Speakers

While having a separate git repository for each project is the most common way to do version control, there is also the opposite approach: a single, “monolithic” repository that contains the code of all projects of a team or even of a whole company (and not only at small companies but huge IT organisations like Google or Facebook). In my talk, I’m going to highlight the pros and cons of both approaches and tackle the question of which is the superior one. The answer will surprise you! 😉

Much like technical debt, content debt isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes we need spaghetti API docs, scrappy READMEs, doodled diagrams, and wonky web content to help us along. But much like technical debt, we need to regularly review and pay down the debt where necessary. It’s time to get stuck in.

This session will explore strategies for tackling legacy content to help you:

• find and track content debt
• decide where to focus your efforts
• run team ‘docathons’ for collaborative review
• test different content evaluation techniques
• triage fixes
• archive old content
• keep your newly refreshed content up to date

Drupal 7 was released in January 2011 and it wasn’t a big change from Drupal 6; and it don’t take long for sufficient contributed modules to be released to make D7 a viable and popular framework for building websites. It was almost the same date I incorporated my own company Cognimatic, so I feel a certain affinity for a tool that’s helped me slowly build up my business. Since then I’ve had a lot of distractions, and haven’t really been able to set aside dedicated time to learn the huge changes when Drupal 8 was released in 2015.

I can build websites really quickly in D7, and from the client’s perspective they get a decent, well managed site - which they pay me the same amount regardless of my development pathway. So why should I bother? Drupal 7’s end of life in November 2021 - the same as Drupal 8’s.

So what were the big changes? How would adoption of Drupal 8 make my job easier, and would I get an ROI on training myself up? Would my clients see any benefit?

I’ll summarise the big structural and technical changes in D8, improvements to usability, security, deployability and the huge concepts and tools available to developers.

Drupal 9 is planned to be released June 3, 2020, in a little less than a year! Also, Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 both go unsupported by November 2021. This session covers the timeline getting there, as well as where are we and what kind of changes can you expect. It will be most valuable for developers but businesses can also get a summary on status details and tools to help with the transition.

At the University of Dundee, we decided that we were going to fix our website problems by starting from scratch - new content, design and infrastructure - the whole thing. For the infrastructure part, we chose Drupal 8 as our CMS to help realise our bold vision. We are still in the early stages of our Drupal journey but in this session, I will outline how we have chosen to take things forward, what tools we are using alongside Drupal and more importantly our development/workflow process.

From multiple data sources to a unique and simple experience, this is the journey of the Course content data visualisation in Drupal 8 of the University of Dundee's new website.

When you have limitations of existing business systems and business processes that mean the sources of information for courses can be in various formats and various states of completion/availability, requires a different approach and thinking. Here we will look at how we are using Drupal to consume a feed of the data and deliver course content fit for the future. Attendees will see how multiple excel spreadsheet and database table are normalised into a single JSON API feed to then be consumed by Drupal through custom entities and visualised in bespoke sub-routes.

Ethereum is an open source smart contract platform that is globalising financial technology and removing barriers to cross-border organisation.

I’ll be explaining what Ethereum is and how to use it in the context of Drupal’s Ethereum module.

This talk will cover:

• Basic introduction to the principles of blockchain
• High level overview of Ethereum platform & ecosystem
• Anatomy of a transaction
• Programming smart contracts and developer tooling
• Integration with Drupal

The team at Content Design London are currently leading a project to create a universal style guide. They are looking to find out if research in usability and accessibility can provide enough evidence to determine if there are particular ways of presenting content that are best for everyone.

In this session, Lauren (a keen admirer of the project) will talk through how the project has been running and the findings so far. She will also go into why it is important that the Drupal community pay attention to and adhere to these guidelines on creating inclusive content.

Not all of us are destined or even want an illustrious role as in core or contributed module developer. If you've ever struggled to find a way to contribute this is the session for you.

I contribute to the Drupal in a mostly non-code way through Drupal Scotland and I want to help those of you who have yet to find your outlet or want to get more involved.

This session will be a bountiful selection of impactful ways you can start to contribute to Drupal outside of the code, sourced from community members across the globe and in all manner of interest areas, many you may have yet to realise. See yourself here? This session is for you!

If you occupy any of the following roles or have skill sets in these areas the content I've prepared will be particularly pertinent and valuable.

• Customer (end user of Drupal) - Product owner, Content Manager, Site owner, Evaluators, CTO, CMO
• Agency - Founders, owners, managers, sales and marketing
• Promoter - Copywriter, marketing, SEO, social media
• Creative - Business analysts, UX Designer, Visual Designer, Content Strategist, Translator
• Facilitator - Project Manager PM, Manager / agency owner, (Events / conference organiser), Mentor
• Connector - Trainer, HR, sales person, Recruiter (yes you can contribute too!)

Thanks to Paul Johnson who originally delivered this session at DrupalCamp London.