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.

Business

This Business and Strategy track is aimed at attendees looking for actionable advice, ideas and challenges from business owners, executives, and project managers. Sessions are intended to be relevant not just to Drupal shops, but the digital experience business as a whole. Sessions in this track will be non-technical by nature.

We aim to generate ideas and inspiration for recruiting and hiring, company culture, sales and marketing, digital strategy, products and service offerings. Emphasis will given to relevant experience, story-driven narratives and ideas outside of the core Drupal ecosystem. Preference will also be given to individual sessions that provide in-depth lessons learned over panel-based sessions preaching general best practices.

Locally, New Orleans is an emerging technology and start-up environment. Consideration will also be given to sessions that highlight the benefits of Drupal over the hottest frameworks du jour.

Suggested Topics

  • Recruiting and retaining talent
  • Tools and best practices for teams - local and distributed
  • Customer service, communication, and marketing
  • Selling Drupal: Showcasing the value of investing in open source
  • Beyond Drupal: offering products, strategy, services and integrated solutions
  • Growing and scaling your business
  • Choosing the right platform for a technology start-up
  • The upgrade decision: when is the right time to move to Drupal 8?

Coding and Development

With core Drupal 8 now in full swing and the contrib space rapidly maturing, now is an excellent time to get more deeply involved with one of the world’s largest open-source development communities. The Coding and Development track is focused on educating developers on the latest techniques and tools for increasing the quality and efficacy of their projects.

Topics will include best practices for coding and debugging in Drupal 8, making decisions and plans for migrating sites from earlier versions of Drupal or other systems, upgrading contrib to Drupal 8, engagement with other frameworks and technologies, high performance and large scale development experiences, and exploring the advantages of participating in open-source culture. Come share the vast wealth of knowledge and lessons learned and collaborate with other engineers from around the world!

Suggested Topics

  • Showcasing awesome things that contrib projects can do in Drupal 8
  • How to manage the migration of our projects to Drupal 8
  • Tools and techniques for upgrading modules
  • What both beginner and experienced developers should know
  • Project architecture
  • Caching and performance

Core Conversations

Core Conversations are a place for people actively working on and contributing to Drupal to meet, discuss, and plan the future of Drupal.

This is the place for big ideas about the future of Drupal, as well as discussions about where we want to go and how we are going to get there. Where regular tracks and sessions focus on the present and immediate future, Core Conversations are about long-term.

Each session is a conversation, so it has a short presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion with the audience.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • Reflections on D8 release, and things that were introduced in D8
  • Targeted, actionable proposals for improvements to Drupal
    • development process
    • mentoring process
    • documentation process
    • community management, governance process, and the challenges of its rapid growth
    • subsystem and topic maintainership

Ideas:

  • Defining Drupal's goals, mission, and core principles
  • Plans for Drupal 8.2.x, 8.3.x
  • Retrospective / lessons learned from 8.0.0 and 8.1.x release
  • Effects of issue credits
  • The road to Drupal 9 without FUD
  • Javascript admin front-end
  • PSRs for Drupal Core
  • Concrete discussions about major/larger architectural changes or ongoing pain points
  • Where do we plan to go for next Drupal releases
  • How to get your idea into core
  • Automated javascript testing
  • Automated performance testing
  • Automated visual regression testing
  • Entity and field API future
  • ?? and your ideas for core conversations

DevOps

DevOps culture is building agile relationships in organizations of all sizes allowing them to build web sites and applications faster and better than ever before. From automating processes to creating dashboards, we see DevOps practices becoming critical to operations ability to keep pace with the rapid velocity of modern development.

In the DevOps track, the Drupal community will share wide-ranging experiences, knowledge and skills that will bring your developers and operations together to work more efficiently & resiliently.

Suggested Topics

  • Business value of DevOps for companies of any size
  • Establishing DevOps Culture
  • Configuration Management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack)
  • Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery
  • Docker best practices
  • Docker infrastructure (Kubernetes, OpenShift, Rancher, Swarm)
  • Monitoring and Logging (ELK, Graylog, Sensu)
  • DrupalCI use outside of drupal.org
  • Chatops (Hubot, Stackstorm)

Drupal.org

The Drupal.org track is a collection of sessions about Drupal.org the website. The Drupal Association Engineering Team will attend the sessions to provide feedback and participate in discussions. Community members leading Drupal.org-related initiatives are welcome to submit sessions to share progress on their initiatives, solicit community feedback, and attract more volunteers to help push their initiatives forward. If you are an experienced Drupal.org volunteer and you’d like to pitch an idea for Drupal.org; would like to help with and/or start an initiative, your submissions are also welcome. Make sure that your idea is ready and well-thought-out, with a clear use case and benefit for the community. Include a detailed description in your session submission and links to previous discussions / posts about the idea. This track will take place on Wednesday, May 10 and will consist of 5 sessions.

Front End

The Front End ecosystem continues to evolve at a blistering pace, both within Drupal and in general web development. How can developers keep up and marry the best Front End practices with the best of what Drupal offers?

While the end result may appear as simply HTML, CSS and Javascript, the road from conception to rendered page is complex. Innovation is abound: rich client-side applications now consume RESTful resources, stitched together with diverse contributed javascript technologies, stylized with shared CSS components and frameworks. Drupal 8 is embracing these technologies and making room for Front Enders to adopt new technologies.

