Nestled right off Main Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts lies the Ray and Maria Stata Center on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This abstract building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry was the perfect venue to house the longest running, front-end focused Drupal conference in the US, Design 4 Drupal. It demonstrates that the modern and abstract design Cambridge and MIT has seen can work perfectly with the structure needed within.

The Design 4 Drupal conference highlights training sessions and seminars focusing on designing for, and building the “front-end” of websites, or what gets seen and used by end users. This area of focus encompasses graphic design, user experience, accessibility, performance, tooling, and much more.

Like a lot of our Higher-Ed clients, MIT is a user of Drupal, and is proud to offer this space to the Drupal community to learn and share knowledge. I was pleased to be asked to present two sessions at the conference, and even more pleased with the knowledge I was able to take away from attending the event.

Meta and Schema: Defining the Content about your Content

The first session I presented focuses on designing and implementing a metadata strategy for your website. Metadata is the content that describes your content. It is very important in how web pages are found in search engines, and how they are displayed on social network sites.

The presentation is a deep dive into the different specifications for meta tags and Schema.org schemas, how to decide what to markup, and then how to text and validate that you’ve done it correctly.

This session was not recorded due to technical difficulties, but the slides are available at jimbir.ch/meta-schema-drupal

Building a Better Page Builder with Bootstrap Paragraphs

The second session presented reviews the Bootstrap Paragraphs module for Drupal 8 that I developed and how it combines the power of the world’s most popular front end framework, Bootstrap, with Drupal Paragraphs, the powerful module that allows content creators to build layouts and structured pages using content components.

I have been working on this module since I first presented it at the BADCamp 2016 Front-end Summit. The module installs a suite of components that allow content creators to quickly build out pages.

I love giving this presentation because I always get great feedback from people who use the module; who are going to use the module; or who are going to use my methodology to create their own version that fits their specific needs. The module currently has over 25,000 downloads, and has had users from all around the world.

You can watch a recording of the session here.

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The Keynotes

The Building Blocks Of The Indie Web – Jeremy Keith

The conference featured not one, but two great keynotes. On the first day author and developer Jeremy Keith, who was also in town for An Event Apart Boston, presented a session in which he encouraged a return from social media publishing to independent publishing. It was a great reminder that the web was ham radio before it was cable, and can still be so.

Exploring the New Drupal Front-end with JavaScript – Dries Buytaert

The second keynote was given by founder and project lead of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. Dries was the keynote at the very first Design 4 Drupal, so it was a special treat have have him back for the tenth anniversary. His presentation reviewed the history of JavaScript on the web, API-first vs. API-only approaches and gave behind-the-scenes insights into Drupal’s JavaScript modernization initiative.

Design 4 Drupal Sessions

Thanks to Kevin Thull, and the organizers of Design 4 Drupal, most of the presentations were recorded and are available to anyone at Design 4 Drupal’s YouTube channel. There was a broad mix of different types of sessions that covered developers, designers, User Experience (UX), Accessibility (A11Y), and Tools. Below are some highlights of the sessions I went to.

Web Accessibility Tips and Tools – Abby Kingman

Abby gave a session that was near and dear to my heart. We are always learning about how to make our websites more accessible, and Abby’s presentation covered where to find current guidelines and specifications, and then when onto to review tools for testing. There are lots of great links to follow from this one.

This session validated the approach we take at Kanopi to accessibility in design and development. A lot of the tools and testing techniques were all part of our processes, and I look forward to exploring the ones I didn’t know about!

Webform Accessibility – Jacob Rockowitz

Jacob is the current maintainer and a prolific blogger and thought leader in the Drupal-sphere. We penned an article in advance of this presentation where he reviewed his thought process, and recorded his presentation. My favorite takeaway from this presentation was:

“Learning about accessibility can be overwhelming. We don’t have to be accessibility experts. We just need to care about accessibility.”

Kanopi has a long history of both building new and retrofitting existing sites to be WCAG compliant. This presentation showed me that our approach, ongoing learning and iteration have us on the right track.

Variable Fonts and Our New Typography – Jason Pamental

I’m a big fan of Jason’s body of work, from his book, Responsive Typography: Using Type Well on the Web, to his blog, and frequent appearances on the Talking Drupal Podcast.

Jason’s deep knowledge of typography truly shows in this presentation that gives a brief history of type, how it moved from paper to the screen, and how the future of digital typography will be with variable fonts.

I look forward to exploring more about variable fonts with the designers at Kanopi. The design possibilities, and the performance gains make these new tools very attractive.

In this technical presentation, Chris Wells, CTO of Redfin Solutions gave a nice overview of Herman, which uses SassDoc to reads comments in your stylesheets to build a static website that is your style guide. It is not as extensive as a full blown style guide like Pattern Lab, but can be very useful for smaller teams.

This presentation has me researching simple style guide solutions. Not every project has the budget or need for a solution like Pattern Lab, but since I already try to comment style sheets and templates, it makes sense to do it in a way that something like Herman or KSS Node can parse.

Thanks Design 4 Drupal!

Thanks to all of the volunteer organizers, especially Leslie Glynn, who was my point of contact before, during, and after the event, and in true New England fashion, made sure I took home some famous Boston cannolis for my mother. Kanopians help organize a few different conferences across the states including BADcamp and MIDcamp, and we know putting on these conferences is a labor of love, so thank you!