DrupalCon sessions about Front End

Last time, we gathered together DrupalCon Baltimore sessions about Site Building. Before that, we explored the area of Drupal Showcase, Coding and Development, Project Management and Case Studies. And that was not our last stop. This time, we looked at sessions that were presented in the area of Front End.

Atomic Design in Drupal 8: Isolating frontend workflow with Pattern Lab! by Anthony Simone from Elevated Third

This session reviewed the basic principles of Pattern Lab and atomic design but focused on the practical implementation of Pattern Lab in the next Drupal project.

 

Back to the Basics: Best Practices for Front End Developers by Tessa Kriesel from Pantheon

This session looked at how the developers can do their very best work so that their clients are receiving a top notch website and not just a site filled with the latest and greatest libraries and frameworks.

 

Beyond Screen Readers: Diverse Accessibility Needs in Custom Themes by Erin Marchak from My planet

This session explored some of the under-represented gaps in Drupal 8 accessibility and demonstrated methods for tackling these gaps with user’s custom Drupal 8 themes.

 

Creating Layouts and Landing Pages for Drupal 8 by Suzanne Dergacheva from Evolving Web

In this session, the word was about different techniques for creating layouts in Drupal 8 - from how to configure landing page content using Paragraphs or Panels to implementing a grid system with users theme. So, attendees walked away with some new tips and tricks under their belt.

 

Decoupled Drupal and Angular 2 by Preston So from Acquia

This session went into the undiscovered depths of Angular 2 and dived into TypeScript (including decorators), observables, Angular 2 components and services, and promise-based communication with Drupal 8.

 

Demystifying Rendered Content in Drupal 8 Twig Files by Amy Vaillancourt-Sals from ThinkShout, Inc.

In this session, the author took the crowd through a brief intro into twig, the debugging process of sorting through twig variables using xdebug in PHPStorm, mentioned other helpful debugging tools at disposal, and shared common patterns she found helpful for rendering content in twig files.

 

EmberJS: A Fitting Face for a D8 Backend by Taylor Solomon from Interactive Strategies

In this session, the author delved into what he and his company learned about Ember and how to structure their frontend data layer to take advantage of Drupal's features.

 

JavaScript ES6: The best vanilla you’ve ever tasted by Ryan Hagerty from Chromatic

This session is an introduction to ES6. It reveals how to get started with a compiler and how to solve everyday problems while making the code easier to read and maintain for others and yourself.

 

Pattern Language: Pattern Libraries in the Wild by Mark Llobrera from Bluecadet

This session looked at what Bluecadet has experienced as they shifted their design and development process to create flexible, modular sites. The author discussed tools like PatternLab, Fractal, and how he leveraged Drupal’s View Modes. He also talked about Drupal’s Paragraphs module, Drupal Shortcodes, and how to make complex, flexible, modular systems that are simple to understand and manage for content authors.

 

Pinterest’s Component Based Design: Breaking down silos, saving time, and empowering content editors. by Grant Gaudet and Evan Lovely from Phase2

In this session, attendees learned about Pinterest’s new integrated design approach using Component-based libraries integrated seamlessly into the Drupal 8 platform using Drupal’s flexible Paragraph system.

 

Setting up a Front End Development environment for Drupal 8 by Kristin Bradham from Hook 42

This session walked the attendees through the steps to setup their theme development environment in Drupal 8. Topics included many of the standard things that are needed to do to set up a new theming environment in Drupal 8, so users don't have to work it out themselves!

 

The admin interface for an enduser by Morten Birch from Theme Machine

This session was about showing the design problems that Drupal have inherited over the years by beeing a developer -driven project, and point to a way out of this, so everybody can make Drupal pretty.

 

Web Performance in 2017 by David Porter

This session covered big things to look out for in 2017. Namely, it covered general front-end performance concerns and showcase Drupal 8 projects and techniques for each particular topic area with a few turnkey options ready to go.