DrupalCamp NJ - Site Building

SEO Awesomeness for Drupal Sites

Dave Sawyer — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 22:59:39 +0000

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.

In this session, we'll review SEO best practices relative to Drupal development and will show how you can improve your SEO with some relatively simple configuration changes. We'll also review a number of specific techniques and contributed modules that you can use to improve the way search engines see your site.

Topics include:

Understanding Meta Tags (and which ones are important)
How to include Meta Tag content in a publishing workflow
Leveraging Twitter Cards and Open Graph tags to make your content more sharable
Tips for using Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools
Tips for configuring Drupal menus, breadcrumbs, and URL paths
Search engine-friendly redirects and Canonical URLs
XML Sitemap and robots.txt configurations
Recommended contributed modules
Recommended analysis and testing tools
SEO Considerations for Drupal 8

About the Speaker

Dave Sawyer is a Solutions Architect at Blink Reaction - a proud sponsor of DrupalCamp NJ 2015. He has 15 years experience in web development and specializes in architecting multi-site solutions. Dave is an Acquia Certified Developer and works extensively with Drupal. He has given talks at numerous Drupal conferences and camps including DrupalCon Austin, Drupaldelphia, DrupalCamp New Jersey, and NYC Camp. Previously, Dave has worked as a consultant and developer for Adobe Systems, Bloomsbury Publishing, and The Vineyard Gazette. You can follow him on Twitter at @cmsdave.

Experience level:

Beginner

Speaker(s):

Dave Sawyer

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building

Entities, Bundles, and Fields: You need to understand this!

Ted Bowman — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 21:13:54 +0000

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.

In the first section of this session we will delve into what Entity types, Bundles, and Fields actually are in Drupal 7 and 8. We will look at what is going on under the hood and how Drupal core is using these features. We will examine how this is stored in the database

We will then look at what contrib modules are doing to take advantage of this architecture. Some of the modules that we will look at are:

Entity API
Profile2
Field Collection
Entityforms
Drupal Commerce
Organic Groups

We will look at what new Entity Types and Bundles these modules define or how they add functionality to existing Entity Types by defining new Fields.

Understanding these concepts and how they are being used in different modules will give you a better perspective on evaluating different contrib modules.

Drupal 8 has made even more things entities. We look at some of the new entity types in Drupal 8 and who possibilities they open up.

Come to find out many tools that can add flexibility to your site building experience.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Speaker(s):

Ted Bowman

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building

An Introduction to using Features, Drush, and Git

Ted Bowman — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 21:02:42 +0000

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.

Using Features, Drush, and Git will make life much easier for multiple developers working on single Drupal site. The tools methods learned in this session can be used in any Drupal hosting environment including Pantheon and Acquia.

Experience level:

Beginner

Speaker(s):

Ted Bowman

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building

Using Media, Picture, and Focal Point modules

byron veale — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 18:14:57 +0000

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.

With this combo, your users can have an easier time managing their image assets, optimizing images, and presenting them in a mobile-ready format.

Slides:

using_media_picture_and_focal_point.pages_.pdf

Experience level:

Intermediate

Speaker(s):

byron veale

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building

Working with field collections

byron veale — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 18:01:25 +0000

Using field collections can make it easier for your users to add unlimited "grouped" content to their nodes. Through a single field-entry on the node edit page, users could add:

"people" information, with fields for name, e-mail, phone, and address
"building" information, including building name, address, and category (high-rise, parking garage, etc.)
or any info that's too small for the trouble of using entity reference or something similar, but needs more than a single text field to be really useful (and needs to allow for multiple entries).

We'll also discuss how to create custom formats for your field collections.

Experience level:

Beginner

Speaker(s):

byron veale

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building

5 Top Drupal Innovations You Can't Live Without

Daniel Schiavone — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 15:35:55 +0000

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

Entities
Displays
Media
Views
Rules

Session Objectives

Identify and demonstrate the most useful tools introduced in Drupal 7
Offer tips on how to utilize Drupal 7 Innovations to build great web sites
Show how these innovations will be affected by the pending Drupal 8 release

Experience level:

Beginner

Speaker(s):

Daniel Schiavone

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building

Perfecting Menus, Breadcrumbs and Paths

Jody Hamilton — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 15:07:38 +0000

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:

- Beautifully structured URLs are an important part of your site's design
- You should almost always include breadcrumbs and they should always be correct
- You can display one breadcrumb and one path, and they should always be in harmony (two formats of the same structure)
- A site's navigation should all fit into a single tree
- The menu position, breadcrumb, and URL should all be in harmony within that one tree
- A URL should mimic a real directory structure, and be navigable
- If you have a page with more than one path or menu position, one path and menu position should be canonical

For many years I've fought with core's handling of paths, menus and breadcrumbs as it does not seem to support my beliefs. I've tried many, many different approaches. Finally I'm happy with my set of configuration, modules, core patches and philosophy, and would like to spread the technique as well as the passion for perfection in this critical aspect of your projects.

Slides: http://jodyhamilton.github.io/menus-n-paths-slides/menus-n-paths.html

Experience level:

Intermediate

Speaker(s):

Jody Hamilton

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building

Views Demystified

Doug Vann — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 18:01:23 +0000

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!

Together we will use views to:
a] Build a listing page of nodes
b] Build filtering functionality so that users can limit and control the list of content that is created by the View.
c] Build a simple block.
d] Build a block which contains the node author's picture so that it shows on every article.
e] Some Q-n-A time to satisfy your Views questions!

If you have questions about, this session, me, or Drupal in general: http://dougvann.com/contact

Experience level:

Intermediate

Speaker(s):

Doug Vann

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building

10 New Things You Can Do with Drupal 8 Out-of-the-Box

Suzanne Dergacheva — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 20:47:51 +0000

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.

You can get the slides on slideshare.

Experience level:

Beginner

Speaker(s):

Suzanne Dergacheva

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building

Rules: Duct Tape for Drupal

Ryan Price — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 16:21:23 +0000

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.

This session will provide you with a formula you can apply to decide when to use rules and a system for asking the right questions before you sit down to create a rule, and how to find some examples of people using rules for similar purposes. Finally, we will cover some excellent modules that provide extra actions and conditions for rules that can be helpful in specialized sites.

For Slides, check http://slides.com/ryanprice - I am editing them to add a few things we talked about during the session, and I will upload a PDF here soon.

Slides:

rules-duct-tape-for-drupal.pdf

Experience level:

Intermediate

Speaker(s):

Ryan Price

Session Tracks (DrupalCamp NJ 2015)

Site Building