Category: Events

Drupalcon Dublin kicked off on September 26th in Dublin, Ireland, and hosted an incredible lineup of speakers and members from the Drupal community.

Upwards of 1,700 drupalists attended Drupalcon Dublin, which featured tracks ranging from DevOps, Coding and Development, as well as sessions that addressed being a human in a fast-paced, technology-driven world.

In addition to the great session lineup, attendees enjoyed the “Birds of a Feather” sessions, (better known as “BoF’s”) which brought together top minds in the community to discuss various aspects of the industry. The BoF speakers shared tips, ideas and recommendations to better improve the overall experience for agencies, individuals, and product owners.

The city of Dublin did not disappoint, offering breathtaking scenery, warm hospitality and experiences that will be remembered for a lifetime.

The Driesnote offered a positive outlook on the future of the Drupal project, highlighting examples of how Drupal has been deployed for a variety of applications outside of the traditional usage of building websites.

Session Recap

Ride the Whale! Docker for Drupalists

Socketwench demonstrated how Docker can provide a unique approach for hosting environments, both for development and production applications. A key advantage of using Docker, is its minimal ramp up time for building development environments, which can be shared amongst project developers for rapid deployment of development environments. Session Recording

Stream Your Way to Success: Bigpipe, Refreshless, ESI, Ajax, and more

Fabianx reviewed practical usages for Bigpipe, Refreshless, and other performance enhancers for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.  Bigpipe, in conjunction with JavaScript, will assist in getting your hosting stack ready for streaming, ultimately improving the overall user experience. Session Recording

Launching Online Stores with Commerce 2.x on Drupal 8

Drupal Commerce 2.x is ready for prime time! Ryan Szrama and Matt Glaman presented the history of Drupal Commerce, as well as the updated architecture and features of Drupal Commerce 2.x on Drupal 8.  Drupal Commerce 2.x delivers many strengths, however, the greatest advantage is how well it integrates with third party systems and external API’s. Session Recording

Burnout at Scale

Alina Mackenzie presented an approach for identifying, understanding, and preventing burnout within an organization. Burnout is a multidimensional issue of which anyone is susceptible to – identification of why burnout occurs in the workplace is only the beginning.  I would strongly recommend this presentation for anyone involved with a digital agency. Session Recording

Conclusion

Drupalcon is a fantastic event that everyone involved with the Drupal Community should strive to attend. In addition to learning about the most recent advancements to the Drupal Platform, you will also get full exposure to the greatest aspect of Drupal – its diverse and vibrant community.

WordCamp Milwaukee is an awesome WordCamp, and not just because they have a bacon bar (although that is legendary)! With somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 attendees, there were three tracks that catered to folks at various levels of experience and interest. One unique feature this year was an Immersion track on Sunday where people got a complete walkthrough of custom theming a WordPress site.

Milwaukee is a sleeper of a city – it’s on no one’s radar, but it’s amazing! There are great transportation options, an inviting riverfront and beach, lots of different eating / dining / shopping establishments, a variety of museums and concerts, and festivals! There are always festivals going on in Milwaukee. They’re hard to avoid, and why would you want to?

Along with many other wonderful companies that are involved in the WordPress community, our friends at Pantheon were one of the sponsors of WCMKE. It was good to see them there showing off the various features of their hosting service.

There are hundreds of WordCamps every year, but WordCamp Milwaukee stands out for it’s great program and location, but most importantly, it’s the people who make it awesome!

Session Recap and Slides

CSS Sanity with Sass and the Inverted Triangle Method

My presentation provided a quick introduction to Sass and a more thorough walk-through of the Inverted Triangle Method of organizing Sass (or CSS) code as part of the Advanced track.

You always start with the best of intentions. The parent/starter theme that you begin you custom site with has a beautifully laid out style.css file. You do your best to keep everything organized and logical, but in the throes of deadlines and CSS frustrations, things get ugly. Maybe you’ve heard of Sass and don’t know how to begin. Maybe you’ve used Sass and aren’t quite seeing the light yet. This presentation shows you how to begin with Sass and how to use the Inverted Triangle way of organizing Sass to help you keep your sanity throughout the entire project.

