DrupalCon Austin 2014 Review

A review of some notable sessions at DrupalCon Austin 2014.

1. DrupalCon Austin 2014 Review for Great Wolf Resorts Daniel Stout and John Brandl July 9, 2014
2. Angie Byron (@webchick) Acquia “Drupal Core developers write blog posts with Drush.”
3. DrupalCon is… • for developers… And everybody else • 3,400+ people… Record attendance (again) • showing Acquia’s growth • in Los Angeles in 2015 • fun!
4. Keynote: Dries Buytaert Drupal and Acquia Founder • Vision of the future: ◦ Google further enhances search results ◦ Why go anywhere else when Google has it all? ◦ Google becomes Web replacement • Ease-of-use ◦ Drupal 8 is easier to use but more complex behind the scenes
5. Next generation PHP performance • PHP is experiencing a renaissance • Facebook leading the new wave of PHP performance with HHVM (Hip Hop Virtual Machine) • Community refocused on base language features rather than frameworks • Benchmarks: PHP 5.3 = 509 ms, PHP 5.5 = 395 ms, HHVM 3.1 = 283 ms
6. Semantic site architecture • Paths should be traversable -- subdirectories should go somewhere. • Architecture is important at the beginning ◦ Harder to fix after the fact. • Good architecture helps with: ◦ consistency ◦ usability ◦ maintainability ◦ ex: it’s easy to add too many content types.
7. Validation with Symfony2 • Don’t trust ANY user inputs format, consistency, integrity, filter data • Use Symfony framework, philosophy, community integrated in drupal 8 • What is symfony? full stack web framework https: //speakerdeck.com/hhamon/validation-with- symfony2
8. Migrating the world’s largest website onto Drupal: weather.com • 50MM pageviews daily / 30MM unique monthly visitors • #1 challenge -- adding legacy platforms into Drupal -- ex: slideshow management • Drupal for heavier services • Angular.js + ESI for front-end functionality • ESI = Edge Side Includes markup language from Akamai for dynamic web content assembly
9. Functional PHP
10. Functional PHP
11. Drupal Commerce: open source as a service Drupal Commerce allows for flexible billing: • recurring • usage-based • or metered billing such as for SaaS DrupalRooms -- Drupal distro for hotels, villas and B&Bs
12. Keynote: Erynn Petersen Senior Vice President at Time, Inc. • Compared to other open source communities, Drupal community is diverse • Women leave engineering, but men leave at similar rates • If 10% of management are women, then women are more likely to stay in an organization
13. Type, Responsively: Design for readability & meaning on any screen • “Page” is not a good metaphor for the web. • Small screens demand subtle scale. • Google Web Font Loader • Lorem Ipsum is not natural language. Use real content, like Moby Dick. • Typogrify module
14. State of the Union Address: a peek behind the curtain • Priorities: mobile experience, responsive design, social media engagement • 8 weeks to complete • 4 days to produce 120 graphics for enhanced view • Live streams up 38% -- people not watching on TV as much • AWS SQS (Simple Queue Service) Drupal Module -- reusing code across applications
15. Understanding XHProf: pinpointing why your site is slow & how to fix it • XHProf tells us solely about execution time ◦ does not measure front-end performance ◦ user perception may be different • Issues may not be Drupal specific • Drupal module for XHProf • Be specific about goals -- ex: execution time on specific page while logged in as certain user under specific conditions
16. Keynote: Hugh Forrest Director of SXSW Interactive • Attendance at SXSWi: ◦ 3,500 in 2004 ◦ 37,000 in 2014 ◦ Has surpassed SXSW Music and Film • Geeks are the new rock stars • Geeks are pushing the boundaries in the way that rock stars used to
17. Planning for performance • The “tuning” phase is too late to fix problems -- need to build architecture right from the beginning • Granularity -- functional differences -- profiles, articles, etc. • Cardinality -- cost of caching -- # of variations of item • Granularity + cardinality = total cost of building individual cache item
18. Spark: authoring experience++ in Drupal 7, 8 & beyond • Spark initiative from Dries to improve content authoring • Designed for Drupal 8 and backported to Drupal 7 • Editing modules for Spark: CKEditor, QuickEdit (in-place editing), Navbar (responsive toolbar), Ember (responsive admin theme), Picture (responsive images), Responsive Tables, Escape Admin (simplified overlay)
19. My brain is full: keeping pace with front-end & UX innovations • Front-end frameworks: bell curve of expansion • Too many frameworks now but will narrow going forward • Confusion for developers, but things are improving • Web apps relying on JavaScript are becoming mature
20. Build a blog with Drupal 8 on the day it’s released • Drupal 8 has lot more built-in functionality -- won’t need to wait for modules • Picture module -- allows HTML5 Picture tag and inline media queries
21. Thinking inside the box inside the box inside the box • Component-driven design -- interlocking family of components that become our design language • Style guides are important • Modular Scale -- tool for producing mobile friendly font size differences • Typecast -- online type testing tool
22. Consultancy scum: making Agile work for clients & vendors • Consultancy scrum: work on projects (not products) with external teams and stakeholders. • Share control of resources. • Project Owner (PO) -- PO is preferably on the client side
23. Thank you!
24. But there’s one more thing…
25. Headless Drupal