Session Day: Friday, April 1, 2016

Happy Hour on Friday

Happy Hour: 5PM |  

Introduction to User Experience

4:15 PM - 5:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): mmiller

User experience design is not just for designers, it's for everyone, and everyone can benefit from learning to speak the language of UX. So, what exactly is user experience, and how should you integrate it into your next web project? In this talk, I'll be breaking down the dimensions of user experience, introduce core concepts, and outlining specific strategies and methods to apply to your next design project.

Google Analytics: Quick Wins

4:15 PM - 5:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): jgknox, Nick Manning

Google Analytics gives you critical insights that help drive innovation and evolution by showing you exactly how people are using your site. Understanding how your site is being used can aid in identifying where improvements can and should be made. You can do a lot to improve the performance and user experience across your site by making use of your Google Analytics account. In this session, we'll cover a few valuable standard reports that you can view for your site right now.

 

Blog posts referenced during session:

Getting Started on Sites: Adding Google Analytics to Your site
5 Useful Google Analytics Standard Reports To Check Out For Your Website

Reducing Double Entry: Leveraging Stanford Data

4:15 PM - 5:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): dustin, alexbw

One of the first questions we’re asked when starting a new project: “Can we import that data?” The answer: a definite maybe.

 

Academic units at Stanford are required to maintain their data in a mishmash of systems across campus. From faculty appointments to class schedules, Stanford has a different system for all of it. 

 

Using Jumpstart Academic (Stanford Web Services’ pre-packaged website solution), H&S units are able to feed some of that data into their site. Come hear how the Humanities & Sciences Web Consulting team is helping our departments and programs reduce double entry, and minimize the burden of keeping a website up to date. There are some highs, there are some lows, and there’s so much more we want to do.

How to: Stanford Department Signatures

4:15 PM - 5:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): jholleman

Complex layouts created simply with Display Suite

4:15 PM - 5:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): aaronc

Display Suite allows you to configure the layout of your content without writing a line of code. Most anything you can imagine can probably be achieved using this powerful suite of tools. Come by and I'll share with you all I've learned while managing earth.stanford.edu.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words - Data Visualization, Drupal and more

3:15 PM - 4:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): izaks, cmaimone, jhegland, mwidner

Visualization is the latest trend. Visualize everything.   Humanities.  Law.   More and more research projects at Stanford are visual interactive websites.  

See examples of visual projects built on various platforms.

Come to the session and join discussion about what your organization wants to do, wants to get, wants to offer in the world of visualization.

We will also demo how Drupal was used to provide efficient solution in legal research by providing capability to

  • create complex data structures intuitively without coding SQL using Content Types
  • import or enter data & metadata via a single web interface 
  • display data in various formats & visualizations using Views and D3 library module
  • share data for others to use

Links of interest

 

Stories on Service and Scale: from individual projects to running a service at scale across the School of Humanities and Sciences

3:15 PM - 4:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): marionm

Equality of Opportunity and Education

3:15 PM - 4:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): arnewman, John Bickar

The Equality of Opportunity and Education website is part of a larger project, housed at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and funded by the Spencer Foundation, to examine the relationship between the ideal of equality of opportunity and the public provision of education. Over 90 percent of Americans believe that equality of opportunity is an “absolutely essential” American ideal. This ideal is key to ongoing conversations about social mobility in the US, particularly with respect to public education. Can schools be the “great equalizer” that Horace Mann suggested they should be over 150 years ago? What vision of equality should they aim to enact given competing understandings of this ideal?

The purpose of the bibliography website is to serve as a resource for academics, college and graduate students, teachers, school administrators, and interested citizens to learn about philosophical debates about equality of opportunity, and what these debates mean for the public provision of education. The site provides an annotated bibliography of major works, topically organized into three sections, about equality of opportunity and its application to education. The fourth section offers a list of major court cases in the US that have addressed different aspects of equality of opportunity in education, with links to the decisions and notes about the rulings.
 

How a Web Re-Design Drives Organizational Change: A Cautionary Tale

3:15 PM - 4:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): tbird, sdenholtz

Few people set out to change their organization when they begin redesigning a website, but the process of creating an effective user experience can reveal gaps in an organization's strategy/business processes/etc. To improve user experience in a sustainable way, while achieving business goals, your job may extend beyond wireframes and content outlines and require you take a seat at the table where business decisions are being made.

Presenters: Toni Bird and Sorel Denholtz

Integrating CollegeNet's 25Live Room Reservations into Drupal 7.x

3:15 PM - 4:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): kensharp

The task: transition Stanford Earth room reservations from end-of-life in-school applications to University-adopted 25Live system from the good folks at CollegeNet. The need: a simple, self-service room reservations system for Stanford Earth faculty, staff, postdocs, and grad students. The problem: the only available tools are the complex 25Live UX (for trained department admins), read-only calendar widgets for public web pages and an XML-based RESTFUL API. Can I have a working Drupalized solution to show in time for DrupalCamp 2016? Let's find out.

