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Tracks

DrupalCon Sydney will have sessions organised around the track topics outlined below, so please review these before crafting your session submission. Local track chairs are supported by the Content Lead, Donna Benjamin, and the Global Content Team.


Content Authoring

Chair: Pamela Barone

How do you plan, create and manage compelling content whilst leveraging the power of Drupal?

The web is nothing without great content, but it's much more than copywriting. It’s planning your content strategy, devising search engine marketing and optimisation approaches, harnessing social media, ensuring content accessibility and managing your content team’s workflow.

Main Themes

  • Best practice techniques for improving the authoring experience
  • Maximising content effectiveness
  • Encouraging community participation by content authors

Audience: Web site managers, editors, administrators, marketers and anyone else interested in the content side of web strategy.


Case Studies

Chair: Peter Cossey

Share your tales of epic Drupal projects!

Is it a story of courage and determination in the face of fire-breathing clients and insurmountable issue queues? From the moment Drupal was a gleam in the eye of a project manager to the sweet pop of a champagne cork at the launch party, to the moment your site’s traffic peaked. Give us the big picture vision punctuated by the practical reality of deploying a Drupal project.

Main Themes

  • Clients from hell
  • How I got rich and famous using Drupal
  • How I got broke and inconspicuous using Drupal
  • They said it would never work...
  • Drupal’s finest hour

Audience: The entire spectrum of the Drupal community.


Business and Strategy

Chair: Mark Matuschka

How do you plan, manage and deliver a successful Drupal project or run a Drupal-focused business?

Success usually depends on good planning and management. But how do you get on with business in the world of Drupal? How do you sell Drupal? How do you find, recognise and train Drupal talent? How do you support Drupal site owners? How do you allocate resources to contribute back to the project?

Main Themes

  • Open Source vs. proprietary software
  • Open Government
  • Selecting and adopting Drupal as a platform for your project or company
  • Leveraging third party software that integrates with Drupal
  • Running a Drupal agency
  • Business management tools & technologies
  • Best practices in project and product management, software design & development, team management
  • Analytics

Audience: Technology executives, business owners, project and product managers, and everyone else responsible for leading projects or guiding technology decisions and processes in his or her organization. Individuals and organisations that deliver Drupal solutions - business owners, managers, producers and anyone wanting to improve their organisation’s ability to deliver Drupal solutions.


Community

Chair: Brian Gilbert

How do you engage and collaborate with the Drupal community?

To understand Drupal, you need to understand the community and the ways we collaborate. Find a local meetup, run a camp, host a code sprint and connect with the global Drupal community. You’ll find out why we say “Come for the software, stay for the community”!

Main Themes

  • How to kick/start your local Drupal community
  • Tools and infrastructure
  • Building your local community
  • Connecting with other communities

Audience

  • Anyone who isn't participating in the community
  • Anyone wanting to participate further in their local community
  • Anyone wanting to start a local meetup


Frontend

Chair: Mr Snow

How do you craft Drupal for the end-user?

Design and Drupal theming are the obvious Frontend topics, but it’s also about interaction and usability. From defining user-centred goals to delivering accessible content across multiple platforms, a great user experience is at the core of any successful Drupal project.

Main Themes

  • User experience: user centred design / defining your user / user stories
  • Interactivity: JS frameworks, Backbone, jQuery
  • Theming / CSS frameworks / SASS / LESS / Compass / modular CSS
  • Mobile
  • Drupal as a platform/backend for alternative front ends
  • Accessibility

Audience: Marketing department, content editors, themers, interaction designers, usability experts, SEO providers


Site Building

Chair: Alastair Moore

How do you build and manage a Drupal site through administration tools and module configuration without any coding?

Do you build your project module by module or start with a pre-configured Drupal distribution? Showcase your own site-building toolkit and the modules that help you create great sites time after time.

Main Themes

  • Best Practices. The tools and modules that allow you to best create and maintain your Drupal site.
  • Build Better. Building better Drupal sites with contributed modules and distributions.
  • Key Concepts. The foundations of Drupal site building and contributed modules.
  • Optimisation. How to improve the performance of your site from within Drupal’s admin tools and contributed modules.
  • Sharing and Integration. Sharing content and integrating external data with your Drupal site.

Audience: The Site Building track is targeted at attendees of all skill and experience levels, however it is expected some sessions will be intended for advanced site builders.


Coding and Development

Track Chair: Dave Hall

How do you code and deploy Drupal projects?

Whether you build custom modules, contribute to core, or create complex integrations for your Drupal projects, dive deep, share your tools and techniques and show how you’re preparing for Drupal 8.

Main Themes

  • Leveraging Drupal 7: What new options and capabilities are available now that haven't been before, and how do we do amazing things with them?
  • What's around the corner with Drupal 8: Find out about new approaches and patterns being developed for Drupal 8.
  • Provisioning and deployment: Tools and techniques to make life easier for developers, system administrators, and module authors.

Audience: Coders, hackers, architects, dev ops and those wanting to learn more about Drupal development. This track is for those of all levels of experience with a basic understanding of PHP and the basics of Drupal and web development.