DrupalCon New Orleans is on the Horizon

This year, DrupalCon North America heads to New Orleans, and I can't tell you how excited I am. Together with all the other members of our local Louisiana Drupal user group, we are truly looking forward to hosting the Drupal community as much as you all are excited to come experience everything New Orleans has to offer. For those visiting for the first time, I hope your expectations are exceeded. For those of you who are familiar with New Orleans, we welcome you back, and I hope you will be comforted with old haunts. I also hope you find something new to you...it won't be hard to do with New Orleans' seemingly infinite number of dining options between classics and pop-ups. Regardless of the local fare options, everyone coming to DrupalCon New Orleans will have a chance to experience something novel with these three new track offerings: PHP, Project Management and Horizons.

In the past, atypical or slightly off-topic sessions have been stuffed into other tracks, but this year, these new track offerings give presenters and session goers more room to stretch their minds. Of these new tracks, I have the good fortune to co-chair Horizons with David Hwang. From David's experiences as front end track chair at other DrupalCons, he's witnessed the increasing dialogue around the distributed, decoupled, multi-channel web as well as sessions that stretch across track descriptions. Drawing from these observations, he started advocating for a unique space for session topics.

Wolf of Wall Street's Jordan Belfort character toasting champaign with fireworks in the background.

Queue fireworks...this is the year. The DrupalCon New Orleans Horizons track is open for all those seeking to submit sessions with topics that will continue these conversations about the edges of Drupal. We are looking to you to submit sessions that align with the following topics:

  • What perspectives can the Drupal community learn from alternative, complementary or even competing platforms, JS MVC frameworks, etc.
  • Drupal as a publication platform for the Internet of Things
  • Integrating Drupal with your chosen front end framework
  • Drupal as an application framework
  • Interdisciplinary topics: accessibility, performance and security
  • Optimized Drupal for content discovery: search engine optimization
  • Web analytics and A/B testing
  • Advertising networks and integrating them with Drupal
  • Video content publishing
  • The content authoring experience
  • Using Service Workers and Drupal

So get excited already! We have the whole web and internet to learn from and integrate with when working with Drupal. Let's use the Horizons track to welcome presenters sharing their knowledge and insights with us. For those looking to present, submit your DrupalCon New Orleans session soon, the submission deadline ends February 29th. And to everyone, come enjoy the conference and New Orleans. Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler!

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Jason Want
Horizons Track Chair
DrupalCon New Orleans