Recent Talks

Managing dates and times is often complex: recurring events, timezones, daylight savings times, regional formatting conventions, and more. Add in additional presentation requirements like add-to-calendar links, registration links, and related content (like agendas, that change for each date instance) and the complexity can seem bewildering.

Fortunately Drupal offers a rich toolset for solving these challenges. In this session we'll explore the solutions, not only showing how they work, but also detailing the modules and the configuration needed.

Inefficient toolchains are a major source of lost productivity for development teams. This talk will demonstrate managed, cloud-based tools that make your team more efficient at every stage of the software delivery life cycle.

There’s lots to be excited about in Drupal 10 and Drupal 10.1 was just released, boasting tons of new features, including tech upgrades that help developers build better, automatic updates that make life way easier, a fresh admin experience that content editors will love and Drupal's most accessible default theme ever.  This talk will explore the new and improved features just released, and how to make the most of them, as well as some other exciting functionality the community is working on.

Marketing budgets are stretched thinner than ever: Teams have to reach increasingly distracted stakeholders, across channels and markets, under ever-changing conditions. How can your team get to market faster, with less effort, and better brand experiences? We’ll talk about a rapidly evolving toolset that promises to unleash the productivity of your team.

One of the key strengths of Drupal is its flourishing ecosystem for contributed modules. Best of all, you can jump in and add yoour own module! All you really need is a good idea, though of course some programming knowledge, understanding of Drupal coding standards, and a few other technical things would help. This talk will focus less on how to write code or what code you should write, and more on the process of creating a module, submitting it on Drupal.org, and getting it adopted by the community. We'll touch on such topics as:

Drupal 10 was released in late 2022 and is the platform's most recent major update. What new features and capabilities of interest to marketers were added? If your website hasn't been updated, is now the time? Martin Anderson-Clutz, a senior solutions consultant at Acquia, will explain what marketers need to know about Drupal 10.

There’s lots to be excited about in Drupal 10, but the Drupal 10.1 release is just weeks away. What new features will we see? This talk will explore the changes almost ready for release, as well as some other exciting functionality the community is working on.

There's a lot of excitement around headless headless websites. Is headless always better? In this conversation we'll unpack the true benefits of a headless architecture and some areas where it's often oversold.

We often talk about UX as a focus on making a site intuitive and easy-to-use for anonymous visitors, or perhaps registered users who need manage their account, make a purchase, and so on. But what about the people who will use your site most? While an engaged visitor might return to your site 3-5 times a month, a site admin use the site that many times a week, or more!

This session will explore how UX principles apply to Drupal's back end, as well as recommend some modules and best practices to make your site easy and intuitive for your contributors.

I sat down with Jeremy Wood to discuss careers in tech, my own journey, and what lies ahead.

The Talking Drupal hosts and I had a spirited discussion about why image optimization is important, and what tools are available.

Your site speed is a crucial element of good UX, and an important part of technical SEO efforts. We often think of optimizing Drupal's speed in terms of accelerating the page rendering, but often the speed of Drupal sites is hurt even more by requiring visitors to download much bigger image files than are truly necessary.

Kaleem Clarkson and I sat down with the Talking Drupal hosts to talk about the Event Platform module and how it can make life easier for event organizers.

Your site speed is a crucial element of good UX, and an important part of technical SEO efforts. We often think of optimizing Drupal's speed in terms of accelerating the page rendering, but often the speed of Drupal sites is hurt even more by requiring visitors to download much bigger image files than are truly necessary.

Thanks to the generous amount of time available, we also took a hands-on look at some recent functionality added to the Event Platform, driving new capabilities in Smart Date and other modules.

We talked about the Storage Entities that I work on with mxh, including when it's useful, how it's different from paragraphs, and more.

I talked with hosts John Picozzi and Nic Laflin about Drupal's Smart Date module: the use cases it's meant to address, why managing dates and times in general can be so difficult, and more.

Managing dates and times is often complex: recurring events, timezones, daylight savings times, regional formatting conventions, and more. Add in additional presentation requirements like add-to-calendar links, registration links, and related content (like agendas, that change for each date instance) and the complexity can seem bewildering. Fortunately Drupal offers a rich toolset for solving these challenges. In this session we'll explore the solutions, not only showing how they work, but also detailing the modules and the configuration needed.

With a renewed focus on site builders, Drupal has an opportunity to enable these critical users to quickly build out even complex functionality: an events calendar, a locations map, and more. By leveraging the power of configuration management built into modern versions of Drupal, configuration kits empower site builders, and provide a "known good" baseline that can help maintainers when troubleshooting.

Solutions like Acquia Site Factory and Pantheon Upstreams can be effective (but platform-specific) tools for managing multiple sites with similar requirements. The session will discuss a less scalable, but more portable approach using forked repos in Gitlab, that allow for development and site building from a central, template repo, while adding site-specific changes to individual sites that extend off the template.

One of the key strengths of Drupal is its flourishing ecosystem for contributed modules. Best of all, you can jump in and add yoour own module! All you really need is a good idea, though of course some programming knowledge, understanding of Drupal coding standards, and a few other technical things would help. This talk will focus less on how to write code or what code you should write, and more on the process of creating a module, submitting it on Drupal.org, and getting it adopted by the community.