Like last year I’m keeping an extremely rough setup of notes from Drupal maintenance support plansCon as a repository of things I’m picking up and tracking of sessions that looked like they would be interested but that I couldn’t attend because I was in another session. I’ll clean then up a bit and add to them over time.
Thank you to everyone who is currently working really hard to make the event a success.
If you are kicking around con and want to meet up, contact me through here, Drupal maintenance support plans.org, or Drupal maintenance support plans Slack.
Monday I attended the Community Summit, and while I had lots of great discussions, I didn’t take a lot of notes. The biggest two things I noted were that Western New York DUG is doing interesting stuff with online meetings that might be worth checking out and emulating for the SC DUG. And that Mid-Camp keeps a list of all the various channels that have videos of Drupal maintenance support plans Camp sessions.
DriesNote:
Roadmap:
The current roadmap looks pretty cool, assuming everything comes together as well as we all hope it will:
Announcing the new #Drupal maintenance support plans8 Roadmap revealed by @Dries during today’s #DriesNote in #Drupal maintenance support plansCon Nashville https://t.co/wKCQfvcbAr pic.twitter.com/mK5s4afe71
— Drupal maintenance support plansCon Nashville (@Drupal maintenance support plansConNA) April 10, 2020
Dries showed off some great stuff from the new demo site called Umami. Umami has been committed for 8.6, and we might be able to see it later in 8.5
Small correction: Umami demo is *already* in #Drupal maintenance support plans 8.6 and we are hoping to even expose it in a later release of 8.5! #Drupal maintenance support plansCon #driesnote
— webcsillag (@webchick) April 10, 2020
JS modernization and a new admin interface design are on their way, media library is part of that, but is likely a year out from being ready for prime-time.
Webchick summed this section of the talk nicely:
So rad to see the Out-of-the-Box and Layout initiatives being shown off together. Feels like #drupal 8 is really coming together for site builders and content authors! #driesnote #drupalcon
— webcsillag (@webchick) April 10, 2020
We are very over due for the needs of content creators, so it’s great to see meaningful headway on some of these processes.
Dries then moved on to start talking about values. It’s something he’s still not clearly fully comfortable doing, but it was good to see him try. The first public version of his attempt to define a set of values is up.
My read is that its well intended and has some ground to cover is it gets revised. I haven’t done a deep dive into its details yet, nor the response, but early reviews are mixed.
Frankly that Values statement leaves me a little cold. “Treating others with dignity and respect” !== “Creating a safe and inclusive community” #Driesnote #drupalcon
— Heather Rodriguez (@hrodrig) April 10, 2020
Although there was much less discussion today in hallways and informal chatting than I’d expected to here.
And there is definitely some ground to cover on issues that got us here in the first place:
Tech conf presenters who are white dudes, with slides of only images of white dudes, quotes only from white dudes
as a service
— Johanna Bates @ Drupal maintenance support plansCon (@hanabel) April 10, 2020
(That’s not related to the DriesNote directly, something she ran into at later session but was on topic of my comments)
JavaScript and Accessibility: Don’t Blame the Language
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/javascript-and-accessibility-dont-blame-language
This was a really good session on accessibility with both a real world set of examples and realistic discussions of what’s hard and what happens when things pass tests but don’t get tested by humans.
Major take aways:
Modern tools support JS and it no longer gets in the way of accessibility. WCAG 1.0 said this was a problem 20 years ago, but that’s not the current best practice.
There are constraints to the work because of accessibility, but it they don’t have.
“There are times that I go to use an interactive calendar on the web and all I hear is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and so on to 30 or 31…with no indication that these are dates…just a mass of numbers in the middle of the page.”
We used to test sites by disabling CSS/JS. Now it makes more sense to try to navigate the site with a keyboard and see what happens. Remember that just because something is possible it doesn’t mean it’s obvious or good. This doesn’t get you to a great site, but allows you to pick off errors before someone finds them for you later.
When you tab to things, the visual affordances some designers hate can be put back in as a compromise for people using accessibility tools.
I need to spend more time with the iPhone voice over tool so I can test things better.
Things I didn’t go to in this window:
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/making-inclusion-happen-through-mentoring
https://events
.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/build-banging-sites-bpm-bricks-paragraphs-and-modifiers
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/big-changes-small-agencies
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/managing-your-most-important-resource-you
UX for Admin:
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/modernize-d8-admin-ux-and-accessibility-material-admin-theme
This was a really interesting session on the Material Admin theme, and what’s been needed to make it work. It’s not perfect, and may or may not be ready for prime-time, but it looks like a great idea and show what we can do to make the admin much better.
