal 9 readiness
  • Drupal and IoT: Any usage would be interesting, however a way to improve performances and reduce memory and storage size in order to smoothly run Drupal in IoT devices would be ideal.
  • Integration with conversational AI