You can view the slidedeck now and the presentation should eventually be posted to WordPress.tv

What a blast! We’re back from a great week at DrupalCon 2016 in New Orleans. We were thrilled to participate in this conference in so many ways – presenting sessions, attending workshops, exhibiting on the show floor and sponsoring the conference. As a web development firm that specializes in Drupal, and is distributed around the country, it’s great to connect in person with others in the Drupal community, but also with our own team members. We managed to fit in some time to explore what NOLA had to offer – stopping at Redfish restaurant, BB King’s House of Blues, and the Palace Cafe.

Session Recap

Becoming a TPM

Co-hosted with Jessi Fischer from Pantheon and Kanopi’s own CEO Anne Stefanyk broke down the do’s and don’ts of Technical Project Management (TPM). Originally titled “SuperHero Cat Herding”, attendees learned the difference between traditional project managers and technical project managers, as well traits that make up a successful TPM, tips and tricks and the ultimate TPM toolbelt – all within a pretty cool cat-themed deck. Listen to the session – or review the slidedeck.

We loved all the positive feedback we received on our presentation. Check out this little ‘review’ of our session from Acro Media.

---

Live The Dream, Work Remote: Building a Successful Distributed Drupal Shop

It was standing room only for Anne’s session on how to successfully create and run a distributed Drupal shop. As this new style of working virtual/distributed becomes increasingly popular, attendees learned how to recruit and retain the right talent, key communication tools and processes, as well as, how to successfully work with clients when team members are in different time zones. Listen to the session (our Q+A session went overtime and we got kicked out of the room) – or review the slide deck.

---

“Must be Intuitive and Easy to Use”: How to Solidify Vague Requirements and Establish Unknown User Needs

Our resident UX expert Vanessa presented on a key topic most designers/developers/PMs have encountered: how to solidify vague requirements from clients and turn them into user needs. Another full session – attendees walked away with tips for the next project to better identify project objectives and limitations, identify critical success factors, and defining project deliverables. Listen to the session.

---

Our Giveaway Winners

Being a distributed team, we rely on good Wi-Fi to help us work when and where inspiration hits – so we wanted to give folks at DrupalCon a chance to experience it too with Wi-Fi USB sticks and our Airbnb gift card grand prize! Our contest had such positive feedback – and lots of entries. Thank you to everyone who entered our contest and congrats to ALL of our Winners

Airbnb Grand Prize Winner:
Johanna Brams

Wi-Fi USB Winners:
Adam Kapp | Mary-Kate Carr | Joseph White | Chris Ospring | Ryne Emory | Brandon Thompson

A big THANK YOU to everyone who attended, sponsored and presented at the Conference. Your inspiration, excitement, innovation and overall commitment to the community is what makes working in Drupal so amazing. And of course – a shout out to the conference organizers – ‘cause without you, this conference would not be possible.

The last two weeks have been very busy for the Kanopi crew as we are in conference season. On the heels of participating in the Nonprofit Technology Conference, we headed over to Palo Alto this past weekend as a sponsor of Stanford Drupal Camp to host a couple of sessions.

Like Legos, developers are the key to building solution-based, effective websites. As the owner of a web development firm in charge of managing developers who are distributed around the country, I love sharing the ways that we work to keep our developers happy and inspired while generating the highest quality work for our clients.  You can find my presentation slides here.

Kanopi’s own Darius Garza, one of our Designers co-presented a session: ‘Contracting & Copyright Licensing for Drupalistas, Agencies & Solopreneurs’. Attended by a fun, small intimate crowd, the session explored how to navigate through common issues that affect many in the creative industry – contracts and copyrights! Whether you are a business or a sole proprietor, if you have clients, you have contracts. Attendees learned contracting basics and the key to developing a contract with their own terms instead of using the clients, as well as, information regarding intellectual property (IP). As web professionals, we are always either using IP, creating IP, or doing both simultaneously by using pre-existing IP to create new IP. “Websites are like onions: it is a container for various layers of intellectual property.”

