DrupalSouth 2021

Drupal project founder, Dries Buytaert, discusses the initiatives towards the release of Drupal 10.

Presented by Salsa Digital

Speaker: Rikki Bochow

Speaker: Vladimir Roudakov

Speaker: Alex Matthews

Speakers: Kris Kroucher, Dave Ganley

Speaker: Murray Woodman

Speaker: Stuart Clark

Speaker: Marji Cermak

Speaker: Ian Laslett

Speaker: Danielle Shuffler

Speaker: Michael Strelan

Shortly after DrupalSouth in November, Drupal 8 will be end of life. For those still on Drupal 7, it might seem like the 'new kid on the block', but actually Drupal 8 is already 6 years old. In fact, Drupal 9 is fast approaching its 2nd birthday. With Drupal 7 and 8 we became accustomed to long major release cycles for Drupal core, but this wasn't always the case. With this in mind we look to our next major release, Drupal 10, which will be released next year, around two years after Drupal 9. So why are the major release cycles getting shorter? Is this something we can expect to continue? What's driving these shorter cycles? These questions and more will be addressed in this session, as well as a look to what we can expect to see in Drupal 10... and beyond!

Geoscience Australia (GA) has commissioned the development of a consolidated Drupal-based platform that aims to shape the future of the Australian government's digital presence. The pilot site for Digital Earth Australia launched in August 2021 with more scheduled in the coming months.

We'll cover the challenges with Geoscience Australia's legacy systems as well as its program, project, and platform goals to guide the advanced framework including consolidation, consistency, and lower cost of ownership.

Geoscience Australia's new decoupled platform leverages a Vue.js design system, GovCMS Drupal 9 CMS hosting, NuxtJS and GitHub Actions middleware, Algolia search, and QuantCDN static asset hosting. We'll go through the tech stack and how each piece fits into the full architecture to create a flexible, resilient, scalable, secure, and performant platform for GA's modern digital presence.

Kristen and Stuart from Salsa Digital will discuss the project's challenges and wins as well as how this leading-edge platform aims to impact the Australian government's digital future.

Speaker: Stuart Rowlands

Sparks have built a number of decoupled sites using our Sector distribution and Gatsby. This includes fully and partially decoupled. Sector was designed as a sitebuilder-first distro with a lot of control in config for admin users. Publishing decoupled to a JS frontend has a different set of constraints and challenges for formatting of published content, as well as some key strengths. Sparks will showcase learnings from the last 3 years publishing business critical sites using this toolset.
Speakers: Marco Guidetti, Gareth Poole

In order to more easily explain caching, and gather the information you need to know in one place, I wrote a tool which analyses any URL, and is able to score the site in terms of how well it is configured for caching. The intent is to promote better caching practices, and help educate people on the HTTP headers that matter.

Covered in the talk:
* Headers that impact caching
* What are CDNs, and how do you best use them
* How to test your caching is working
* How the tool can help explain the current caching setup, and how to optimise it
* Integration with Drupal, and how Drupal best practices can be instilled

The gamification layer will allow you to test your site against other sites, to see how well you stack up.

Speaker: Sean Hamlin

Speakers: Nick Schuch, Hasitha Guruge, Steve Coochin (DeveloperSteve), Chris Burgess

It’s important that content meets accessibility standards, however many people don't know what guidelines to follow. A few simple tips will help anyone writing content meet accessibility standards (WCAG) and ensure content is accessible for everyone. This session will outline content accessibility best practices including page titles, text links, headings, and making content easy to understand.
Speakers: Phillipa Martin, Danielle Sheffler

Let's write a decoupled application that retrieves content from Drupal with live refresh using React Query and JSON:API.
Speaker: Jack Taranto

Speakers: Sohal Khatwani, Nicole Ritchie, Janna Malikova, Dave Sparks, Owen Lansbury

Salsa Digital is an open source company made of digital engineers from across the globe delivering technology and innovation to open governments.

