BADCamp 2018 just wrapped up last Saturday. As usual it was a great volunteer organized event that brought together all sorts of folks from the Drupal Community.
Every year Kanopi provides organizational assistance, and this year was no exception. We had Kanopian volunteers working on; writing code for website, organizing fundraising, general operations planning, assisting as room monitors, and working the registration booth.
An event like this doesn’t happen without a lot of work across a lot of different areas and we’re very proud of Kanopi’s contributions.
Personally, Kanopi was able to send me down from Vancouver, Canada to spend time doing a day long training course, as well as doing the regular conference summits and sessions.
The course I chose was “Component-based Theming with Twig” which was really informative. We covered the basics Pattern Lab and then worked on best practice methods to integrate those Pattern Lab tools in to a Drupal theme.
Some of the takeaways:
- The Gesso (https://www.drupal.org/project/gesso) theme is a great starting place for getting Pattern Lab in to your project.
- Make sure you are reusing all your basic html components and make the templates flexible. Resist the urge to simply copy and paste markup into a new template.
- The best way to map Pattern Lab components in Drupal is to use Paragraph types and their display modes.
- To get the most out of Twig template, make sure you are using the module Twig Tweak (https://www.drupal.org/project/twig_tweak)
For the regular conference sessions, the most interest seemed to lie in the possibilities of GatsbyJS (https://www.gatsbyjs.org/). All the developers with whom I spoke are focused on the performance and security perspective, as it can be completely decoupled from Drupal, allowing for fewer security issues. One interesting talk on Gatsby was this one by Kyle Mathews.
Kanopi was also fortunate enough get four sessions selected:
- Jim and Sean talked about upgrading a cleaning franchise site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and the optimisations they worked into the project.
- Jim then discussed the various meta-tag flavours and what types of things to do to entice Google to index your data more thoroughly.
- Kat showed how to get data about user interaction on your site while still respecting a user’s privacy.
- Lastly, Anne covered what types of things to consider when upgrading or rebuilding your Drupal site especially in the context of Drupal end of life dates.
All in all BADCamp 2018 was a great experience. It’s terrific to meet our distributed co-workers as well as see friends from other parts of the Drupal community.
