Proposed Sessions

Axure Prototyping for Drupal

danigrrl — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 19:06:14 +0000

Speakers:

Click here to watch Axure Prototyping for Drupal

Click here to watch Axure Prototyping for Drupal (continued)

When working on relatively simple sites, there's a lot you can do directly in Drupal to show clients how content and functionality will work together. But as functionality gets more complex and more stakeholders get involved in decisions about how the site will work, it's easy to lose development hours on code that will end up thrown out as the stakeholders rip apart your ideas.

Wireframes only tell part of the story. To really get buy-in from stakeholders, you need to show them more than what's on a page—you need to show them how something will WORK.

Enter Axure RP. A common tool used by UX practitioners, it allows you to create site maps, user flows and wireframes quickly, within a single application—and makes it easy to add interactive elements, annotate your work, and export working HTML prototypes with the click of a button. In this session, UX Designer and Drupal for Designers author Dani Nordin will share how she uses Axure to prototype complex functionality and get stakeholder buy-in on projects while saving her team development time.

What question(s) does this session answer?

How do I ensure my project is going in the right direction before spending time on development?
How do I manage projects with many stakeholders without losing my mind?
How can I turn my team's ideas into something we can test quickly?

In addition, you'll learn practical techniques for working with Axure to create prototypes that not only give you something testable—without spending days or weeks on Drupal code—but that can also be used to directly communicate important specifications to the development team.

About Dani Nordin
I'm a UX Researcher and Designer who works with Drupal teams on medium-to-large implementations, usually involving complex relationships of content, stakeholders and technology. Additionally, I have taught UX Design at CDIA, General Assembly, and Harvard Business School. Currently a Research Associate at Bentley User Experience Center, where I'm pursuing a Master's Degree in HFID.

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Beginner

Drupal Version:

N/A

Time slot:

Tuesday · 01:00-02:00

Room:

12 - Mediacurrent | 4th floor

Convert a Site Template to a Drupal Theme using ZURB Foundation or Twitter Bootstrap

camoa — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 04:37:23 +0000

Speakers:

camoa

Beginners and small Drupal web shops are always faced with budget constraints, this leads to the lack of resources to acquire a decent web design for their projects. When you search around there is the option of getting Drupal Themes from sites like themeforest for $45 Dollars, while this is a good option to obtain fast, affordable and good looking web design new comers will be faced with the problems as was clearly stated b\y Brent Bice in his post http://getlevelten.com/blog/brent-bice/why-cheap-drupal-themes-suck.

This session looks forward to give another option to this, by acquiring a cheap $10-$15 dollar site template using the frameworks mentioned and make the conversion to Drupal using the proper tools and modules provided by Drupal.

In this talk we are going to show how you can setup both Themes, Drupal Zurb Foundation and Drupal Bootstrap.
Then we will proceed to discuss and show the different tools that will help and allow a beginner to intermediate user to recreate the template as a Drupal Sub-theme.
The talk will address the use of views, responsive grid, block class and other modules to accomplish this transformation in the easiest way possible and with minimum changes to template files.

This talk will be friendly to both, English and Spanish speakers, we did it at Drupal Picchu 2014, think we can do it again!

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Intermediate

Drupal Version:

Drupal 7.x

The Caching Deep Dive

ohthehugemanatee — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 12:15:29 +0000

Speakers:

ohthehugemanatee

Souvent22

bmeshjason

Click here to watch The Caching Deep Dive

In this workshop you will be an active participant, so please bring your laptop!

Back by popular demand from Prague 2013, the Caching Deep Dive is not for the faint of heart. We bring together Campbell Vertesi (ohthehugemanatee, Technical Architect at Forum One), Jason Ford (bmeshjason, CTO at Blackmesh), and Earnest Berry (souvent22, Senior Drupalist at the Economist) to dig deep into the issues of site caching, performance, and scalability.

This is not a session about the basics: you are expected to know what caching is and how it works already. We will compare various mainstream caching systems, their strengths and weaknesses, and common cache bin allocation strategies. You will learn how to performance test Drupal sites, producing benchmarks and load charts. You will learn how to diagnose caching problems, and optimize your cache configuration. You will learn how to make Varnish sit up and play fetch. We will discuss best practices in network topology, cache configuration, and performance testing, to give YOU the benefit of our deep experience in the area.

And you won't learn it by listening to us talk - you'll learn it by DOING, with your own computer, on a real server environment.