Connecting your website to CAP Profiles

2:15 PM - 3:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): zchandler

It's a well known problem at Stanford (and across higher ed) that we generate LOTS of websites: schools, departments, labs, centers, personal sites ... which put us in the position of updating similar content in all of those places, and makes it very likely that some of those sites fall out of date quickly. Data about faculty, and their activities, is one of the most important sources of content that we have, and is in high demand on many of our websites at Stanford. You have probably already heard of the CAP Profiles project, you may even have had some experience implementing a connection to the API with the CAPx module. My goal is to make connecting to Profiles easier. In this session, I will cover:

  • Why connect to Profiles?
  • Overview of how the system works
  • Implementation specifics: Mappers, Importers, and Views
  • Project roadmap
  • Practical implementation help

Lacuna: Social Reading for Teaching and Learning

2:15 PM - 3:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): mwidner

Lacuna is an open-source, online learning tool based on Drupal and designed to create new possibilities for reading and learning collaboratively. By focusing on tools for digital annotation, Lacuna allows instructors, students, and co-learners to discover different ways of reading, interpreting, and discussing course materials. Lacuna enhances the rich, discussion-based learning of a seminar style course, for instance, by extending that conversation to the readings before and after class. The result is often students who are better prepared for class, already have some questions formed (or answered). Instructors can also get a better sense of student interest and can identify “hot spots” that are ripe for discussion or clarification based on student annotations.

Lacuna was first designed in early 2013 by the Poetic Media Lab, a digital humanities lab hosted in Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. The original concept and design were created by Brian Johnsrud, the current lab co-director. Prototypes and subsequent versions were built or overseen by Michael Widner, the director of technology on the project. Amir Eshel, the faculty co-director of the Poetic Media Lab, leads implementation, testing, and leadership for Lacuna and all of the lab’s major projects.

Rapid User Testing With Prototypes

2:15 PM - 3:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): dtom

Design Thinking Tools for Web Projects

2:15 PM - 3:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): Linnea Williams

Getting to the core of your values and desires, information architecture, design goals, etc for a web project can be challenging and time consuming. I'll be talking through handy tools to help get to answers quickly when working with large or small stakeholder groups. We'll cover a number of helpful exercises and examples of how and when to apply them in a web project, and physical tools to keep handy so that you're less likely to get stuck in a conversation loop. Examples include: card sorts, facilitated brainstorms, the best language to use, and more.

Slides are available online.

Using Stanford Modules

2:15 PM - 3:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): izaks, cjwest

Do you have a website on Stanford Sites? Want to learn more about Stanford specific modules?

In this session we will explore popular modules developed by Stanford Web Services and demo how you can have your site ready in 21 minute(demo by Irina).

 

Available to anyone either on Stanford Sites or through Github, these modules assist with common website functionality. This will include modules such as images, events, news, courses and publications.

Basic Edition

Other modules

Slides at:

 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Oos4eSDXdqvWNGlvYZsEueXTIn57CJCU...

Panel: State of Drupal at Stanford 2016

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM | Registered Speaker(s): zchandler

A discussion with Stanford community leaders on why Drupal is a powerful tool for higher education. Panelists will share recent work and thoughts on what’s next for their web teams.

Moderator

Zach Chandler - Technology Strategist, Office of International Affairs

Panelists

  • Lyudmila Christie - Director of Web and Digital Media, Graduate School of Education
  • Aaron Cole - Director of Web Services, School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences
  • Caitlyn Craft - Communication and Web Strategist, Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education
  • Marion Groh Marquardt - Project Manager, School of Humanities and Sciences
  • Shea McKinney - Web Developer, Stanford Web Services
  • Adam Moore - Senior Software Engineer, Graduate School of Business
  • Marco Wise - Senior Web Developer and Tech Lead, University IT Communications

BoF: Stanford intranets in Drupal - moved to Morning O'Code

| Registered Speaker(s): aaronc

Birds of a feather (BoF) discussion around Stanford intranets: their purpose, how to separate them from your main/public-facing website, and what we can build in Drupal or when to use other collaboration tools, like Stanford Box or Confluence. Especially interested in hearing from those who have tackled intranet projects and have tips to share!

This is an open discussion and not moderated - all are welcome to join and bring questions and ideas to share.

Session Day: Saturday, April 2, 2016

Happy Hour on Saturday

Happy Hour: 5PM | Registered Speaker(s): user1

Built it, but nobody came: Avoiding overengineering

4:00 PM- 4:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): fluxsauce

Designing and building something that people need is completely different from implementing what they asked for. Engineers don't like to say no; helping is empowering and pride makes it difficult to back down. Product owners don't always have the context to understand how hard a feature is to implement and a throwaway request can add weeks to a project. We're all limited by our perspective, so the trick is to recognize what practically should be built. The goal isn't to say no, it should be to empower. Learn from our successes and mistakes!

We’ll discuss ways to focus on feature development and manage expectations so you can deliver value without compromising effectiveness. I'll show you some real-world examples of technically successful but over-engineered projects.

About the speaker: Jon is a Senior Engineer at Four Kitchens and a lynda.com author with 13 courses on development. He's spoken at Drupal Con Los Angeles, and dozens of Drupal Camps about performance, site auditing and deployments. He's also the author of multiple Drupal utilities, including site_audit, generate_errors, feeds_import_io, and a co-author of the first version of Terminus.

Understanding the Dark Side: An Analysis of Drupal (and Other) Worst Practices

4:00 PM- 4:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): Kristen Pol

No one is perfect and we all make mistakes. Making mistakes helps us learn and grow and do better work. But, sometimes we don't even realize we are "doing it wrong" until someone points it out. This session is a collection of some worst practices that are pretty common in the Drupal world and beyond. If you don't know what "hacking core" is or why you shouldn't do it, this is the session for you!
We will cover worst practices in Drupal and web development in general within:

  • Devops
  • Architecture
  • Security
  • Coding
  • Maintenance
  • and more...