Amazee.io: The best form of defence for a Drupal site is to know your enemy, not hide from them. Hear about some of the tools and techniques that amazee.io use to effectively detect, mitigate and block malicious traffic.

PreviousNext - Supporting Australian Universities with Drupal: PreviousNext is Australia’s most experienced Drupal agency with a long history of clients in the Higher Education sector. Our clients include the University of Technology Sydney, Charles Darwin University, the University of Adelaide, the University of Queensland, Bond University and Australian National University.

During this showcase, I’ll cover common problems faced in this sector and solutions that PreviousNext has implemented with Drupal to address these issues. Speaker: Griffyn Heels

Skpr - Decoupled Applications on Skpr: Deploying Decoupled applications onto cloud hosting platforms can be difficult because of how many moving components are involved eg. Frontend Application(s), Content API etc

In this showcase, Nick Schuch (Lead Architect) will demonstrate how the Skpr hosting platform simplifies the deployment and orchestration of complex decoupled applications.

This showcase is intended for all skill levels and is intended for anyone wanting to learn about decoupled architectures and/or see how it is managed on the Skpr hosting platform. Speaker: Nick Schuch

Acquia - Drupal 7 migrations and Acquia Migrate Accelerate (AMA): Introduction to Acquia Migrate Accelerate, the tool that makes Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 migrations up to 80% faster with an intuitive UI and comprehensive migration set-up built by Drupal experts.
Benefits of a pre-built Drupal migration workspace
Drupal Migration best practices
Low-code experience building for Drupal 9
Migrating content and data from non-Drupal to Drupal 9 using Migrate Re-Platform
Speaker: Josh Waihi

Morpht - Convivial CMS: Murray Woodman, from Morpht, will showcase Convivial CMS, a personalisation focused Drupal distribution. Convivial CMS ships with many personalisation and editor friendly features to make Drupal a first class citizen in the digital ecosystem. The presentation will cover:
- Using context to build a profile
- Integrating with third party systems to enrich the profile
- Personalising and customising content

WCAG2 doesn’t cover mobile accessibility very well, requiring that all content be accessible to a keyboard interface, but it does not require that all content be accessible to a touchscreen user.

WCAG2.1 does include some mobile accessibility requirements, but many think it doesn’t go far enough. Enter the Mobile Site Testing Guidelines, developed by a non-partisan group of accessibility companies. These guidelines are meant to be used with WCAG2 (and WCAG2.1) to ensure that sites are accessible to people with disabilities using mobile and tablet devices.

Speaker: Gian Wild

Just After Midnight: Taking the heat out of your 24x7 Drupal support

We’ll be exploring scenarios when having a team on hand to do 24x7 support matters and how it can help deliver a great experience to your customers.

We’ll also explore best practices in the life of an always-on digital platform:

- Proactive preparation and prevention
- Reactive readiness and resolution
- Great communication, more meaningful insights and feeding continuous improvement

Sector - the Drupal Distribution: Sector is targeted towards Drupal site builders and site owners who are looking for a fully configured Drupal project out of the box.

Simon Hobbs and Nathan ter Bogt talk through the approach to high availability on nsw.gov.au which is a Drupal site in the top 1000 in Alexa rankings globally. It has a remit to provide functionality for hundreds of sites being consolidated onto it and this presents many architectural challenges.

Accenture: How to deliver a basic Drupal site in 2 sprints
Drupal takes very little time to build a complete site from design phase. The power of Drupal is, it can handle 80% of most common business requirements out of the box. This is the walk thru of the Orora project from design to go live in 2 sprints.

Pantheon Autopilot: Pantheon's Autopilot helps teams by automatically detecting, performing, testing and deploying updates for Drupal. Site upkeep can be tedious with constant monitoring, building, maintaining websites, and working cross-functionally to deliver digital experiences for customers. Autopilot relieves you of the continual maintenance work it takes to keep sites updated. Come to this session to see it in action and evaluate whether or not it might help you and your team. All qualified partners and contract customers can start using Autopilot today.