Find more great quotes and useful information in his presentation.

Higher Education institutions like Stanford were some of the earliest adopters of Drupal so it’s always great to attend these sessions and share knowledge. Thanks to everyone who attended our sessions at #sudrupalcamp and a big shout out to the conference planners of Stanford Drupal Camp – it was a great conference to attend!

Next up – we will be sponsoring, attending and exhibiting at DrupalConNOLA!

The booth materials are packed and me and my knee scooter are home after four jam-packed days at last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC 2016) in San Jose. I must say, I was unsure about how I would get through the conference with my broken ankle but as many of you can attest, I covered a lot of ground and got to connect with a lot of great people in spite of my injury!

This was our second year participating in NTC and our first year as a booth exhibitor. It was great to be part of this conference which now in its 16th year, provides a unique platform for those of us in the technology sector to connect with nonprofits from around the country to share, learn and discuss ways that technology can be harnessed for good – whether to engage volunteers, secure donors or create operational efficiencies, the ever-changing technology landscape provides infinite opportunities for advancing the mission of organizations large and small. Thank you to the conference planners and all the attendees for making this years #16NTC an amazing conference!

This year, over 2000 people gathered over the four days that included a day focusing just on Drupal, WordPress and Salesforce, presentations covering  everything from IT to email marketing to CRM administration and of course, the networking parties in downtown San Jose.

Drupal Day + WordPress Day = LEARNING

I really enjoyed attending the Drupal Day sessions as a presenter and as participant. My session’s focus was Website Musts: How to Define Everything That Your Website Needs to Do. We hope our user focused approach to identifying website features is helpful – you can Review and share our slide deck! . We were also glad to have one of our nonprofit clients, The Center for Digital Archeology provide a case study on Mukurtu – a free, mobile, and open source platform built with indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage.

Deborah Pappalau, one of our project managers and communications strategist found Crafting Your Nonprofit Story In A Digital World by Ben Wong from Blackbaud really compelling- this approach takes a unique spin on how to craft your nonprofit story where the problem or issue that the organization is fighting against is the antagonist and how to make your audience the hero.

Attendees + Booth = CONNECTIONS

I was thrilled to have our Executive Assistant, Darlyne Dolap and our Marketing Coordinator, Lynette Sawyer  manage our booth presence. Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth to say hello and to discuss how our team can help nonprofits with their online presence. Our highlight was connecting with organizations who need support for their website, as well as, giving away free site audits to those who are seeking strong data to present to their board of directors as a business case to update their websites. Plus – seems our chocolates, stickers and t-shirts were a hit!

Thanks for seeing us at NTC 2016! We look forward to staying in touch with everyone we met and being apart of #17NTC in Washington D.C. next year. Learn more about how Kanopi can help nonprofits by contacting us today.

#KanopiForGood

As a frequent sponsor of Drupal conferences and events, we feel strongly about personal and professional development and are glad to see our team members take advantage of these opportunities to build their own skillset and to share their newly acquired knowledge with the rest of the Kanopi team.

This past weekend, we were happy to be one of the sponsors of Florida DrupalCamp and to have two of our team members, Kim Murphy, a Drupal designer and themer and Andy Klepner, Drupal and WordPress engineer represent Kanopi. Not only did they finally get to meet each other in person, which is always a treat since we are a remote shop, they attended some very informative and engaging sessions.

This year’s Florida DrupalCamp was attended by an estimated 200 front-end themers, back end developers and drupal engineers – about 100 more than expected. The sessions were diverse in terms of topic and skill level – but all commonly focused on working with Drupal 8.

For those who were not able to make it, a wrap up of some of our favorite sessions:

May the GIT Force Be With You – How to become a jedi master of GitHUB was one of Kim’s favorite sessions, “As someone who uses GITHub, I know as much as I need to know to work with my team, but it was great to learn more about this tool and advanced uses of it! I cannot wait to start using it more!”

