Intermediate

Drupal 8's Configuration Management System is a modern marvel. We now have a standard way to export, store, and import configuration files.

When working on a single site, built on a fresh Drupal 8 install, the process is pretty straightforward and there are many tools to help along the way.

But what if you're building lots of similar sites? Like a multi-site? Or maybe a Drupal Distribution? Or Install Profile? Or Sub-Profile? In Drupal 7 we had Features. Do we still need that?

With the component-based approach becoming more popular in Drupal 8 we’re beginning to see some slick front end environments show up in Drupal themes. The promise that talented front enders with little Drupal knowledge can jump right in is much closer to reality. 

However, before diving into this new front end bliss, there are still some gotchas, plus lots of baked in goodies Drupal provides that one will need to have a handle on before getting started.

This talk will cover: 

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In a world where everyone has the ability to post anything online, it becomes critical for site owners wanting to maintain their brand reputation to curate what is published. How can content editors keep up with reviews when there's a steady stream of content submissions? Enter the robots.

What's the deal with all this serverless talk? In this session you will learn the basic concepts around serverless. Serverless is a broad term used to describe an approach where the developer doesn't have to manage the server, only pays for what resources they use, and where scaling is automatic. We will take a beginner friendly look at this approach to development as well as walk through real world examples of use cases. Serverless has many uses, especially for decoupled projects. Attendees will leave with a good working knowledge on the subject.

In this session, we will take a critical look at how the new JS world is impacting Drupal. We will address the barriers we have to make Drupal relevant for this novel ecosystem and analyze how our current Drupal administrative interface lags behind.

We rely our whole Drupal administrative interface on the fact that there is a site builder to build things. Maybe it's time to look at it differently. An alternative is OpenStory, a decoupled administrative interface aimed to improve the editorial experience in Drupal.

We will address the following points:

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This session is about giving a practical example of how the CMS and Drupal community can put machine learning into practice by using a Drupal module, the taxonomy system, and Google's Natural Language Processing API.

We will begin with an overview of what natural language processing is and some natural language processing concepts, including:

Have you ever wondered about the implications of your architectural decisions? Should an entity reference go on this entity type or that one? Why? Is it ok to nest many different entity types together? How many is too many? How many levels down? Paragraphs? Why? Fields or entity displays? When and why?

Drupal has been criticized as "being slow" and, it's true, performance can sometimes be an issue. Some performance improvements are made easily by turning on core caching and leveraging a good hosting platform that provides things like Varnish and Redis support. Once you get through the easier wins, tuning can get more challenging and, often, the issues lie with slow database queries.

In this session, we will cover:

Watch the session video here.

Nightwatch.js is an easy to use Node.js based End-to-End (E2E) testing solution for browser based apps and websites. Practically speaking, this means you can write JavaScript that will visit and test your website in various browsers. It does this by using the W3C WebDriver API to run an actual browser on your system and perform tasks on DOM elements.