Notes from DrupalCon 2013: Improving the editor experience, better performance testing, CSS architecture for the future, Drush 6, and more
DrupalCon was held in Portland last week. I took detailed notes for (most of) the sessions I attended. Here are the ones that were good enough to share with the internet. They also link to their session pages, where a lot of the videos have been posted.
For more information, and for session videos, check out the official DrupalCon 2013 website.
- Secrets to Awesomizing Your Editor's Back-End Drupal Experience: If I'd only gone to one session, I'd have wanted it to be this one. Mike showed a variety of modules that make an editor's job a little easier. If you want editor buy-in on your Drupal site, that's a huge deal. Presented by @mikeherchel.
- Making Sense of the Numbers: DOs and DON'Ts of Quality Performance Testing: This session covered the terms people throw around with performance testing, who has responsibility for good site performance (spoiler: it's everyone), and straightforward dos and don'ts that help you get usable data out of your performance testing. Presented by @erikwebb and @doogiemac.
- What's New in Drush 6: I love this session for showing me how to upload my module list to Google Docs, as a spreadsheet, with ONE COMMAND. Presented by @weitzman, @msonnabaum, @jhedstro, and @grugnog.
- Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS: You know that sinking feeling you get when you look at a 4,000 line CSS file and wonder how it happened? This will help you avoid that feeling. Presented by @snookca.
- Multilingual Module Madness: What i18n Modules Do You Really Need?: There are lots of multilingual modules out there. There's no perfect way to know which ones you need (other than a lot of experience), but the aim of this session was to give you a starting point based on your project's requirements. Presented by @kristen_pol.
- What Developers Need to Know About Dev Ops: My notes on this are more haphazard than I'd like, but this session on what developers need to know about the environment their site will live in had great information -- like sample differences between a dev box and a production box, and a list of common pitfalls when you develop without understanding your production environment. Presented by @gchaix, @ramereth, @KenLett, and @basic_.
- Should Have Made a Left Turn at Albuquerque: Building Maps in Drupal - These are really limited notes. I normally wouldn't share them, but there were two fantastic mini-sessions: one gave a "recipe" for building great maps in Drupal, and the other showed impressive interactivity features with D3js.
- Rules Without the UI: This was a very detailed session, with lots of code examples, showing you how to set up rules in your module's code. Presented by @dwkitchen.
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