This year, we were honored to sponsor and participate in DrupalCamp Atlanta. Our team attended as many sessions as they could with the intention of gaining insight and sparking new ideas. Here are a few of Ed and Dan’s favorite sessions:
Turn That Frown Upside Down – Adding Wins While Migrating Sites
This session focused on migration optimization. Senior applications developer at Georgia Tech Michael Sheldon provided techniques to make migration more of a long term investment as opposed to a meticulous chore. Dan found this session to be unique in its consideration of all the aspects surrounding Drupal migration.
I’ve attended a lot of sessions on actually migrating Drupal, but this is the first that dealt with the details. Michael discussed everything from client buy-in to the possible changes in editorial processes to SEO considerations on the final product.
Weather, Weather, Everywhere
By building a filter that delivers the weather for any location, this session introduced the design elements and various resources of Drupal 8. Ed brushed up on his Drupal 8 skills during this session with developer, Bradley Roberts.
Survival Skills for Real-World Project Management
Although this session seems strictly geared towards project managers, Jeff Diecks (@jeffdiecks) of Mediacurrent, offers a toolbox of helpful strategies to stay organized, including methods as simple as creating lists. Dan enjoyed this session and praised its organization.
This session demonstrated a highly effective project management mindset with a laser-like focus on effective and complete communication that allows a PM to stay up to date constantly for clients.
Paragraphs In Depth
With a focus on page design, this session presented by Tobby Hagler (@thagler), Director of Engineering at Phase2, instructed attendees on how to use the Paragraphs module in order to create reusable page layouts. Ed found this session insightful because of it’s focus on design. Design skills are equally as important as coding skills – This session taught Ed how to improve the interface for editorial administrators and an improved user experience.
Shifting UX to the Editorial Experience
Our developers work hard at optimizing the user experience of our projects. In addition to Paragraphs in Depth, our developers also attended this session, presented by Kevin Basarab (@kBasarab) of Mediacurrent and Mike Priscella (@mikepriscella) of Group Nine Media, which focused on improving the Drupal editorial user experience. Dan considered this his favorite session because it was such a wealth of information.
The presenters used their JET system as an example but distilled a lot of applicable knowledge out of it. The session featured modules, custom patches, discussion on clarity of workflow, and a lot more.
Follow @DrupalCamp_ATL for tweets and pictures from the conference as well as updates for future events. Follow @Sevaa for the latest blog posts about everything from SEO to Drupal advice for developers!
In case you missed DCATL this year, check out the details and presentation slides for these particular sessions:
Turn That Frown Upside Down – Adding Win While Migrating Sites
Weather, Weather, Everywhere
Survival Skills for Real-World Project Management
Paragraphs In Depth
Shifting UX to the Editorial Experience
