DrupalCamp LA 2015 Roundup

Submitted by Mile23 on Tue, 09/01/2015 - 12:03

Social unDistortion - Gaining Clarity of Your Tweets, Likes, and Shares

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/social-undistortion-gaining-clarity-your-tweets-likes-and-shares

This session was called Social unDistortion. It had some good ideas about doing your own social logging, such that you didn't depend on e.g. Google for your like button stats.

One of the beneficial side-effects is that you're in much more control of how much JS gets loaded and what it actually does.

But the main effect is that the data lives on your server, and doesn't go to 'The Man.'

The example implementation uses Piwik analytics platform, which is either a service you pay for or some software you host.

There was a follow-up session afterwards which went more in-depth into Piwik: http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/piwik-analytics%E2%80%A8-own-your-data

HHVM: Upgrading PHP for Fun and Performance

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/hhvm-upgrading-php-fun-and-performance

Fairly decent overview of the differences between HHVM and PHP. Some conversation afterwards about whether Facebook is trying to take over open source.

I was familiar with most of this stuff, but I wanted to get a refresher. Also, this was the Deep Nerd option in this time slot.

Lunch

Last year someone sponsored a catered lunch. This year not so much. I hung out with the Drupal Console crowd and ate pizza at the nearby mall.

Building your first Drupal 8 theme

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/building-your-first-drupal-8-theme

I wanted to see a D8 theming session, because a) I'm terrible at theming and b) would there be lots of caveats and Drupalisms?

This talk did a good job of spending time introducing theming to what I call beginnermediates, but my brain rebelled and I shifted to...

Autoloading on Autopilot

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/autoloading-autopilot

I'd seen a previous version of this talk when Jeremy gave it at SeaPHP. It's a good overview of how to implement an autoloader, and how you can just use the one that Composer gives you.

Inventing The Container or: WTH Is A Container And Why Should I Care?

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/inventing-container-or-wth-container-and-why-should-i-care

Clearly the best session of all, since I gave it.

Some SNAFU with session recording... I hope it eventually shows up on the session page.

CMS Bakeoff

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/cms-bakeoff

This was basically watching people install CMSs and then configuring them to some very basic requirements.

We had Backdrop, WordPress, Drupal 8, and a mystery CMS.

I left just before the mystery CMS showed up to go to the bathroom, so I don't know what it was.

I was impressed by the fit and polish of Backdrop, and that they did things like move Views into core.

Still unimpressed with WordPress... The demo required getting plugins, and editing CSS and PHP in order to do some simple things. The requirements list might have been stacked against it, however.

Speeding up Drupal 8 development using Drupal Console

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/speeding-drupal-8-development-using-drupal-console

Walkthrough of the Drupal Console app. I was familiar with most of this stuff, but again a nice review, and a decent way to end the day.

The Next Day....

Implementing a Content Security Policy

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/implementing-content-security-policy

So I didn't know about the Content-Security-Policy header standards, and this session opened that up to me.

I got in late so I missed some of the specific JavaScript recommendations, but they're in the slides.

One of the heartening ideas that got floated around was that Drupal 8 could lead the pack by implementing its own CSP. I thing getting community buy-in on the specifics would be tough.

Lunchtime

Hacked around a little on stuff instead of going to lunch. UC Irvine blocks port 2222, btw. :-)

Repeatable Deployment: Install Profiles, Drush Makefiles and More!

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/repeatable-deployment-install-profiles-drush-makefiles-and-more

Walk through how to make Drupal deployable through Drush makefiles, profiles, features, scripts, and CLI tools.

The speaker works for Commerce Guys and their platform.sh product (and also gave the HHVM talk I attended earlier).

They needed a way to make Drupal reliably deployable for platform.sh, and this talk is about extending their solutions to local and general deployment.

Automating site configuration with Drush Recipes

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/automating-site-configuration-drush-recipes

Continuing the Drush theme...

It turns out some smart person has made Drush Recipies, which a sort of miniature scripting language for Drush.

You define sequences of commands as JSON or XML and then chain them together. It has a 'madlibs' mode for accepting user input, as well.

What's in Your Project Root?

http://2015.drupalcampla.com/sessions/whats-your-project-root

Ending the conference with Jeremy's project root talk.

It's an overview of common open source build and CI tools from the perspective of figuring out which tool all those files in your root directory belong to.