2021-09-09 Schedule

Our websites are maturing into feature-rich publishing platforms, allowing collaboration across organizations and delivering content across multiple channels. But the out of the box publishing experience is fairly flat -- with content either published or not.

Content moderation is not a trivial feature. It’s a big responsibility to write software that dictates how someone works. Workflows should be a reflection of your individual creative processes. Creating interfaces that are too rigid or don’t allow collaboration will stifle good ideas and accidentally impose an unwanted layer of governance.

This session will explore common offline/institutional workflows and how they map to functions of the Drupal CMS. We will discuss the lifecycle of content from concept to published copy and look at ways to manage content as it moves through the roles of your institution. Topics include:

• Moderation: Defining states and transitions that match the roles of each stakeholder.

• Dynamic Permissions: Changing access rules based on content state, history, and ownership. 

• Revisioning: Reviewing, purging, and diffing sets of content changes.

• Notifications: Sending messages to stakeholders on content transition.

• Dashboards: Developing interfaces and reports based on content states and the roles of your team.

We will look at real-life workflows inspired by client work, including a publications workflow, a job application website, and a tech-support ticketing system. Finally, we will discuss the benefits of centralizing your content management processes, leveraging features of Drupal over getting lost in a mess of spreadsheets and emails.

I would like to talk about the Configuration Split module in Drupal 8/9. One of the coolest features introduced in Drupal 8 was Configuration management.  The developers now can easily push configuration changes to different environments. There are cases where certain configurations need to be enabled only in certain environments. For example, modules like Devel, Kint, etc are enabled only in development environments, but we do not have these modules enabled on production or sometimes we need to configure different credentials for different environments. Fortunately, the Configuration Split module provides a means to accomplish all of these goals by keeping configurations into a separate directory so we can import them into a certain environment.

Any Drupal beginners with site-building and configuration management knowledge can attend this session. This session would help them understand their site's configuration and prevent it from overriding.

Ensure that you let us know:

• Attendees do not need any specialized knowledge to understand the content of this session, but awareness of Drupal webforms will be useful although not required.
• In this session attendees will get an introduction to Drupal webforms, and through storytelling learn how flexible Drupal webforms can be.
• Through a comparison of our first approach (using our law library's ILS Sierra's Innovative) and our second approach (our law school's website Drupal 7) attendees will see how much beneficial webforms can be for simple workflows, basic automation, and improved user experience.
• This session will teach that process and user experience (including marketability) are more important than the technology itself, and that often the simplest and most affordable solution is the best one.

Depending on the needs of your organization, taking advantage of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to automate your newsletter campaigns can be a simple way to increase traffic to your blog, especially if you don’t want to pay for a fancy marketing automation tool. During this session we will discuss the basics behind building out automated newsletter campaigns in RSS-compatible email marketing tools such as Mailchimp. While RSS feeds can be applied to any CMS, we found that the feed export functionality in the Drupal Views module served as a great data source for our own RSS implementation on the DesignHammer website. An advanced level of marketing knowledge is not a prerequisite for this session, it is open to anyone and everyone who is interested in learning how to apply a common technology to drive new traffic to their website, especially those with a limited marketing budget..

After this session, attendees will have learned how to generate an RSS feed that pulls data from their Drupal blog, how to build an RSS-readable email template in Mailchimp, and how to schedule recurring campaigns. Thanks to RSS tech, automating your email marketing campaigns can be simpler than you think.

There are a lot of Drupal features we end up missing out on when going fully Decoupled. In a lot of scenarios, only a part of our application needs the functionality that Decoupled Drupal provides, and going overboard ends up hurting us more than it saves our time.

Can't we have your cake and eat it too? Well, we certainly can when we decouple progressively. With such an architecture we get to enjoy the strong suite of both Drupal and the Frontend framework without worrying about how to scale our infrastructure or the team.

However, even with a progressively decoupled drupal project, there are a lot of scenarios where we might run into challenges. In this session, I'll try to address some of them. We will go through the following:

1. When to opt for progressively decoupled Drupal and how it compares to fully decoupled
2. How to structure your components and how various Drupal modules can make this simple for you
3. How to build components that work in harmony with Drupal localization.
4. Which Frontend library should we use and when does it make sense to use something else
5. Optimize data fetching when querying data from Drupal and third-party APIs
6. Using Drupal for tracking Frontend errors.