Review of DrupalCon Austin 2014 conference

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:
o Google further enhances search results
o Why go anywhere else when Google has it all?
o Google becomes Web replacement
● Ease-of-use
o 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
o Harder to fix after the fact.
● Good architecture helps with:
o consistency
o usability
o maintainability
o 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/valid
ation-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
o does not measure front-end performance
o 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:
o 3,500 in 2004
o 37,000 in 2014
o 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. Thank you!

21. But there’s one more thing…

22. Headless
Drupal

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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