Intended Audience
You do not need to be a coder to find this session useful. Anyone building or managing sites should understand the dark side of development so they can make wise choices. You will walk away more enlightened and better able to steer away from the darkness and onto a more noble development path.
Skill Levels
This session is suitable for beginners and intermediates. If you are an expert, don't forget to send your favorite worst practices to @kristen_pol on Twitter.
About the Speaker
Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. She has presented at many DrupalCons, BADCamps, Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Checkout her drupal.org page for a partial list of talks and check out more info on Kristen's Hook 42 page. This "Understanding the Dark Side" talk was presented at UC Berkeley for BADCamp 2015.

From Content to Code: Let's make Something good, Together

4:00 PM- 4:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): labbydev, aneville

We thought we could run this project like any other project. We were wrong. The functional requirements were complex. The diversity of users was staggering. And the volume of content spanned 10 sitemaps (plus several pages of addenda!). The client team was under pressure to deliver a major overhaul and accountable to dozens of content stakeholders. There were false starts and frustration. Team changes. And then, magically, things started coming together. We recommited to a “studio model” that brought together content strategy, UX, design and development to collaborate in the most integrated way possible. Together, we unlocked three techniques that made this project a huge success. Strategy led the way

  • Deep discovery revealed functional requirements that hadn’t been specified and allowed us to think them through early on.
  • We empowered EHS to prioritize their tasks by giving them the tools/data that they needed to make decisions by minimizing blind spots and emphasizing ROI.

Clean, structured content = clean, structured code

  • We maintained a single set of canonical wires throughout. Any time any team made a change, they were updated.
  • Content requirements were thoroughly vetted before development started.

There was never a handoff

  • Full team calls held weekly throughout the life of the project.
  • Solutions were never proposed without input from the implementers.

Profit in Project Management

4:00 PM- 4:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): jmosmith

Profitability is never a guaranteed outcome. Drupal is a powerful CMS that developers use to give clients the web products they need; with all of the features and functionality they want. Drupal can provide all this at a lower cost than HTML or other platforms, but using Drupal is no guarantee of profitable project. Using Drupal along with an Agile Development Process is an excellent way to eliminate much of the wasted efforts found in a traditional Waterfall Development Process. By comparison, using an Agile Methodology can reduce cost by as much as half, or provide up to twice as much product for the same budget! However, Drupal and Agile alone are not enough to ensure a profitable outcome. Experienced project management along with a senior-level development team can successfully use Drupal and Agile to start from a position of great strength on any project. Adding proper management techniques to work-flow and production will help move any project toward potential profits, but even the best team cannot overcome fatal flaws in scope, schedule, or budget. What are the fundamentals needed to keep costs under control during a project? How do you bid projects against a client's budget properly? How do you address scope, schedule, and budget to start off in the best position possible to achieve a win-win outcome for your client and yourself? In this session we’ll discuss how to address these questions and answer them successfully, with specific attention to how these answers may change along with the size of the dev team or the project; some key management fundamentals that have business value far beyond project management alone. We’ll address some specifics of the Agile process, the development process, how to construct the development team; understand the relevant economies of scale for projects and development that can help dev-shops large and small identify the best range of projects to target in order to bring home profits and grow their business. Examples will be taken from attendees to discuss as specific case studies. Attendees will participate in a discussion of:

  • Agile development methods applied to web-dev
  • How the communication process can break down and wreck projects
  • Properly sizing budget, scope, and schedule of any project from the beginning
  • How a full service digital agency applies these techniques successfully

James has given presentations on projects and management at SANDCamp, Drupal Camp L.A., GLAD Camp, EduWeb, PNW Drupal Summit, and SACCamp. He frequently speaks about production techniques at Downtown Los Angeles Drupal meetups, and Drupal Business Summits. James produced a video blog for Team FREDNET (TFX), one of the groups that was in competition for the Google Lunar X-Prize. James has given presentations to NASA on the TFX's mission profile. As a Technical Project Manager at a digital agency, James coordinated all of the pieces that must come together in order to deliver highly functional websites on more than 20 Drupal sites over 3 years. Currently he is an in-house digital project manager for web properties at L.A. Care.

Accessible Continuous Integration

4:00 PM- 4:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): hrodrig, nerdstein

Sound continuous integration practices are game-changing for teams looking to deliver stellar digital services to stakeholders. Automated deployments, rigorous code review, and similar processes are valuable tools developers employ to ensure the best possible results. Unfortunately for customers, those results are usually obtainable only through the services of developers, server admins, and trained technical staff. If a client emails a project manager to inquire about code security or stability, the manager will need to consult with an engineer who will then run, analyze, and interpret the available data. Because continuous integration is not accessible to a non-technical audience, project managers and clients remain dependent on developers for these services. But what if we could empower stakeholders to benefit from continuous integration practices without the need for technical staff? We think the time for this shift has arrived. To date, technology has followed a standard maturation process -- a problem is identified, then tools are developed and eventually adopted to solve it. Over time, through the incorporation of feedback and enhancements, the tools become more accessible to a non-technical population. For example, early desktop computing required users to interact with the system via a command-driven prompt. It wasn’t until Microsoft developed graphical user interfaces with clickable icons, more palatable to the general public, that desktop computing surged in popularity and became a staple of the modern computing experience. Technology must mature to a point where it is capable of serving a broad population if it is to reach its full potential. We posit that continuous integration, as a practice, is ready to undergo the transformation needed for broader adoption. Problems have been defined and tools developed in response to them. The technology is becoming more stable and robust each day. The next step is to bring continuous integration to the masses -- it must be made accessible. In this presentation, we’ll review the current state of this technology and introduce Accessible Continuous Integration as the next step in its evolution. We’ll cover the basic principles of Accessible Continuous Integration as a practice and provide case studies. It’s time to start the conversation on how we can change the way we practice continuous integration so that it can reach its fullest potential.