Faster and Smarter Drupal 8 Development – With a resounding “WOW” from our team, this session discussed a different (and surprisingly straightforward) approach to building sites in Drupal faster using modern techniques and tools. Traditionally when building a website, the process is to build the site then QA test, whereas a different (and potentially time-saving) approach is to test frequently throughout the entire build process. There were many helpful tools and tips provided in this session, including:

• webpagetest.org – described as the “bread and butter” of site testing, it provides a more overall comprehensive report over the other site testing tool google insights (which some say is a bit ‘google-opinionated’ in their results).
• “A-Syncing” – the technique that allows javascript to load concurrently with your site’s code to improve the speed of your site. No more waiting for javascript to load before the rest of your website’s elements load.
• Pic Module/Elements – Responsive images can cause a lot of issues rendering on both desktop and mobile, resulting in slower site speed. Using the picture element within the core of Drupal 8 – or the pic module in Drupal 7 – will help render your responsive images quicker and improve your site’s speed.

Cat Gifs. Also Front End Development – As intriguing as the title is, so was the session! The session explored the workflow process of front end development and how to standardize processes using Gulp, Grunt and Suzy (oh my)! Our key takeaway was to use Gulp over Grunt as it is much faster. And a shout out to how creative this topic and session was presented.

Rapid Prototyping with Kalatastic – This was another of Kim’s favorite sessions. It explored a design + content first approach to prototyping to create clean, beautiful sites that users enjoy and clients can easily collaborate on and understand. Our key takeaway was a new process to implement for prototyping: creating the visual design, developing a static html prototype with javascript and css, obtaining the client’s approval, then passing to development to build the site around the prototype. Rather than the traditional workflow of creating the visual design, passing off to a developer to build out the content types and site, then passing back to a designer to theme.

Debugging, Profiling and rocking out with Browser-Based Developer Tools – A favorite of developer Andy, this session “blew his mind” on using the Chrome Based “Inspector” tool for modern front-end development. The session explored the ways to use Inspector for running testing and showcased all the functionality including the timeline and looking at your site’s load time and code that could be causing the slow speed. Our key takeaway was a super useful tool within inspector regarding CSS code.

Have you ever needed to look at a site’s or module’s CSS code and when using Inspect, it displays in one long line of code?

Click on the { } on the bottom of the frame and the CSS code properly formats to make viewing and/or editing easier.

‘Mic Drop.’

So that’s it for us this time. The conference season is in full swing. Look for us at the upcoming NTEN Conference in San Jose, Drupal Camp Stanford and DrupalCon NOLA among others.

What a great event and we finally have all the sand out of our shoes! Reflecting on our time at SANDCamp last weekend we really enjoyed meeting new people in the Drupal community and getting to learn about Drupal in beautiful San Diego. Kanopi represented with two of its own – Darius Garza, one of our Designers and Jason Savino, our Senior Drupal Engineer – both of whom conducted a training and a session. They also got to attend the camp and share what they learned with the rest of the Kanopi team.

It is always great to attend a conference where sessions are full, people are engaged and everyone is excited about development. The main buzz for this year’s camp: moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. There was also a lot of interest in JavaScript and headless drupal. This year’s conference seemed to focus more on the technical development, coding, and programming.

We want to thank everyone who attended Kanopi’s sessions at SANDCamp. The Intro to Backdrop CMS, in collaboration with Backdrop CMS, was well attended. We really enjoyed the interest and engagement – as well as the curious nature of our session participants. Our last session – Themer Friendly Module Development – had a good turn out as well (given people were excited to get the party started).

There were a lot of great sessions but in particular, we found Pantheon’s half day drupal development session very informative. Starting out pretty introductory and informational, it jumped right into the technical backend quickly. It provided valuable insight and knowledge in how to use Pantheon for yourself or your clients, and successfully manage version control, develop environments, understand how to use their high-performance tools, as well as a lot of other tips and tricks for using the platform to its fullest.

All in all, it was a fun and productive conference. The vibe was great and we loved presenting to an amazing crowd. Thanks to all for making it such a great experience and look forward to seeing everyone again next year!

