As the local track chair for the frontend track, I'm posting this to encourage any last-minute session proposals bouncing around in your head to get typed out and proposed today.

That's right: Today's the Portland Drupalcon session proposal deadline. Submit your proposal now!

(And yes, nonprofit and nonprofit developer friends, there's an NGO track too.)

This year, the frontend track has been split off from the user experience track, so you can be even more specific in your proposals. Here are the descriptions for both tracks:

Frontend: Connecting new tools and techniques to create an effective Drupal frontend experience

The frontend experience of a website is crucial to its success. Though the backend of a site may be impeccable, the frontend experience gives the user the first impression of an organization or company. Without a good frontend experience, a site can turn users away. Let's discover ways in which we can connect our knowledge of different frontend tools and techniques with Drupal — and make Drupal a better experience for all users.

Main Themes

• The importance of frontend development in creating websites + web apps
• What frontend developers need to know to work well with backend devs, PMs, UX, Content Strategists
• Preparing frontend devs for D8 and Twig
• Frontend for mobile
• Using frontend frameworks such as Foundation and Bootstrap
• Speeding up the design process
• Frontend development for multilingual sites

Audience

• Frontend developers
• Backend devs that do Frontend work
• PMs that work with Frontend devs

User Experience (UX)

The User Experience process is key to the success of the development of websites and web applications. From user research, interviews and analytics, we learn what the user actually wants and needs; not what we assume they want. At this year's DrupalCon we present a new User Experience track to show our community's dedication to user needs.

Main Themes

• Explaining what user experience is and why it’s important
• UX for mobile and tablet, Responsive UX
• Speeding up the design process using UX tools and techniques
• UX for multilingual sites - especially RTL
• Content Strategy

Audience

• UX professionals - Drupal
• UX professionals outside of Drupal
• Backend devs that are interested in UX
• Frontend devs interested in UX

For the frontend track, global track chair John Ferris and I are looking for balance among three big areas: CSS and CSS metalanguages like SASS and LESS; jQuery and JavaScript; and Drupal 8's new template engine, Twig. There are also topics that span those areas, such as frontend mobile development (including responsiveness) and multilingual frontend development.

If you're wondering whether you should submit a session proposal, as track chair let me clear it up for you: You should!

Awesome frontend speakers

Drupalcon has some exciting keynote speakers, such as Karen McGrane. But the frontend track has some special guests we're really looking forward to:

• Jonathan Snook, author of Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS (SMACSS), will be presenting some of his ideas for writing great stylesheets. I'm personally very excited about this one!
• Jen Lampton, Fabian Franz, and John Albin Wilkins will be doing an in-depth look at the aforementioned Twig, Drupal 8's new template engine. At a similar presentation at BADCamp last fall, I heard audible gasps from the audience. No joke, Twig is that cool.

So if you haven't already, be sure to grab a ticket and get your travel figured out to my (new) hometown of Portland for the 2013 North American Drupalcon!

Join Rootwork on Twitter, Facebook and SlideShare.

Learn about Rootwork's services for nonprofits and social change.