Contracting & Copyright Licensing for Drupalistas, Agencies & Solopreneurs

4:00 PM- 4:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): darius, koppie

If you have clients, you have contracts. Learn easy ways to navigate the issues of contracts, money, intellectual property, how to navigate copyright licensing, and more. Learn how to offer your own contract with your own terms instead of always using theirs. Learn how to avoid "gotchas" - both for your sake and your client. Speakers:

  • Darius Garza
  • Jordan Koplowicz

Tips and Tricks with Twig (TTT).

3:00 PM - 3:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): isramv

In this session I will be talking about theme Development in Drupal 8, some tricks and how to structure your theme, for better and faster development, why I use Gulp.js and Bower and NPM ( all together ). Also I will be demoing a contrib theme that I created, https://github.com/isramv/d8_materialize

What's changed since Drupal 7?

3:00 PM - 3:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): jcrespo

Drupal 8 has a bunch of new features and that's just great. But features are just tools to make our jobs easier as developers, site builders, and content editors. They're only interesting if they're used to build something important. This session will try to talk about that something important. As users, how has our digital experience changed since Drupal 7 was released? How have these changes impacted the way we consume content? How does the shifting landscape inform how we build a platform or product? How is Drupal 8 solving these problems? If you can only pick one session to go to, pick something you're really passionate about, but if you can pick two, this session should be at least a close second.

Man v. Machine: Successful Client/Vendor Communications

3:00 PM - 3:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): jmosmith

Clear communication is fundamental to every process in life -- in business, it is the ESSENTIAL ingredient for making sure all parties involved are happy, and that we are able to run a business at a profit with each project. There are many fundamentals of the communication process which are irreducible; focusing on them helps us gain clarity of communication both inside and outside of our organization. Personally, I am often more comfortable communicating with the computer, because the code is either correct or incorrect, and the results match this -- I can always find the mistake, and fix it easily. With other human beings, this is not as easily done. For this session, I am going to take you on a quick tour of the communication process to show you where it breaks down and how. I'm going to show you a model for the process of conflict, and how to deal with it. These are the skills to keep in mind while growing your company, dealing with employees and clients alike. These surprisingly simple tools are NOT abstract, they can be learned quickly and easily, and put into practice almost immediately. Once you see these basic models, and then try to see them at work in the world around you; it is astounding how much more clearly you will see the communication process, and even the process of conflict as well. This session is for anyone whom is interested in improving their work relationships for better business and better projects. This is not about how to communicate on the web, or how to get your message across a website to a viewer; rather it is about dealing with work mates and clients to help create websites with far less pain, far greater outcomes, and more consistent referrals for personal and professional growth. James has given presentations on projects and management at SANDCamp, Drupal Camp L.A., GLAD Camp, EduWeb, PNW Drupal Summit, and SACCamp. He frequently speaks about production techniques at Downtown Los Angeles Drupal meetups, and Drupal Business Summits. James produced a video blog for Team FREDNET (TFX), one of the groups that was in competition for the Google Lunar X-Prize. James has given presentations to NASA on the TFX's mission profile. As a Technical Project Manager at a digital agency, James coordinated all of the pieces that must come together in order to deliver highly functional websites on more than 20 Drupal sites over 3 years. Currently he is an in-house digital project manager for web properties at L.A. Care.

Drupal 8 Module Development and Debugging

3:00 PM - 3:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): dharris1

This session is mostly for people that have written module code in Drupal 7, and wish to get up-and-running quickly with Drupal 8 development.

In this session, we'll cover are some good tips and tricks to get you up and running quickly with Drupal 8 development. You'll learn how to create a Drupal module with plenty of scaffolding in minutes with a command line tool, and some tips for debugging Drupal 8 modules.

We'll also cover lessons learned while upgrading the module from Drupal 7. Lastly, we'll take a brief tour of the Node Hierarchy module as it exists today.

Unless you're used to developing OOP-based code within an IDE, such as PhpStorm, get ready for a shock because almost nothing will feel familiar in Drupal 8.

That's because much of the contributed module code prior to Drupal 8 was written in procedural PHP, while Drupal 8 encourages an OOP-based approach.

Gone are the days of whipping up Drupal code in Notepad++ or some basic text editor, and say hello to IDEs like PhpStorm.

The Node Hierarchy module has been around since Drupal 5, and it allows a parent-child relationship to exist between entities so that children may inherit properties of the parents, grandparents, and so on.

This may be desirable with breadcrumbs, menu links, paths, blocks, taxonomy, and so on, although the module doesn't support inheritance for all of those things just yet.