Kanopi Studios is excited to attend SANDcamp 2016 in San Diego! This year, two of our Kanopi team members will be presenting at this great event that brings together Drupal experts and San Diego’s best and brightest talent for four days of learning, sharing, training and teaching! Join one or all of us at our seminars during your time at SANDCamp.

Themer Friendly Module Development
Saturday, February 27th – 5:00pm to 5:40pm
Room: G7
#KanopiModDev

Join Jason Savino, Senior Drupal Engineer at Kanopi Studios as he outlines how to help module developers output code that themers can use without losing the modules integrity!

How many times have you sat down to theme a site only to find that a custom or contrib module is outputting data that doesn’t work with the comps. Unordered lists that need to be divs, divs that need to be spans or tables that need to be anything but a table! Modules that have un-themable HTML as output have caused hours of unneeded stress that could have been avoided.

The session will include:

• Demoing a fully functional sample module with two different issues
• Discussing rational to change each issue
• Walk through the code modifications for each issue
• This session is perfect for all front-end and back-end developers!

About Jason: Jason Savino is an experienced Drupal front-end developer with over a decade of experience in web development including digital graphics and content management systems. He has strong problem-solving and innovating skills and has a passion for standards-based design and accessibility, as well as user-centric design.

Learn more Here: https://www.sandcamp.org/session/themer-friendly-module-development

Intro to Backdrop CMS (Full Day)
Thursday, February 25, 2016 – 9:30am
Room F9
#KanopiBackdropCMS

Co-Led by our own Darius Garza – immerse yourself in this full day training session where you will be introduced the basics of creating and administering a website with Backdrop CMS. Full itinerary and information regarding the pre-requisite here: https://www.sandcamp.org/backdrop-intro-backdrop-cms-full-day

Jen Lampton, Founder of Backdrop CMS, is our co-leader for the full day training. Backdrop CMS is a fork to Drupal – it is robust CMS for smaller companies, nonprofits and others who need a comprehensive website – but have a limited budget. (PS – Congrats to Backdrop CMS for the recent one year anniversary!)

About Darius: Darius Garza is a Designer at Kanopi Studios. He translates client goals, aspirations and UX insight into a visual reality. During his years at a large Drupal design agency he has created website and visual identities for many high profile clients. He is also the creative lead for the Bay Area Drupal Camp, which Kanopi is a large supporter of in terms of sponsorship and time donation.

Planning to attend one of Kanopi’s sessions at SANDcamp 2016? – tweet us @kanopi_studios or post a comment on our Facebook Page.

Sometimes it can be hard to commit to attending a conference after a long work week, particularly when you have kids, but my first time at the 8th annual WordCamp Miami this past weekend was really worthwhile  – I got to delve deep on several WordPress topics, made some great connections with other developers and best of all, still had quality time with the kiddos.

For those coming in from out of town, the three-day event provided more than just an escape from the cold.

• Speakers from all over the country provided a wealth of informative talks.  I really enjoyed the Intro to AngularJS – Josh Pollock’s enthusiasm about Angular templates and how to relate to PHP made it easier for me to understand.
• Another session that I found very helpful was the Advanced Topics of Javascript – Nizar Khalife Iglesias took some really hard subjects and showed us how to apply to real world applications.
• One of the most important classes I took was called, Beyond the Basics: “Building Security Into Your Development Projects“ showing easy ways that holes are left in code that can easily get fixed for a site’s overall security.
• I also got a chance to sit down specifically with the WooCommerce people and get in deep with some arcane functionality.

This year, WordCamp Miami also hosted a Kids Workshop. This Kids panel was a blast – my kids and I got to work together on a blog, they did an arts/crafts/STEM class in the afternoon where they played games that worked on the understanding of technical directions and they got involved in doing basic kids coding. I think they might finally understand what it is I do for a living. They might even go into the family business!

I would have enjoyed some longer sessions because many were less than 45 minutes which may be due to the large number of speakers present.

And, of course, I got to see old friends and made a lot of new ones. This was my first year, but it won’t be my last. Not only will I be going again, I am looking forward to connecting with other WordPress developers on an on-going basis. Stay tuned!