Tracks

Conference Tracks

Business and Strategy

Aimed at business owners, project managers, evaluators, and other decision-makers, these non-technical sessions focus on using Drupal to solve business challenges. Talks cover three main themes:

  • Drupal-Powered Businesses - Building web-based products, services, and stores powered by Drupal.
  • The CMS Industry - Discussions on trends in the industry and Drupal’s niche within it.
  • Managing Drupalists and Drupal projects

Speakers from outside the Drupal community are highly encouraged to submit talks for this track.

Community: Bridging People and Technology

Drupal may be written in PHP, but it runs on community - a powerful collaboration of people through meetups, camps and code. Discover your role in Drupal 8 and learn how to contribute. Plan a virtual meetup, regional camp or a thematic summit. Explore the relationships and ideas behind Drupal and Drupalcon.

Main Themes

  • How to contribute to core and where help is most needed.
  • Connecting with other Drupal users in your region.
  • Connecting with other Drupal users that have shared interests.

Audience

  • Everyone!
  • Anyone who is not contributing code and would like to.
  • Anyone who is contributing code and would like to mentor someone who isn't.
  • Anyone who wants to grow the community at the heart of Drupal.
  • Anyone who wants to rock the boat. ;)

Frontend: Connecting new tools and techniques to create an effective Drupal frontend experience

The frontend experience of a website is crucial to its success. Though the backend of a site may be impeccable, the frontend experience gives the user the first impression of an organization or company. Without a good frontend experience, a site can turn users away. Let's discover ways in which we can connect our knowledge of different frontend tools and techniques with Drupal — and make Drupal a better experience for all users.

Main Themes

  • The importance of frontend development in creating websites + web apps
  • What frontend developers need to know to work well with backend devs, PMs, UX, Content Strategists
  • Preparing frontend devs for D8 and Twig
  • Frontend for mobile
  • Using frontend frameworks such as Foundation and Bootstrap
  • Speeding up the design process
  • Frontend development for multilingual sites

Audience

  • Frontend developers
  • Backend devs that do Frontend work
  • PMs that work with Frontend devs

User Experience (UX)

The User Experience process is key to the success of the development of websites and web applications. From user research, interviews and analytics, we learn what the user actually wants and needs; not what we assume they want. At this year's DrupalCon we present a new User Experience track to show our community's dedication to user needs.

Main Themes

  • Explaining what user experience is and why it’s important
  • UX for mobile and tablet, Responsive UX
  • Speeding up the design process using UX tools and techniques
  • UX for multilingual sites - especially RTL
  • Content Strategy

Audience

  • UX professionals - Drupal
  • UX professionals outside of Drupal
  • Backend devs that are interested in UX
  • Frontend devs interested in UX

DevOps

We define DevOps as bridging the gap between developers and operations; ensuring deployment, testing and site upgrades go smoother than ever before. By changing organizational culture, increasing automation, enhancing metrics collection and sharing our experience enacting these changes, quality of work and life can improve for everyone.

Main Themes

  • Automation and CI processes
  • Functional testing
  • Culture shifts to fit a testing and automation workflow
  • Configuration management and its usage in a DevOps process
  • Metrics and reporting dashboards

Target Audience

  • Operations teams interested in expanding their DevOps tool set
  • Developers interested in learning more about operations and automation
  • Business leaders interested in shifting the culture of their organizations to embrace testing and automation

Site Building

Drupal is a system that can be extended with PHP modules and there are many available already. The Site Building track is designed to teach you ways to use the Drupal system to build sites quickly and efficiently using both core and third party modules. These sessions will show you how to make Drupal do the hard stuff and then get out of the way.

Main Themes

  • Laying out content: Using contributed modules to modify the way your site displays content.
  • Quick functionality: Modules that give quick features for very little time.
  • Complex functionality, simplified: Modules that accomplish specific complicated tasks with little configuration.

Audience
People looking to build sites using the Drupal framework but are not PHP masters, people who need better tools to layout their site, and people who want to add functionality to their site but aren’t sure where to start.

Coding & Development: Connecting Concepts & Execution

Solving problems and building better solutions are part of the Drupal mantra. Improving and extending the framework includes adding or improving new functionality via modules, implementing new database technologies, & novel technical solutions to common problems. Come to find out about the latest ways to interact with Drupal. New paths to use existing Drupal code to streamline development workflows. Dive deep into the beating heart of running sites and discover new avenues of raw functionality.

Main Themes

  • Using alternative methods to control your Drupal site, other than through the UI.
  • Developing new methods to speed up creating solutions (feature driven development, developing with CI, pair programming, TDD, BDD).
  • Extending the entities to make Drupal even more OO!
  • Performance tuning to make the site fly.
  • Moving content around.

Audience

  • People who have an abiding love for the command line.
  • People who regularly check xkcd.
  • Anyone who loves solving problems, especially their own.
  • People who understand the text editor wars.
  • Mac or linux? Don’t care. We’re platform agnostic.
  • Anyone who’s dreamed about code, or had thought up a new module in the shower.

Government, Nonprofit, and Education: Connecting Citizens and Communities

This track will offer content for attendees interested in Drupal and nonprofit, government and education organizations. Sessions will address ways developers, site administrators, strategists and organizations can connect communities of volunteers, donors, and activists; citizens, policy experts and lawmakers; students, teachers, and staff using Drupal along with other open source technologies and web communities.

Main Themes

  • High-level Drupal implementation strategies in nonprofits, government and education organizations of various kinds and sizes
  • Important case studies and other strategic how-to’s demonstrating how organizations are using Drupal in the nonprofit, government and education spaces
  • Leaders from the nonprofit, government and education industries who can expand and enrich the Drupal community with their perspective
  • Targeted tools and solutions for nonprofits, government, and educational organizations - from the very large to the very small

Target Audience

  • Decision-makers and technical staff from public sector, education, and nonprofit organizations
  • Agencies who work with public sector, education, and nonprofit organizations

Core Conversations

Core Conversations are a place for people actively working and contributing to Drupal core or Drupal.Org 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're going to get there. Where regular tracks and sessions focus on the present, Core Conversations are about the future.

Session Format
Each session is either one 30 minute presentation or two 15 minute presentations, followed by 30 minutes of discussion with the audience.

Target Audience
Those actively engaged in pushing Drupal forward whether it be via the code, the community, the development process, or some other aspect critical to our development.

If you are new to Drupal or simply want to learn more about Drupal and Drupal development then you will get far more out of the regular sessions, particularly in the Coder, Themer, and Sitebuilding tracks.

Day Stage

For companies serious about growth in today's world, having the right suite of tools and knowledge of current trends is critical. Come hear sponsored business-level content on the Day Stage (case studies, best practices) and meet with Drupal businesses to fill up your toolbox with helpful tips and advice from leaders in our industry.