Drupalnator Themestation: Understanding Drupal 8’s New Theming Layers

3:00 PM - 3:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): darol100

In this talk we are going to be discussing the major differences between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 theming layers. In addition, participants are going to learn file organization of a theme in Drupal 8. Basics twig syntax, which will include output variables in twig and how to use filters, will also be discussed. Although we will be demonstrating this with the base themes (Classy, Stable, and Bootstrap), users will be able to apply what they learn to other themes, and maybe even be able to make themes of their own! Participants are going to learn how to use Drupal Console to their advantage to build their theme. At the end of the session, participants will be able to understand, configure, and deploy a variety of themes using the updated Drupal 8 CMS.

Aegir - Drupal based Enterprise Management and Provisioning

3:00 PM - 3:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): xalg

Aegir is an enterprise level Drupal provisioning and management platform. It is composed of four primary projects: Provision, Hosting, Eldir and Hostmaster.

Despite its aging paradigm, Aegir can still provide a lot of value when it comes to automation and management of Drupal sites in an enterprise scenario.

The attendee will discover how SLAC utilizes Aegir to manage the Drupal platform.  I'll highlight some of the things Aegir does well and where it falls down.

I'll briefly cover the following topics:

  • How Aegir promotes an agile, iterative SDLC
  • What roles Provision, Hosting, Eldir and Hostmaster fulfills
  • How to leverage Aegir to provide clients, in an enterprise usecase, a vastly improved level of service 

All are welcome but many of the technical apsects covered will be advanced in nature. Understanding enterprise level architecture, agile/lean development practices and the Drupal platform stack will be helpful.

Key takeaways I hope to provide:

  • Is Aegir right for you?
  • A solid understanding fo the architecture involved in the Aegir platform

 

Debugging Drupal 8 With Drupal Console

2:00 PM - 2:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): darol100

Drupal Console is not longer a boilerplate code generator. Drupal Console is now a full CLI, which allows you to debug your system using a terminal. We will be talking about some of the newest Drupal Console features to debug a Drupal site. You will learn how to debug:

  • System errors.
  • Twig templates.
  • Services registered on the service container.
  • Routes registered on the route system.
  • Configuration objects.
  • State values.
  • Database connection.
  • Site settings.
  • Available node types.
  • Available users.
  • Available taxonomies.

Where's the fire? AKA: My site is down... now what?

2:00 PM - 2:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): Kristen Pol

Anyone who's ever supported a website dreads the call or text (or pager alert... wow, that's old school) saying the site is down. Your heart starts pounding. You worry that it's some code you wrote or some config you changed. You wonder if you will figure it out fast. You wonder if you will get to sleep tonight.

I am not a devops person. In general, I try to avoid system administration (though I've done plenty of it over the years). I like hosting services like Pantheon and Acquia since they tend to take care of all that stuff for me. But, I still have to deal with what to do if the site goes down or is slow as molasses (including crossing my fingers it's the hosting company and not my fault!).

This session will cover a process for seeing what might be going wrong and how to recover. We'll go over:

  • Emergency planning
  • Monitoring
  • Traceroutes
  • Status pages for hosting, CDNs, and 3rd party services
  • What logs to look at
  • Analyzing New Relic data
  • Support tickets
  • Prevention when possible

The goal is to follow a documented process that will get you back online faster.

Intended Audience

Anyone building or managing sites, especially those on the hook when things go south. You will walk away with some strategies for dealing with site outages and slowdowns more efficiently and some tips for preventing some problems ahead of time.

Skill Levels

This session is suitable for beginners and intermediates. If you are an expert, feel free to send your favorite disaster recovery tools, tips, or stories to @kristen_pol on Twitter.

About the Speaker

Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. She has presented at many DrupalCons, BADCamps, Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Checkout her drupal.org page for a partial list of talks and check out more info on Kristen's Hook 42 page.

Behat Kickstart for Drupal Developers

2:00 PM - 2:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): xpsusa

Testing is more important than ever. In an Agile development enviroment, testing is essential. Now you can learn to understand Behat testing as related to Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 -- fast. Behat Kickstart for Drupal Developers covers the basics of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and Behat and then rapidly moves into more advanced concepts that will quickly escalate your grasp of Behat by clearly integrating Behat with your existing Drupal and PHP knowledge. This session gets under the hood of Behat immediately. And tells you what you need to understand, write, organize and share your Behat work professionally as a developer. The Behat Kickstart for Developers session is fast-paced and aimed at intermediate developers in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 who need to get up to speed with Behat testing now. - Intro to Drupal/PHP Testing Ecosystem - State of Testing in Drupal 8 - Composer - Intro to BDD - Intro to Behat - Mink, Mink Extension, Drupal Extension - Steps, Scenarios, Scenario Outlines, Background - Features, Suites, Hooks, Contexts - Steps: Relationship to Context Methods, what they do, how they work - TableNode: Pass arrays of data from step to method - Tagging - Behat Debugging steps - Context: Contexts are PHP classes. How to structure, working within, pulling into project - Using Javascript: Selenium, Phantom.js, what is headless - Behat.yml file: Organize and setup your testing environment - Behat command prompt parameters

Building a UC Drupal 8 Distribution

2:00 PM - 2:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): jkealy, shawndearmond

With the upcoming release of Drupal 8 it became obvious that there is an opportunity to implement a shared platform across the five UC campuses that use Drupal.  Creating this shared distribution requires higher cross campus cooperation then UC has attempted before. Using the principles of the Open Source DoOcracy has help us to build trust and make continuing progress on developing a shared platform. We will share our experience in this process and talk about our successes and failures, as well as on going campaign to make it all work.