Let’s talk about the technologies and procedures that are in use in today’s Front End development: preprocessors, build automation, JS and CSS architecture, new template systems and client-side applications. What about headless Drupal, where the back end deals with data and leaves the interface to the Front End?

And how has web design changed to cope with Front End innovations? Let's see how rich applications are designed, from component design to responsive layouts. Designers and Front End developers now have all the freedom we’ve ever dreamed of, let’s see where it can take us!

Suggested Topics

  • The maturation of Front End as an engineering practice
  • Front End practices outside the Drupal world
  • Current and emerging best practices, tools, & techniques (BEM/OOCSS, static prototyping, design in browser, progressive enhancement)
  • Front End and Back end templating systems (Twig, Twig.js, Handlebars)
  • Performance
  • Content-first, atomic design, and new design issues
  • Sustainable patterns of development
  • And most importantly -- Why are we doing this? What do we hope to achieve? Why, as a Front Ender, use Drupal at all?

New! Horizons

We use Drupal now in ways that were unimaginable even five years ago, to say nothing of when it was first created 15 years ago. Horizons is a new track to discuss the edges of Drupal, where front end meets back end, publishing platform meets application framework, where our long-held notions of publishing 'pages' to the 'internet' fall in the face of our distributed, decoupled, multi-channel web. The separation of 'Front End' and 'back end' has become increasingly blurry, UX is now a concern of engineers and designers alike, and design is as much code as it is visuals. For all the sessions that don't fit the traditional Drupalcon tracks, for ideas that are too big to be just one category, we offer Horizons, an interdisciplinary track that acknowledges our biggest challenges and greatest opportunities are at the messy edges of Drupal.

We are seeking sessions which 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

New! 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

New! 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 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, lead, review, report on and strategically plan your projects and portfolios.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • Project estimation
  • Project planning techniques: Sprint planning, resource allocation, Backlog management
  • Scope, risk, and change management strategies
  • Project management case studies
  • Project and portfolio reporting tactics: “how to” with specific tools, charts, reports. (PMs like spreadsheets)
  • Leadership and coordination approaches: working with remote teams, encouraging self-organization, encouraging cross-functionality.

Site Building

The power of Drupal lies not just in the core platform, but also in powerful contributed modules that allow one to build sites quickly and efficiently. The Site Building track is designed to teach you ways to let Drupal do the hard work without needing to write code.

The Site Building track is aimed at people looking to build sites using the Drupal framework but are not PHP masters, people who need better tools to layout their site, people looking to integrate with web services, and people who want to add advanced functionality to their site but aren’t sure where to start. This includes students who are new to Drupal, developers just getting started with Drupal, seasoned developers and freelancers.

Sessions in this track will be technical in nature, although they would not usually involve any coding.

Suggested Topics

  • Drupal 8 is here:
    • What’s new with Site Building in Drupal 8? Eg: Multilingual, Blocks, Context, Responsive Images, CMI, etc.
    • Have you already built a site with Drupal 8? Share your site building experience.
    • D8 Status of popular Site Building modules: Like Panels, Display Suite, Rules, Context, Media, Flag, Paragraphs, etc.
  • Improving Accessibility, UX and Content Admin UI
  • Information Planning and Content Architecture, Applied Content Strategy
  • Migration - either from previous versions of Drupal or other systems
  • 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!
  • There is a recipe for that! Whether building a shopping cart, Faceted Search, or custom RSS feeds, all are something that Site Builders can do. If you wish to showcase any of your special ways of putting modules to work the way you want, the stage is yours!

Symfony

The Symfony track is dedicated to exploring the Symfony Components that build Drupal 8. Learn from the Symfony core team new and elegant approaches to coding with PHP. Enhance your knowledge of the Symfony components and understand how Drupal 8 runs, save time when you code. 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.

If you are an experienced Symfony developer submitting a talk, don’t forget to adapt your talk from a Drupal perspective, to let the Drupal community understand as much as possible the Symfony ecosystem and components.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • ClassLoader
  • DependencyInjection
  • EventDispatcher
  • HttpFoundation
  • HttpKernel
  • Routing
  • Serializer
  • Validator
  • Yaml
  • Assetic
  • Forms

User Experience

User Experience (UX) design forms the foundation of all interactions on the web and requires consideration beyond the web such as off-screen/non-web interactions the user may have had with your company or product or the environment in which they’re interacting with the web. It’s inherent in all aspects of production - from strategy and content creation to design and development. Whether you identify yourself as a UX practitioner or not, any part of the web that you touch affects the user’s experience. Conceptual thinkers, strategists, decision makers, content creators, designers and developers are encouraged to present topics on their area of expertise.

We are seeking sessions which align with the following topics

  • UX process and techniques
  • Strategy and planning
  • Content strategy
  • Visual and interaction design
  • Responsive and accessible design
  • Usability
  • The impact of non-web interactions on the web user experience

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.

Desired session 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

 

Tip: Before submitting a case study, make sure that you have informed (and received consent from) all parties involved in the project, especially if you are addressing failure and resiliency. Don’t surprise your clients!

Who Should Attend:

  • Drupalistas: Developers, Site builders, Project Managers, Product Owner
  • Clients: project leads, business owners (non-technical) with a project underway
  • Those new to Drupal, curious about what it can do