DrupalSouth day 1 digest - Monday 3 December 2018

Day 1

Read our session key takeaways from day 1 of DrupalSouth.

Morning sessions

Afternoon sessions

Morning sessions

9am sessions

Ivan went to see Jonathan Hunt’s session titled Islandora CLAW: A next generation content repository.

Ivan’s key takeaway: Islandora CLAW was a bit of a peephole view into a totally new universe, and its potential looks amazing. I liked its Drupal frontend to the Fedora. They have micro services for easy install too! More info here: https://islandora.ca/about.

Alan and Greg went to Media management in Drupal 8 by Ivan Zugec.

Greg’s key takeaway: Things have greatly improved over Media Management in D7 with the media module now baked into Drupal core. More flexibility, better integration, and considerably less contrib modules to install and configure to get things done.

There were quite a few Salsarians in The story of GovCMS with Toby Bellwood and Nathan Wall.

Paul’s key takeaway: GovCMS 2.0 has launched. It’s just the start. A sharing ethos is critical. Thanks Salsa and amazee.io. Lots to achieve together as a GovCMS community.

Suchi attended the Partnering with vendors for agile success session with Salsarian Antoine, and Elisha from University of Southern Queensland.

Suchi’s key takeaway: Partnering needs to be agile. And the most important things are communication, transparency and finally trust.

10am sessions

Alan went to How to keep Drupal relevant in API-driven GIT-basedera with Eduardo Garcia.

Alan’s key takeaway: Right tool for the job. Using the best platform for the job (content, comments, search) and bringing it together in static frontend files can be a viable solution.

Ivan went to HashiCorp Vault for Drupalers by Nick Santamaria.

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Ivan’s key takeaway: Nick Santamaria presented a really good way Drupal Vault modules suite could to be the next logical step in maintaining application secrets (such as password management) and improve application security much further. A good thing to learn after the Ansilbe Vault that we use to provision the secure infrastructure. Wondering if this could handle customers’ sensitive data.

11.15 sessions

Sonny went to Site migration 101 by Victoria Spagnolo.

Sonny’s key takeaway: Victoria presented a full demonstration of migrating to Drupal 8 using core Migrate tools. She pointed out some common issues with Drupal 8 migration and troubleshooting paths.

Alan went to Richard Sison’s session on The role of microcopy in user experience.

Alan’s key takeaway: Microcopy is common and can help with navigation. Avoid dark patterns. Feedback is good if respectful and if you follow through with it.

Ivan went to REST ready: auditing Drupal 8 websites for use as a content hub.

Ivan’s key takeaway: Great session but too short. Good point raised: manual code review may be hard; automated testing to solve that. Integrate with CI/CD for end-to-end quality control (like we do at Salsa Digital). Good technique for comparing JSON response when using automated testing. It’s also a Docker-based local development tool...good to see wider Docker adoption.

12.15pm sessions

Suchi attended Salsarian Julie’s talk on Delivering to a fixed budget with agile.

Suchi’s key learning: Stay true to agile; educate on the benefit of agile and being open to change; true buy-in from all stakeholders; and be transparent.

A few Salsarians attended Getting the most of GovCMS-UI-Kit base theme in GovCMS8 by Murray Woodman and Toby Bellwood.

Ivan’s key takeaway: Design System in GovCMS8. Couldn’t believe how the vanilla GovCMS UI-Kit Starter theme could do so many things with the built-in theme components, out-of-the-box. Good work by Morpht. Layouts, modifiers, paragraphs, panelizer...all available out-of-the-box for easy layout building.

Greg’s key takeaway: All of the above and holding our breath for the upcoming Layout Builder in D8 core.

Alan’s key takeaway:  Great tool for simplifying content editor input with more immediate flexibility. Will respond to user and developer feedback and try to keep the UI-Kit aligned with the Design System.

Afternoon sessions

2pm sessions

Alan went to the session Let's go Nuxt by Guy Owen and TimYao.

Alan’s key takeaway:  This session looked at SDP tech and the problems they faced creating a headless Drupal implementation.

Paul attended Drupal 8 architectural paradigms with Jay Friendly.

Paul’s key takeaway: D8 extends concepts of D7 by adding features such as Typed Data API.  Typed Data support in D8 makes D8 more enterprise-grade ready by tightening up implementations over the loose approach inherent in PHP and D7. Typed Data Objects are akin to Drupal lego. Jay gave example of a Colour API Module he built, which is available in Drupal.org.

3pm sessions

Suchi went to Behind the agency curtain: what all clients should know!

Suchi’s key takeaway: This talk focused on how to be a good client and get the best outcome possible for your project when working with an agency. Really informative. Most of the things are common sense, but so easy to forget/ignore.

Ivan and Alan went to Search in decoupled architectures using GraphQL.

Ivan’s key takeaway: ReactJS and GraphQL (combined with a few other modules) looks quite a powerful solution for headless Drupal in a good overview by Duarte Garin. Using Apache Solr and GraphQL to build a single content repository to power many sites, without a line of code. A worthy alternative to JSON API.

Alan’s key takeaway: GraphQL looks good and we should find situations to try using it.

Phillipa went to How Drupal code contribution leads to success by Kim Pepper.

Phillipa’s key takeaway: It’s important for Drupalists to start contributing more to the community - there are more consumers than contributors! Contributing can start small and take different forms (e.g. reviewing someone else’s code/patches).

4.15 keynote

Keynote address, Collaboration and community at the core of Single Digital Presence by Jithma Beneragama, Director Digital Engagement, Department of Premier and Cabinet Victoria.

Alfred’s key takeaway: Incredibly strong vision that goes beyond just government. True focus on collaboration within government and across industry partnerships. Talking about whole-of-government platform that can be used globally with a focus on better outcomes for taxpayers and society.

And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for our coverage tomorrow of day 2, DrupalSouth.