Drupal on Docker

2:00 PM - 2:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): John Bickar

You may or may not have heard the buzz around Docker, the container-based infrastructure tool. We'll give an overview of what Docker is, and how Stanford is using Docker to maximize resources when running Drupal websites in the cloud.

It will be helpful, but not necessary, to have a working understanding of the technology stack underlying a load-balanced web server.

We'll talk about the premium cloud-based web hosting environment that we have built at Stanford (called "Anchorage") that runs in Amazon Web Services, and how and why we are using Docker. There will be more diagrams than code.

If luck is on our side, we'll do a live demo of a deployment of a Drupal site with all the tools that we use to build our Docker images. If luck is on your side, you'll get to see us cry when the live demo fails miserably.

 

Drupalternatives

1:00 PM - 1:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): eatings

Drupal is powerful, flexible, free*, and the main reason we have this event! And it's a great solution for lots of web use cases. Why would you use anything else?** Let's take a look at what other systems are available, what they are capable of, and at what price points, starting from Drupal's cousins in the Free/Open Source Software space, zooming outwards to proprietary software, to enterprise CMSs with license fees well into the seven figures. Why might we use some of these alternatives? What do they offer that Drupal doesn't? What are some reasons that make us use Drupal anyway? *as in speech ** intentionally loaded question
 

Drupal 8 Kickstart

1:00 PM - 1:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): xpsusa

Highlighting key Drupal 8 concepts, this fast-paced session shows what a developer should understand to dive into a Drupal 8 site. This session lays out for intermediate and advanced Drupal developers where to expand their knowledge to include PHP OOP, Symfony, and new Drupal 8 concepts and coding requirements. See where and how to integrate a custom module in Drupal 8. When this presentation is complete the developer will have a solid mental roadmap of Drupal 8. Drupal 8 Kickstart provides a look at these aspects of Drupal 8: - Overview of Drupal 8 Ecosystem - Composer, Drush, Drupal Console - Site directory structure - Module structure - Yaml (.yml) files - How Symfony fits in - PHP OOP: Interfaces, abstract classes, classes, traits - Annotations and Comments - Dependency injection - Services - Bootstrap flow - Events - Routing and controllers - Caching, Caching a Render Array - Render Array - CMI - Hooks (Are Events) in Drupal 8 - Valuable changes to know - Drupal Module Upgrader - More Resources Aimed directly at busy Drupal developers who need to catch up now on Drupal 8.

I'm a Scrumberjack and I'm OK! Prioritizing Your Scrum Product Backlog for Drupal Work

1:00 PM - 1:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): aimeerae

This session will cover how to prioritize and maintain a Product Backlog within a Scrum/Kanban environment that balances "keeping the lights on" with new product features.  This is meant to cover a site or group of sites over time vs a finite project scope. 
Are you using Agile and Scrum project management methodologies for your own site or for your clients?  Is the backlog of work CRAZY HUGE!  Is it riddled with suggestions vs. real feature requests?  How do you know what work to do next?  How do you balance Drupal core and contrib updates in your workload in a manner that won't distract from the business improvements your stakeholders request?
In this session, we'll cover how to plan your product backlog that is aligned to the needs of you and your stakeholders (clients) while keeping your Drupal installation tidy over time! 
What do you need to know get value from this session?

  • You have a bunch of work requests for a client and don't know how to manage it.
  • You've heard Scrum is the way to go, but don't know how to start.
  • Someone has required that you work in an "Agile" or Scrum environment, but you don't know what that means.
  • Basic Drupal terms, such as core, contrib, updates, views - even at the most non-technical level. 

What will you learn in this session?

  • Overview of Scrum / Agile work management.
  • Terms and concepts of Scrum / Agile work management applied to real examples.
  • Types of backlogs used to manage and organize work.
  • How to quantify work within a development cycle.
  • How to qualify and prioritize work by business drivers.
  • How to practically manage work requests of different sizes in the course of a delivery cycle.
  • How to evolve a large feature / work request over multiple delivery cycles.
  • --->>> Identifying work requests by business value!  <<<---
  • --->>> Communicating business value with your stakeholders <<<---

Herding Cats: Guiding Content Strategy as a Freelancer

1:00 PM - 1:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): acreative

Organizing your content and displaying relevant content is hard. Seriously. If you manage a site with multiple stakeholders or departments, this task becomes even more difficult. In this session, we will cover some ground rules around project kickoff meetings, questioning content importance and placement, overall user experience, and how the largest sites AND the smallest sites can benefit from intentional conversations regarding interface and content.

Presenter: Alex Laughnan (acreative.io)

More information is available on acreative.io/stanford

How to Keep Your Drupal Developers Happy and Inspired!

1:00 PM - 1:45 PM | Registered Speaker(s): Anne

Facts: Developers are the lifeline of the business. Open source software development is hard. It is unfortunately easy to take developer's work for granted. In this session we will talk about common issues that lead to burnout and attrition. But most importantly we will talk about key tactics to keep your development (and all other staff) happy, inspired, creative and most importantly, part of YOUR team.

The Multilingual Makeover! A side-by-side comparison of Drupal 7 and Drupal 8

11:00 AM - 11:45 AM | Registered Speaker(s): aimeerae, Kristen Pol

Hello! Ciao! Hola! Salom! Hai! Elo!
 
We live in a global, interconnected world, and building websites that support multiple languages and countries is good for marketing, conversions, and creating happy users. It does not, however, also mean you will have happy developers.
 
