Bowst Team
Presenting at NEDCamp
JP and I just got back from presenting at NEDCamp (New England Drupal Camp) last Saturday, so we wanted to take this opportunity to thank the event organizers, advisory committee, sponsors, attendees, and fellow presenters for an awesome weekend. All the sessions and breakouts went smoothly and were incredibly interesting, engaging, and forward-thinking. With the first Drupal 8 release candidate having been released just days prior, the enthusiasm and excitement for the future of Drupal was a palpable current through the entire weekend. We’re going to highlight a few sessions, as well link to all the sessions that we attended. The speakers were encouraged to upload their slides to the NEDCamp website.
The day started for us with an early morning wake-up in our beloved Portsmouth, NH to make the drive down to Providence, RI and prepare for our 9am presentation. Ample amounts of coffee and McGriddles were essential. Our session outlining best practices for generating cleaner, more manageable markup in Drupal (slides below) was well-attended and sparked numerous engaging and spontaneous conversations throughout the day. And yes, it was Marky Mark themed… What can we say? Good Vibrations is a solid track.
Marky Markup and the Funky Bunch – dtraft
Holly Ross, the Executive Director at the Drupal Association, rocked the house with her keynote address. She gave a great presentation on the importance of the Drupal community and the many ways individuals and organizations can work together to make the future of Drupal even brighter. Bōwst already hosts and sponsors the Seacoast Drupal User Groupand the NH DevDays Code Sprint but we’re looking forward to finding even more ways we can contribute.
I attended two sessions on Decoupled (or Headless) Drupal (checkout the presentations here and here), which is the practice of completely separating the front-end of a drupal project and loading all of the data through a RESTful API. This allows one to leverage all the power and modularity of drupal while creating the rich and engaging user experience that is the norm for the modern web. Here at Bōwst we’ve actually been working on projects that utilize this architectural pattern, so stay tuned for another post detailing how we’re creating better sites by harnessing the power of the JavaScript renaissance.
We also attended sessions discussing the underutilized “distribution” functionality. There was an intriguing sessioncovering best practices for improving developer workflows using MagePHP.
JP has heard a lot recently about personalization and the web, which was the topic of this presentation. The speaker explained the difference between the two Drupal modules that can add this functionality to your site (Personalization and Personalize) as well Acquia Lift. Acquia Lift is a Drupal-based, third-party solution across multiple sites.
In addition, he attended this great session that discussed integrating project management into the design process. Finally, he learned a recipe for building a subscription-based Drupal Commerce site.
NEDCamp 2015 was a wonderful event; we will absolutely be back next year.
