Tracks are a series of sessions which span in experience level from beginner to advanced.
Sessions are 60 minute presentations (unless otherwise noted).
2+ hour interactive sessions are called Labs.
Tracks
- Drupal Business
- Case Studies
- Coding and Development
- Core Conversations
- DevOps
- Frontend
- Labs
- Site Building
- Symfony by SensioLabs
- User Experience Design
- Business Showcase
- The Community track is now a full day Community Summit!
Drupal Business
This track is for those looking to improve the way that they sell, conceptualize, plan, estimate, manage, or deliver Drupal services and products. Experienced business professionals will share their knowledge and experience on topics such as project management, client communication, team building, culture, and organizational leadership. Sessions in this track will be non-technical in nature.
Desired session topics:
- Project management, planning, and strategy
- Team management, growth, and business best practices
- Customer service, communication, and marketing
Who should attend?
Technology executives, business owners, project and product managers, and others responsible for leading projects or guiding technology decisions and processes within their company or organization. Anyone who wants to improve their company or organization’s ability to deliver Drupal solutions.
Case Studies
Cases Studies are an opportunity to reflect on our work, and share our successes and insights with the community. We are interested in hearing about not just the What. The best case studies will also delve into the How and the Why.
Okay, so you made an amazing website or application with Drupal. That’s awesome. What problems did you have to overcome? What didn’t go exactly right the first time? How did you make sure that you were serving the actual needs of users?
Desired session topics:
- Breaking new ground, and redefining what’s possible
- Solving common problems
- Failure and resiliency
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. That is a topic for the brave. Don’t surprise your clients!
Who should attend?
- Drupalistas: Developers, Site builders, Project Managers, Product Owners
- Clients: project leads, business owners (non-technical) with a project underway
- Those new to Drupal, curious about what it can do
Coding and Development
The Coding and Development track aims to make you a better, more effective developer by helping you understand best practices and sharing ways to make Drupal work better for you. This track will introduce developers to new tools and techniques or expand on existing practices to make developing for Drupal better and easier, and demonstrate the power of Drupal 8 to deliver and transform content.
Desired session topics:
- Building a Drupal 7 site with Drupal 8 in mind.
- Making the Drupal 8 transition (modules, 3rd party libraries)
- Drupal 8 object classes tour
- Interfacing with the Frontend types
- PHP 5.4+
- Decoupled CMS
Who should attend?
- Teams who have built and launched sites on D6/D7 looking to make the jump
- Developers of useful modules who haven’t yet updated
- Developers looking to pick up new strategies to speed development
- Developers looking to figure out best practices in general
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.
Each session is either a 30 minute presentation or a 15 minute presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion with the audience.
Who should attend?
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, as well as those wanting to get involved in the next development cycle.
DevOps
DevOps; portmanteau; DevOps is the bridge between building websites and hosting them. The DevOps wave has gone from a trickle to a torrent, and we are now in a period of rapid growth and development. As it gains steam, the new ideas, processes, and cultural changes are affecting more of our community than ever before, hopefully improving quality of code, work, and life for everyone.
Desired session topics:
- Automated development / deployment of environments
- Emerging best practices for Drupal 8 continuous integration
- Changes in deployment and testing best practices from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8
- Emerging best practices for Drupal 8 hosting and performance
- Frontend automated regression/performance testing
- Distributed Drupal development (Docker, Vagrant, etc)
- Architectures with Drupal as a service
- Performance best practices
- Configuration management
- Testing best practices throughout the development workflow
Who should attend?
- Small teams looking to improve their testing and deployment practices
- Businesses looking to deploy large, enterprise-level Drupal infrastructure
- Ops teams looking for Drupal best practices
- Developers looking to learn more about configuration management and infrastructure automation
Frontend
From Twig to Backbone, multilingual to responsive - the upcoming release of Drupal 8 will introduce a number of substantial changes for Frontend developers and their teams. This year’s Frontend track will focus on those changes and prepare our community for the exciting transitions and challenges ahead.
Frontend sessions will feature new technologies from Drupal 8 and the broader web community - highlighting the skills necessary for building innovative, performance, and immersive Drupal experiences.
Desired session topics:
- Twig and the new Drupal 8 theme system
- Leveraging frontend libraries, such as Modernizr and Backbone
- Frontend development practices for multilingual sites
- Responsive / device-agnostic development
- Best-practices for Drupal 7
- Frontend Performance
Who should attend?
- Frontend developers / themers
- Site builders & project managers working with Frontend devs
Labs
Labs are 2+ hours of in-depth, deep dive, hands on knowledge share. If a 60 minute session isn't enough, or your topic is best shared through hands on interaction, submit it as a Lab!
Not sure what qualifies as a Lab? Check out the Labs from DrupalCon Prague!
Site Building
Site building is the doing of Drupal. Where we take all 22,900 building blocks and put them together to create value. This track covers a great spectrum of people, from quick and dirty sight builds, churning out high value sites, all the way to enterprise platforms building site building distros.
One of Drupal strengths is how much one can do without digging into code, multiple layout tools, all kinds of data modeling, loading little blocks of social functionality.
Desired session topics:
- Information Architecture in Drupal 8
- Flexible theming in Drupal (how will twig make themes more flexible to site builder)
- Views (contrib) is dead long live views (in core)
- Content layouts future (scotch)
- Spark!
- Websites quick and dirty
- Building site building platforms
- Applied content strategy
- How to contribute as a site builder
Who should attend?
- Technical oriented people that mostly work on configuration
- Technical oriented people looking to use distributions for building out a set of sites.
Symfony by SensioLabs
(Tuesday only) Join industry leading experts for a full day of Symfony, Drupal, Twig, and PHP talks. Whether you're a Symfony aficionado or a novice eager to learn more, this track will have something for everyone.
Who should attend?
- Symfony developers (all levels of experience and knowledge welcome)
- Drupal developers looking to learn more about Symfony and its components in preparation for the Drupal 8 launch later this year
- PHP developers eager to widen their knowledge on frameworks, best practice and quality PHP development techniques
User Experience Design
User experience design as a discipline has exploded over the past few years. Content strategy and prototyping have seen a meteoric rise driven by brands’ push for mobile-friendly web experiences. This track will explore how we can better research, prototype, and plan content for the Drupal projects of the future.
Desired session topics:
- Prototyping for Drupal
- Content strategy
- Authoring experience
- User testing
- Design process
- Visual design
Who should attend?
- UX designers
- Interaction designers
- Visual designers
- Content strategists
Business Showcase
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 and meet with Drupal businesses to fill up your toolbox with helpful resources from leaders in our industry.