Drupal Nights

Panel: "High Performance Drupal"

January 2014

Jeff Shelton, Naryan Newton, and Nathaniel Catchpole literally wrote the book on Drupal performance. This presentation will take a shallow dive into the broad pool of Drupal performance, using the book as our guide. Topics to be covered include: tools for collecting performance-related metrics to establish a baseline, and areas to look to improve Drupal's performance, such as Drupal configurations, module development, caching & swappable storage, reverse proxy caching and MySQL.

Seth Cohn: "Behat: Human-Readable Automated Testing"

December 2013

Behat is a tool that makes behavior driven development (BDD) possible. With BDD, you write human-readable stories that describe the behavior of your Drupal site. These stories can then be auto-tested against your website, whether in the midst of development, or on a live site. And yes, it’s as cool as it sounds!

Behat, if embraced by enough Drupal folks, has the potential to vastly improve the way we build and test Drupal websites.

Jason Pamental: "Think Responsively, Design Responsibly"

November 2013

There are a lot of ways to deal with designing for multiple screens and devices, and all are not created equal. Just because you end up with a site that's responsive, it doesn't mean you took the 'right' path to get there; the ends don't always justify the means. Let's explore those different paths to responsiveness and why some lead to more compromise than others. We need to rethink our design thinking so our work will be more successful in the real world.

Jesse Beach: "The Semantic Application Layer and Accessibility"

October 2013

We often think, if at all, of accessibility as something to be addressed after development cycles are complete: "make it accessible". But simply being accessible is often far from usable and nowhere near delightful. My participation with Drupal core issues to improve the authoring experience in the upcoming 8 release has given me a different perspective. We can structure our applications to make them more maintainable and accessible with little additional effort.

Ed Carlevale: "Blending Drupal Distributions for Custom Websites"

September 2013

The best distributions come with terrific power and functionality, but so often they have to be reworked extensively in order to suit one's individual needs. Several of them deploy the Organic Groups module in brilliant ways, but sometimes one needs functionality beyond what these distributions provide out of the box. This is where Pantheon, a hosting and development platform, comes to the rescue.

Stéphane Corlosquet: "Keeping your Site Secure"

August 2013

While Drupal core comes with secure settings out of the box, it is very easy to open up holes for hackers to damage your brand, steal information, or penetrate your site and server. In this session you will learn how to maintain your site in a secure fashion, what modules to use and what modules to avoid. We will also look at the ways the Drupal community helps you keep up with the security patches and new threats that emerge on the web.

Dani Nordin: "User Research for the Web and Applications"

July 2013

In this talk, Dani Nordin will discuss basic techniques and deliverables to help teams understand their site's users, organize content and visualize task flows. This includes a video demonstration of a post-up workshop done for the Congregational Library, as well as exercises that help attendees understand their current design challenges.

Pages