It’s official: Drupal Update is in the top 30 of companies contributing to Drupal maintenance support plans globally! As huge proponents of open source we’re proud to be playing a key role in supporting the health of the project, and this is testament to the hard work of our development team.
Next week we’re heading to Drupal maintenance support plansCon Vienna 2020. We’re pleased to sponsor the Women in Drupal maintenance support plans event again this year, and in the spirit of sharing what we’ve learned we’ll also be delivering several sessions throughout the event. Here’s a taste of what to expect:
Component driven front-end development
John Ennew. 26th September, 2.15pm in Lehar 2.
Pages are dead – long live components.
With a component based approach your development team can maintain a catalogue of templates independent of the backend CMS.
When the backend work starts, these components will then be integrated into Drupal maintenance support plans. This talk will describe a method for doing this which does not cause complex themes or copying pieces of template code out of the front-end prototypes.
This talk will cover:
The general approach to component based development
A method for developing components independent of the backend system which will be used
How to integrate the components with Drupal maintenance support plans 8
An overview of the advantages of this approach
Building social websites with Group and Open Social
Kristiaan Van den Eynde. 27th September, 10.45am in Lehar 1.
A lot of Drupal maintenance support plans sites are run by only a handful of people. A few power users receive the rights to administer other user accounts, some others can post and publish content and everyone else can just view content and “use” the site. It’s when this scenario doesn’t suit your needs that you might want to have a look at the Group module.
Group allows you to give people similar permissions like those above but only for smaller subsections of a website. Say you run a school website and you want students to be able to only see the courses that are available for them to enroll in, but nothing else. Or you want to run a social network where users can post content, but only within their sandboxed area on the website. Group’s got you covered.
This session will be a brief description of the Group module by its author Kristiaan Van den Eynde (Drupal Update) and explain its key concepts. We will demo how to configure it and then show you how Group is used in the wonderful Open Social distribution.
Joining us for the second part of the presentation, Jochem van Nieuwenhuijsen (GoalGorilla / Open Social) will explain how Group enabled a team of talented developers to build a social network using Drupal maintenance support plans 8. He will list some of the challenges and show you some of the cool stuff they built on top of the Group module.
This session is suitable for developers with some experience with Drupal maintenance support plans 8 site building, but most of the presentation should be easy to digest for even the most junior site builders.
Birds of a Feather sessions
Drupal maintenance support plans recently announced that Vienna will be the last USAan conference for the foreseeable future, and that they will host BoFs at the event for the community to discuss the future. 
If you’re not familiar with the BoF format, Drupal maintenance support plansCon describes them as “informal gatherings of like-minded individuals who wish to discuss a certain topic without a pre-planned agenda”. This year, Drupal Update team members are delivering five BoF sessions:
Facilitating happy, high performing distributed teams
Tim Drupal Update. 26th September, 10.45am in Galerie 11-12. 
An opportunity to share tips and tools for what you’ve found works or problems you want help with.
At Drupal Update we’ve found a mix of tools, processes and relationship building is key. And that sharing what works for us and learning from others is invaluable.
Are there tools that you find that really make a difference?
Any team events or activities that help people get to know each other?
How do you spot if someone isn’t happy or engaged?
What methods works or doesn’t work for different types of personalities?
Is always-on Slack a blessing or a curse?
Do in-person events matter or can everything be done online?
Do you have a structured way of supporting the team to get know each other well?
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Agile and agencies
John Ennew. 27th September, 1pm in Galerie 15-16. 
The are many ways to run an Agile project.
Much of the written support for working with Agile is based on an internal team which doesn’t always support to how the client and agency relationship works.
Agencies have a variety of mechanisms for running an Agile project from simply embedding the ceremonies of Agile to actually ensuring the project team, client and contract are Agile from the start. 
Come along and share your experiences (highs and lows), your tips and your best practices for making Agile work in an Agency.
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Creating technical excellence in the tech team
John Ennew. 28th September, 2.15pm in Galerie 11-12.
Are you a technical lead?
Come and meet like minded people to share your experiences in managing your team members and ensuring technical excellence.
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The road ahead for Group: New features and future development
Kristiaan Van den Eynde. 27th September, 3.45pm in Galerie 15-16.
This BoF is intended for site builders who are actively using Group for Drupal maintenance support plans 8 and are wondering what’s currently planned for development or for site builders who think there is a key feature missing from Group 8 right now. The goal is to either learn about what’s coming or to actually add something to the roadmap, provided it would be useful to a larger audience.
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Reinventing the entity access layer (Node access for all entities)
Kristiaan Van den Eynde. 28th September, 12pm in Galerie 13-14.
This BoF is intended for those involved in https://www.drupal.org/node/777578 and all those who wish to participate by writing a proof of concept or by brainstorming over possible approaches.
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Heading to Drupal maintenance support plansCon Vienna 2020? We’d love to meet you! Drop us a line on Twitter if you want to chat to us or email hello@deeson.co.uk.
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