Drupal 7 is notoriously hard for creating multilingual websites. Language support in D7 was bolted-on and adhoc and tends to require 20 to 30 extra modules and often a number of patches and custom workarounds as well. Drupal 7 multilingual configuration is ugly. And that's being kind.
 
But, Drupal has had a complete multilingual makeover! Enter Drupal 8. You might think we are talking about slapping on some makeup here, but we aren't.
 

Definition: A makeover is "a complete reconstruction and renovation of something"

The Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative had quite a mess to untangle. The goal was to rebuild language support in Drupal from the ground up so that everything in Drupal understood language from the start. And, any custom or contributed modules or themes for Drupal 8 would reap the benefit of not really having to understand language support because it would just "be there". The results are amazing.
 
This session is a side-by-side comparison of ugly Drupal 7 configuration and beautiful Drupal 8 configuration. What took 20+ modules in Drupal 7, takes 4 in Drupal 8, with no workarounds, patches, or hacks.
 
We'll compare Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 configuration for:
 

  • Language support
  • User interface translation
  • Content translation
  • Configuration translation
  • And more...

Intended Audience
 
Anyone building or managing multilingual sites would benefit from this session. You will walk away with knowledge of the how Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 multilingual configuration differs so you can prepare yourself for site building in either version.
Skill Levels
 
This session is suitable for beginners or intermediates. If you are beginner, it is best if you understand Drupal basics such as content types, blocks, menus, and views. If you are an expert, don't forget to send your favorite multilingual module, tip, or horror story to @hook42inc on Twitter.
 
About the Speakers
 
Aimee has been in the web world since the 90s working as a web architect and project manager dealing a variety of Enterprise content management systems. Aimee is currently writing the Drupal 8 Multilingual Sites book. She has presented at DrupalCons, BADCamps, Stanford camps, SANDCamps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out Aimee's drupal.org page and her Hook 42 team page for more info.
 
Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. Kristen wrote the Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites book. She has presented at DrupalCons, BADCamps, Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out Kristen's drupal.org page and her Hook 42 team page for more info.
 

Conversational Drupal: A Crash Course in Drupal Jargon

11:00 AM - 11:45 AM | Registered Speaker(s): kristink2

Conversational Drupal, A Crash Course in Drupal Jargon This is a basic introductory session for those new to Drupal. I really started thinking about myself when I started Drupal 3 1/2 years ago. There were so many terms that had specific meaning. My goal in this session is to help people from many levels get familiar with the most common vocabulary we take for granted as experienced developers. Also, I want to familiarize the audience with the roles they might play as part of the Drupal Community. Finally, in the spirit of working together, I have breaks for people to introduce themselves to others. Overall it should be a positive, fun hour that gets people ready to develop! I presented this at BADCamp, you can see the slides for that presentation at: Conversational Drupal: A Crash Course in Drupal Jargon - http://tinyurl.com/conversationaldrupal

About K2 as a presenter: My name is K2 (I work closely with Kristen Pol and we needed nicknames) and I am an experienced speaker who is confident and clear presenting to large and small groups. I have been a web developer for the past 17 years (has it really been that long?), and I have 3 1/2 years of experience developing Drupal. I really enjoy sharing knowledge, let's all work together to make this easier! My personal information can be found in the following places:

Drupal Presentations:

Thank you! K2

Next Level Git

11:00 AM - 11:45 AM | Registered Speaker(s): Mark Ferree

As a Drupal developer it can be easy to use Git for years without doing much more than `git push` `git pull` and `git commit`. Using Git purely at this superficial level you are missing out on a lot of what makes Git such a powerful tool. In this presentation we will focus on all those tricky powerful parts of Git and advanced Git workflows that will enable you to be a more confident user of a powerful tool that has changed the way a lot of the world develops software.
Some examples of the types of topics to be covered:

  • Stashing, cherry-picking, and other surgical tools.
  • Rebasing, remote management, and advanced branch management strategies.
  • Learning more from git log on your next archeology expedition.

Introduction to Local Drupal Development w/Kalabox and Docker

11:00 AM - 11:45 AM | Registered Speaker(s): reynoldsalec

Kalabox is the fastest way to start working with Drupal on your computer.

With a few clicks in the Kalabox interface, we’ll show you how to…

  • - Install Kalabox on Mac, Linux, and Windows computers
  • - Develop D7, D8, and Backdrop sites on Kalabox
  • - Pull down projects from Pantheon
  • - Deploy new work to projects on Pantheon

If you prefer the command line to a desktop application, never fear! We’ll show you Kalabox’s command line tooling as well.

Curious about how all this magic works? We'll show the basic Docker concepts that Kalabox leverages. Think of it as a sneak-peek into the future of the internet.
 
As a party favor, we’ll give you some pointers on how to use Kalabox in the real world. Whether you work within a large development team, hold trainings at Drupal camps, or are a lone vaquero, there’s something special in Kalabox for you.
 