Related projects:
https://www.drupal.org/project/material_admin
https://www.drupal.org/project/material_admin_support
https://www.drupal.org/project/type_style
Major take aways:
We’re behind, some of fixing that is easy, some of fixing that is hard.
When you’re UX is bad, people perceive things to be slow even if they aren’t. People think that material theme is faster even though it is demonstrably not.
Growth and survival of the project require us to have a better admin.
He’s trying to make sure add-ons for the theme/module are pretty standalone and just work. But theme’s can’t require modules which is silly.
Contenta uses Material by default on front and back because it provides decoupling well.
Skipped in this window:
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/take-images-to-next-level-drupal-8
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/web-accessibility-higher-education (Canceled )
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/drupal-core-auto-update-architecture
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/pdfs-drupal (overcrowded)
Salesforce BOF:
This BOF was a chance for Cornell to show off some great stuff they have been doing with Message Agency. They have done some cool stuff that shows the power for D8 and a good Salesforce integration.
@Cornell in the house at #Drupal maintenance support plansConNA #Drupal maintenance support planscon2020 talking CRM (salesforce) & CMS integrations and best practices using both and interconnecting them at key points. pic.twitter.com/sH5nW9c73R
— Patrick Burns (@digitalburns) April 10, 2020
It should go without saying, but it needs saying too much:
A Salesforce is a CRM. Drupal maintenance support plans is a CMS.
Use your tools for what they are best at.
The content in Drupal maintenance support plans, actions recorded back into Salesforce.
Lessons:
1) Know strengths of each tool
2) Understand user needs
3) Determine how you will use each tool
4) Get the details right: SSO, Data Mapping, etc.
Drupal maintenance support plans is much better at providing accessibility, including Form Assembly which is hard. The SF eco-system is mixed on the whole.
One option for multiple databases is https://www.snaplogic.com/ (apparently it is “capital intensive”).
So you have a Code of Conduct… now what?
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/so-you-have-code-conduct-now-what
This was a mini session that is worth watching if you’re unsure about the importance and value of having a code of conduct. The hope had been to have a discussion about the importance of Drupal maintenance support plans’s CoC, but everyone who attended largely agreed about the broad strokes of the major issues that have been discussed lately in the community. We ended up talking more about how to broaden the discussion than about the CoC itself.
Skipped:
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/keeping-kittens-safe-while-altering-drupal-core
Handling a Big Year: ACLU.org in 2020
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/handling-big-year-acluorg-2020
This session was an interesting look at the impact on ACLU’s D6 (yes that’s right) advocacy site running on Pantheon.
Moved to Pantheon in 2013. And that move dealt with limits of their old hosting solution. Unfortunately some of my old-timey knowledge of why that had that solution was so old they couldn’t tell me much about how they had managed to make that move.
“Crazy things happen all the time”
After the their ED made a Rachel Maddow appearance on 11/16/16 they saw an 85x traffic spike. : was called in to help sort out what happened.
Traffic spiked to just over 500 requests per minute during the interview.
They found it was database bound, which was very common on D6, but still something they see frequently.
Found queries with 3 table join with no indexes on the base table. Able to go from 200,000 rows being scanned, down to 76. They were responding in real-time in crisis response mode.
After the wave passed, they called Pantheon to help build out environments for testing using multi-dev.
During the spikes that followed for the first travel ban, which were even larger they worked to reroute errors to Fastly, which served a PayPal fundraising link: at least the donations kept coming but that wasn’t good enough.
They needed a botnet to replicate the traffic. : used: Locust to create load tests, SaltStack to organize the bots, and EC2 to be the bots. They were failing at ~600 requests per minute and they were able to get to ~5,000 requests per minute. At that point the payment gateways were also starting to buckle, which isn’t a thing most people see.
The final wave they discussed came after the Net Neutrality lose, which peaked around 1,900 form submissions/min.
ACLU needed more logging, but didn’t want them logging personal information. Turned out the payment gateway’s CDN was detecting a DDOS and blocking them. See curl_log and curl_loadbalance. They also intentionally shift load from MySQL to Redis and PHP(?!?) because they knew Pantheon could scale that are far and as fast as needed to handle the waves, but MySQL was a limiting factor.
Skipped:
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/automate-your-automation
https://events.drupal.org/nashville2020/sessions/principles-content-layout
There is plenty left to come.
Source: New feed