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Advanced

Drupal Version:

Drupal 7.x

Time slot:

Wednesday · 01:00-02:00

Room:

12 - Mediacurrent | 4th floor

Achieving Continuous Integration with Drupal

pdrake — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 21:26:10 +0000

Speakers:

pdrake

glennpratt

Designing, coding, testing, and debugging killer websites is hard. The process of staging code, running tests, and demoing and deploying the site shouldn't be. Right?

Yeah, right. Everyone wants to follow the best practices for site development, but few have time to set up a Continuous Integration system and learn how to use it.

In this hands-on lab, you will learn how to follow all the principles of Continuous Integration by actually building and deploying a live Drupal site. Topics will include:

Using a source code repository without losing your mind
Working with multiple environments, such as a development environment for each team member plus separate testing and production environments
Migrating code, database, and files across environments
Automating testing, database updates and scrubbing, and more
Recovering quickly from disaster when broken code is deployed

This lab is for Drupal site developers, but is also useful for their engineering managers or technical project managers. No coding required; sample code and patches are provided. We will use Acquia Free Cloud as a demonstration platform.

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Beginner

Drupal Version:

Drupal 7.x

jQuery for Designers & Themers (lab)

Bevan — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 01:03:20 +0000

Speakers:

Bevan

Small non-intrusive animations and interactions can greatly enhance the user experience and impress website visitors and clients. jQuery and jQuery UI make it easy to add these enhancements with only very basic programming skills. Learn how!

It is expected that attendees have an understanding of CSS selectors and how HTML elements are nested within each other to build a "tree" (aka "DOM"). This should make sense to you:

#page #content > p a.read_more {}

Some understanding of basic programming concepts will be necessary to take full advantage of the session. I.e.

// Declare a function called "calculateCircleArea", // which accepts a parameter "radius". function calculateCircleArea(radius) { // Declare a variable called "area". var area; // The area variable is now NULL. // Now assign a value to area. // area becomes 2 times pi times radius. area = 2 * 3.142 * radius; // The area variable is now 2πr ("two-pi-R"). // Functions usually return something. return area; }

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Intermediate

Drupal Version:

Drupal 7.x

Form API Workshop: From basics to ajax and beyond

Ericmaster — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 05:20:33 +0000

Speakers:

Ericmaster

Forms are the key web components for interaction between users and the website. It also happens that forms are one of the first things that a beginner start looking into when building his first module. A deep knowledge in the forms workflow will help you to provide an improved user experience while keeping the website access secure and troubleshoot issues with forms.

This is a workshop, so bring your laptop and get ready to get your hands dirty. We will go through a series of practical exercises which will cover from the basic concepts to more advanced topics like handing ajax events with forms and will review some of the best practices when building custom forms for Drupal. We will work with a prepared custom Drupal distribution that is aimed to be "hacked" for training purposes. Some of the topics that will be covered by the exercises are:

Basic Concepts, the form API
Form execution workflow
Validation and submission handlers
After build, pre-render and post-render callbacks
Form elements
Create a basic form
Upload and store an image with managed_file form element
Add date input to a form
Create new form element types
Fieldsets and Vertical Tabs
Working with the Ajax Framework
The #ajax property
Adding new input elements to a form
Altering form elements
More use cases
Multistep Forms
Draggable Table Forms
Altering Existing Forms Best Practices

I am very passionate about this subject and I have given a few talks and workshops about it in past events with a lot of interest and great feedback from the participants which had helped me to improve this workshop over the time.

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Intermediate

Drupal Version:

Drupal 7.x

(Don't Fear) The Features, now with More Cowbell

Kristen Pol — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 06:52:33 +0000

Speakers:

Aimee Degnan

Kristen Pol

...
(cue cowbell)
...
Come on baby
(Don't fear the Features)
Baby take my install
(Don't fear the Features)
We'll be able to push
(Don't fear the Features)
Baby lets revert it all
La, la la, la la
La, la la, la la
...

Does Features make you want to break your guitar? Do you wonder why that #$!@ feature won’t revert? Think you should put all your stuff in one huge feature and just hope for the best?

Give up amature hour! Understand and architect your features like a rock star (with more cowbell)!!

Using the Features module can be a wild ride, especially if the features structure is not well thought out before you start.

We'll cover

What is the Features module and why should it be used
Features + Drupal components, what is important
Crazy ways the use of Features can go wrong
Safe and sane ways to create and organize your features
Using features with multiple developers
How to add more cowbell!