So Happy Together: How to Work With Your Vendor to Get a Product You'll Love

10:00 AM - 10:45 AM | Registered Speaker(s): hrodrig

In higher ed, client/vendor relationships are often fraught with many challenges from the onset: RFPs are written before site needs can truly be discovered and architected, web committees are formed with so many opinionated stakeholders that decision-making barely inches along, and each department wants their content to be treated differently than all other site content and custom solutions built to support an idiosyncratic workflow. As a developer who has both worked for higher ed (+4 years leading the UMD Drupal Users Group at the University of Maryland) and for the private sector, I've seen projects suffer all too often from the same avoidable mistakes. At this session, I will impart some strategies I've learned along the way to promote project success and minimize failure, such as how to:

  • craft an RFP that communicates high level requirements while maintaining flexibility
  • choose the right people for the job: roles and responsibilities for your internal web team
  • empower a product owner, aka The Enforcer
  • communicate ideas and solutions with your vendor (sounds easy, but I can almost guarantee you will ask for something that is not what you'll get!)
  • plan for sustainability, including when to say no to custom solutions
  • embrace agile development practices to minimize risk, get visibility into project progress, and ensure that the product you wind up stuck with is one that you'll love.

Automating the D2D Migration Process

10:00 AM - 10:45 AM | Registered Speaker(s): dharris1

Slides may be viewed here: http://webdrips.com/news/automating-the-drupal-migration-process

With Drupal 6 being end-of-lifed recently, Drupal to Drupal (D2D) migration has never been in greater need. For most sites, it's desirable to have as little downtime as possible while completing the migration process.

In this session, you'll learn how to achieve a complex D2D migration with roughly zero website downtime. This session is for anyone wishing to learn how to automate their Drupal migration process.

We'll be covering the migration from both a Drupal standpoint, and what was needed on the server side to achieve this near 100% automation. This can be achieve by building the D7/D8 site architecture from scratch during the migration process using a script and features/custom modules.

You'll also learn how to take advantage of multithreading with Drupal/Drush during Migrations, and how this concept could be used for any large batch process.

Mapping Drupal User Stories | Rounding Out The Flat Backlog

10:00 AM - 10:45 AM | Registered Speaker(s): dangur

The difference between success and failure is what we choose to build…or not to build. Often what ends up in, and at the top of our backlogs arrives there in random, political, or unorganized ways. User story mapping is a repeatable logical alternative for building lean, viable, useful products by employing some of the following principles:

  • Prioritizing outcomes over features
  • Identifying the most valuable opportunities
  • User validation testing
  • Cutting incremental releases
  • Building shared understanding
  • Breaking stories down to size
  • Continuous learning

Presentation will include:

  • Intro to story mapping
  • Live interactive practice session
  • Q&A: maps for your Drupal sites

User story maps and the change in thinking that comes with them can help us discover, build and develop better Drupal sites. Based on a study of the book User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton
mapping_drupal_user_stories.pptx

Introduction To Grunt

10:00 AM - 10:45 AM | Registered Speaker(s): sheamck

I've heard of this thing called Grunt. What is it?

If you are wondering what Grunt is and how it can make your life better, this is the session for you. Grunt is a task runner. It can perform a whole bunch of actions for you really quickly. This is great for speeding up your developmet workflow and automating tasks that you and your team do over and over again. This session will go over:

  • What is Grunt?
  • Installation of NodeJS and Grunt (OSX via homebrew and npm)
  • Basic set up of a project
  • Adding already built packages and configuring them
  • Running a Grunt task
  • How to start your own custom tasks

This session is intended to be an introductory session but you should be comfortable with following along with commands on your terminal. 

DIY GPL Planet Scale Drupal "Cloud"

10:00 AM - 10:45 AM | Registered Speaker(s): niccolox

SLIDES: DrupalCamp Session DIY GPL Planet Scale Drupal "Cloud"

A report back from the Inaugural Aegir Summit (United Nations, NYC, 2015) by the founder and co-organizer of the Inaugural Aegir Summit 2015 which was themed "Commercial Free Software Drupal Hosting with Drupal, Drush & Aegir" which featured a strategy session by Richard Stallman of FSF (who is not coming to Stanford for Drupal Camp)"

NASA hosts 300+ Drupal sites on a GPL codebase on AWS, the Stanford National Accelerator runs 1000+ websites on the same GPL Drupal codebase, universities, non-profits, international democratic institutions, independents and businesses run the same codebase. The DIY GPL planet-scale Drupal Cloud which is so mature, stable, feature rich, government grade, production system is Aegir "

  • Scaling Up & Out with Aegir Cloud
  • Practical SAAS with Drupal and Aegir such as Get Open Outreach
  • Aegir 3 in production and local development with Valkyrie
  • Drupal agency website production lines
  • the Aegir support cooperative and vendor ecosystem
  • the Aegir NG containerized paradise

"Featuring the newly released cloud-ready Aegir 3, Drupal Core testing with Drulenium, DevOps with Valkyrie, Devshop, Open Agency Website Production Lines, Government lab Red Hat Clusters, PAAS with GetOpenOutreach and also a summary of an Aegir strategy session with Richard Stallman of FSF/GPL (note, Richard Stallman will not be Stanford Drupal Camp).

Started by Development Seed with wide community ownership and contrib

Recently personally advised on free software project strategy by Richard Stallman of FSF while at nyccamp 2015 at the United Nations at the Inaugural Aegir Summit.

also completely separately but related see SLAC Aegir talk at Stanford 2016

SLIDES: DrupalCamp Session DIY GPL Planet Scale Drupal "Cloud"

Drupal through Empathy

| Registered Speaker(s): Oddencreative

Many times a thought is executed because it is going to be the best thing for the people, but the people are not really considered, just the features. If we take a step back and start the discussion with identifying the user first, we can better serve these users, and solve real challenges that will make their lives better. It is at this point we have a real product, a real service, a real aid that is useful for people. "A good user experience designer needs to be able to see both the forest and the trees." — Eric Reiss