Site Building

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a critical part of running a successful website and involves a lot more than simply updating some page titles and meta descriptions. Yet despite the importance of good SEO, many sites often lack essential SEO configurations. Additionally, out-of-the-box Drupal sites typically do not provide all of the tools and configuration options needed to implement SEO best practices.

The concepts of Entities, Bundles and Fields underlay much of Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 functionality. Though Drupal sitebuilders and developers understand the concept of Fields, Entity Types and Bundles are often misunderstood or even unknown to those new(or not so new) to Drupal. Understanding these concepts will make you a better Site Builder and give you a better understanding of how many popular contributed modules work.

Are you making changes such as creating Views, configuring content types or saving settings forms on your live Drupal site? If so you probably already know it is easy to make mistakes that cause big problems on your site.

This session will introduce the Features module which will allow you to make these configuration settings on your local development environment and then easily deploy them to your live site.

After the introduction to the Features module we will look at how it becomes even more powerful when combined with Drush and Git for version control.

We'll discuss using the just-about-ready-for-primetime 2.x version of the Media module, in concert with the Drupal 8-ready Picture module, mobile-friendly Breakpoints module, and the easy-to-use Focal Point module.

Using field collections can make it easier for your users to add unlimited "grouped" content to their nodes while avoiding the trouble of using entity reference or something similar. We'll also discuss how to create custom formats for your field collections.

Now that Drupal 7 has reach full maturity and perhaps entering into it's Autumn years we're able to take full stock of Drupal 7 features that have taken off and a few that fell flat. This presentation will explore the most valuable innovations in Drupal 7 and offer examples illustrating why these features have become so valuable. We'll also take a look at how today's most valuable features will fair in the upcoming release of Drupal 8.

Drupal 7 Innovation we'll be exploring

Menus, breadcrumbs, and path aliases have been core features since anyone can remember. Yet the core functionality is still pretty bad.

I'm a believer that:

The VIEWS module is powerful. With it you can create dynamic pages, blocks, feeds, and more!
The VIEWS module can seem mystic at times.
Let's DEMYSTIFY VIEWS!

Join me as we spend some time in the most powerful and complex user interface that Drupal offers. You NEED the power of Views and you're gong to get it!

If you're a Drupal site builder, now's a great time to install Drupal 8 and start playing around with it and testing it out. You've probably heard that Drupal 8 includes Views in core, but what other new features and improvements does it come with?

In this session, I'll talk about 10 new things for site builders in Drupal 8. This includes new features, modules, and user interface improvements that come out-of-the-box. You'll get a nice demo of each feature and a discussion of how it will change the way we do things in Drupal 8.

There is a mantra in Drupal, "there's a module for that"; many times you need one little piece of functionality that's not provided by a module. Instead of learning to write code, you can use the Rules module - the duct tape of Drupal - to build new features and business logic.

Rules can be immensely useful for Intranet websites, or sites with complicated sets of permissions and publishing workflows. It is also used by default in Drupal Commerce sites to manage the taxes, discounts and payment types.