About the lab

This session can be structured as a lab or as an standard session. As a lab, each attendee will be given access to a site where they can build and destroy Features with careful guidance.

Lab attendees must bring a laptop setup for Drupal 7 and, optionally, a cowbell ;)

About the speakers

Aimee has been in the web world since the 90s work as a web architect and project manager dealing a variety of Enterprise content management systems. She has presented at BADCamps, Stanford camps, SANDCamp, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out her drupal.org page and work history for more info.

Kristen has been working in web development since the dot-com boom and with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. She has presented at DrupalCon Portland, several BADCamps, several Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out her drupal.org page and work history for more info.

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Intermediate

Drupal Version:

Drupal 7.x

Modern Frontend Developer Master Class: Achieving Harmony From Design To Build

bmcmurray — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 22:25:42 +0000

Speakers:

Atomic Design, Pattern Lab, Sass, Compass, BEM, SMACSS, OOCSS, Style Tiles, element collages: There are a ton of new techniques and technologies at our disposal as designers and frontend developers. However, comprehending the best way to use ALL the THINGS in a sane process is tricky. Joey, Chris, Brad, and Brian are going to walk everyone through turning a modern, in-browser, component-based design into real code while unifying many of the latest methodologies. If you're looking for a harmonious workflow from design to build, or having a hard time wrapping your head around where BEM fits into SMACSS or how Atomic Design can be used with Sass, then this is the session for you.

The lab will start with mocking up a quick, component-based design. The first part of the lab will focus on teaching solid early-process design principles. From this, everyone will walk through the installation and creation of Pattern Lab to rapidly prototype design elements and wireframes. Sass and Compass will be featured heavily throughout the process. Finally, the class will learn how to wrap the results of all this into a real Drupal theme. The focus of the entire lab will be about solving real world problems using frameworks and thought processes that simplify frontend development.

A note on hardware: We work with *nix (Mac/Linux) systems so we’ll best be able to help you during the class if you’re using the same. We give no guarantee regarding Windows, sorry.

A list of software prerequisites and class materials to participate in the hands-on examples will be coming soon.

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Intermediate

Drupal Version:

Drupal 7.x

Deep dive into PhpStorm IDE for Drupal developers

MikhailVink — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 10:20:05 +0000

Speakers:

MikhailVink

dags

With a lot of important changes in Drupal 8, use of advanced integrated development environments becomes essential to keep being productive and continue shipping products for customers, though Drupal 6 and 7 developers can gain from IDEs quite a lot as well. Drupal 8 architecture brings developers a lot of improvements (with some pain a bit before you learn) - OOP, a lot of changes in API and core, introduces Symfony2 components and Twig template engine - so it definitely looks like quite a learning curve which can be flattered by the right development tool.

Using the right IDE you don't feel pain navigating between hooks, methods, documentation, you get code completion for everything you need, and debugging can be done right in place. Just think of an IDE which deeply understands your Drupal code providing context-dependent code completion, safe refactorings, respects PHPDoc and integrates debugger, PHPUnit and many other tools. With this deep understanding, you can use your tool to navigate between hooks implementations and invocations, Drupal API & core methods, and instantly get quick documentation for everything you are working on! Adding to that built-in Drupal Coding Standard, Drush tool which is run right from the IDE, and much more - and getting the ideal environment to make Drupal developer as productive as possible.

This is a deep hands-on session on PhpStorm IDE which has been quite trending development tool in Drupal community lately (and now supports all actual versions of Drupal - 6, 7 and 8). We'll be talking about general tasks to be performed in the IDE (code completion, snippets, project creation, VCS, unit tests, debugging, etc). Then we'll switch to Drupal modules development and see how easily IDE can make developer's life easier with hooks support, integrated Drush, built-in Drupal coding standards and using Coder tool inside the IDE, working with documentation, and configuring Drupal issue tracker to show your tasks right in the editor. We'll also focus on Drupal 8 related features, such as Twig, new API, and more.

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Beginner

Drupal Version:

Drupal 8.x

Importing data into Drupal with Feeds - A full experiment

franz — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:48:05 +0000

Speakers:

franz

A full experiment on importing data from various complex formats into Drupal, provinding a set of tools for migrating sites to Drupal.

Will use Feeds, Feeds Tamper and other minor modules.

Track:

Labs

Experience level:

Intermediate

Drupal Version:

Drupal 7.x