My first experience at Drupalcamp

I recently attended my first Drupal camp event.

It was great to experience what I’d always been told about Drupal, that it’s a large and open, but tightly-knit community.

Previously, I have had no contact with the Drupal community. My first observation as I entered was the wide demographic of people using Drupal. I didn't expect to see people of all ages, with a wide range of ability sets and backgrounds from all across the world attending.

Considering I'm fairly new to Drupal, I didn’t feel out of my depth or segregated from the more experienced members of the community. Far from it!

I came out of the event feeling that the community was more than just drupal.org. It felt like a community where everyone is happy to discuss problems and ideas publicly.

This openness is something I feel is unique to Drupal and its events. It was good to feel that there were a broad spectrum of people available to help you and share their wisdom.

I was able to see collective development in practice;  that it’s the community who are the main driver for the CMS.

Unfortunately I was only able to attend on the Saturday, but on that day I wanted to squeeze as much information as I could from those who were more experienced in the CMS.

I made sure I packed my day full of the 45 minute sessions in order to aid my personal development.

Coming from a primarily back-end development background, I thought it would be useful for me to understand some more of the the front end development tools and responsive theming techniques in Drupal.

Richard explained how having a framework setup would be useful, as it makes it simpler to customise your site.

I had never heard of ‘Foundation 5’ but I have used Bootstrap in previous projects and it had reduced the amount of time and effort required in theming. It appears that they are both fairly similar, however Richard explained that Foundation 5 does have a more lightweight system to Bootstrap.

Richard explained that Grunt can be used to process SASS files and is a way to speed up the work required to develop themes by automating the task of compiling CSS files from SASS files.

I’ve recently been exposed to this in our development team, so it was useful for me to see our practices being used in the wider community.

A colleague of mine at Deeson wrote a blog about how to implement a theme using Grunt, Bootstrap, Compass and SASS with drupal, which can be found here.

He also discussed how to implement responsive theming. You can use @media tags to specify how large you want a screen to be and within that function you insert your styling specifications for that screen size.

I found this talk very useful as it taught me some interesting consultancy techniques.

It’s easy as a developer to disregard what actually happens before development, so it was certainly a valuable talk for developers like me, to understand how client relationships are initiated and maintained.

Ben showed us a number of valuable consultancy tools, such as questioning a client’s needs by always asking “why?”. He also delved in to customers’ needs and the importance of identifying the root cause of what needs to be changed.

From a developers point of view, this is a very powerful tool. It helps us to understand a client’s actual needs and avoid questions such as “Can you just…” and “It should do…”. Further, questioning a clients ‘needs’ and ensuring clarity in their requirements is also important.

As a developer or a consultant, you should feel confident to ask them questions and feel confident in your ability to answer theirs.

He also told us that you have to choose the right project to fit the team, and pairing great teams with great clients creates great work.

I attended this talk because I wanted to understand the role of the site in the community, its underlying foundations and also what it had planned for the future.

After some user feedback at Drupalcon Austin, drupal.org discovered that improvements needed to be made to the site.  

Drupal.org want to become the home of the Drupal community, to provide learnable, efficient tools and to encourage people to develop themselves, their Drupal proficiency, and careers and to build human connections with the Drupal community.

Oliver described how they plan to meet these objectives. Drupal.org plan to:

• Make account creation and login much simpler.
• Improve the user profiles and organisation sites by adding more information about users.
• Look into a responsive redesign of the mobile website, to make both larger screens and mobile usability simpler.
• Improve the workflow to improve the level of skill in new contributors.
• Make improvements to the drupal.org search functionality, making it possible to gain information more easily and identify if a module is worth using on their site.

These improvements will allow us as developers to speed up development and help to get more involved in the Drupal community by making the site easier to use and improving the tools so that I can get the best out of drupal.

At the end of the presentation, a few people stated that they used Google and Github to search for and download modules and that this shouldn't be the case. They believed drupal.org should be the hub of Drupal. Oliver agreed and stated that this is one of the issues that they wanted to address.

During this talk, Alex described how ‘Panels’ is implemented in a Drupal site, and gave us a demo to show how it is configured.

I didn’t realise how powerful Panels is and I was surprised at how much you can do with it. Panels is a layout manager similar to Context and Display Suite. All three can be used individually or they can all be used together to create a more complex site layout.

Alex explained how, in Panels, a client can use the in-place editor and move content around to fit their specifications. Variants can be used in order to set up a variation of the same page, and selection rules are used for displaying panels on specific pages.

You can also use Panelizer to set the configurations of panels node by node.

This talk was particularly useful for me because it gave me the opportunity to seek new modules, expanding my knowledge base and helping find a module that will serve a clients needs better in different situations.

Paul talked to us about how the user is the one who is often wrongly forgotten by developers, often left with tools that are too basic to manage their site.

Paul then discussed various modules to aid user experience such as Adminimal and Navbar for navigating around the site, giving a cleaner looking site than the default Drupal setup. He also discussed a few modules to aid content management, such as Workbench for displaying content overviews and Workbench moderation for revisioning.

Paul went on to talk about a few modules to be used for file management such as the Media module which enables users to upload once and then manage the files throughout the site.

Finally, Paul discussed options to aid UX on fields such as term reference tree for select lists, focal point for image cropping and Help text for adding helpful text to users about what text to add into a form.

At the end of this talk, people shared their own experiences with modules that they had found useful for aiding user experience. This gave me further insight into the Drupal community and proved the shared nature of its infrastructure.

My experience at Drupalcamp 2015 gave me a good understanding of the Drupal community and was testament to the fact that it is a highly dedicated community based on sharing both tools and knowledge. I believe that this is one of the most important factors of Drupal that makes it as popular and as exciting as it is, and is certainly one of its largest selling points. Drupal camp was highly beneficial to my development, and I was glad that I took the opportunity to see for myself what the Drupal community offered.