DrupalCon 2019 Recap: It’s still all about experience

DrupalCon 2019 Recap: It’s still all about experience

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Thought byRay Saltini
April 23, 2019
DrupalCon Seattle Blog

DrupalCon 2019 Seattle was a wonderful gathering of the Drupal community and sharing of thought leadership. At FFW, we were particularly excited for the event, as we were unveiling our brand evolution for the first time at the conference.

One key theme was constant throughout the entire event: experience. While experience is nothing new, something felt different. The focus on experience at DrupalCon 2019 was truly authentic, and during the event these three things really stuck out:

Drupal community experience

The Drupal community is committed to creating a collaborative space for all contributors. At the Driesnote, this point was reinforced by the focus on Diversity and Inclusion to improve everyone’s experience on the Drupal platform. Seeing what the community had contributed in 2018, and what is to come for Drupal migrations and platform, was inspiring.

Commitment to Drupal platform development to better deliver customer experiences

Sessions throughout the week highlighted improving customer experiences. Experience accompanying development is not a new concept, but we saw how contributors are bringing that to life. Drupal itself is evolving to enable improved customer experiences, which allows us to eliminate technical barriers other platforms are still struggling with.

DrupalCon experiences - for all Drupal users

The community’s relentless focus on improving the platform for not only developers, but content editors and digital marketers were recognized with the addition of two content tracks: Content Editors and Digital Marketers, and Decision Makers. I was also privileged to host a training session for community members in project management to further expand resources at DrupalCon for non-developers.

 

At DrupalCon 2019 Seattle, our team not only learned about many of the advancements in the Drupal community, but we were also able to share our experiences, learnings and case studies from our recent Drupal work. In case you missed, or would like to learn more, check out these FFW session recordings:

Building Websites for the Asian Market

Businesses are always taking opportunities for growth and are looking to expand to new markets. One of the emerging areas where a lot of companies are looking to build a presence is Asia. Acquiring new customers in a new market and then serving them means that all these companies need a website/digital footprint to serve the target audience.

FFW team members, Andrew Wilden, Director of Solutions & Strategy, and Adriana Mosnoi, Senior Project Manager, discuss customizing user experiences for the Asian market and how translation is simply not sufficient for design and building websites that are relevant for diverse cultures.

Stanford and FFW - Defaulting to Open

For higher education institutes, every bit of the digital budget counts. While it can be hard to justify investing money back into open source projects, the Stanford Web Services has gotten a lot back from their investments into Drupal.

This session discusses how organizations — both on the agency side and on the client side — maximized their ROI by investing back into the Drupal community. Andrew Willden, Director of Solutions & Strategy, FFW and Alison Ho, Web Project Manager, Stanford Web Services, share how those investments have helped Stanford Web Services do even more, better.

30 Minutes to Actionable Strategies that will Improve Customer Experience

Ever feel like you're jumping from one problem to the next putting out fires but never get the bandwidth to implement longer term solutions?  Learn how to create actionable strategies to improve customer experiences. I cover the importance of establishing baseline assessments and measuring progress through regular formal audits of your content, architecture, workflow and infrastructure to seize opportunities that will strengthen visitor journeys and increase conversions.

Drupal Blue/Green Deployment with AWS ECS

Drupal deployments are hard. You have to make sure your code is deployed, composer dependencies are pulled, schema updates are performed and caches cleared, all while keeping your website up and responsive for the users. Add in the complexity of hosting on multiple servers and users updating content 24/7, it gets even more interesting.

Blue/Green deployments is the solution to this problem, Alexei Gorobet, Group Architect, asgorobet, shares how to do that with Drupal.

 

We’re already looking ahead to DrupalCon 2020 in Minneapolis. If you have feedback on FFW content or ideas for 30 minute lightning sessions, I would love to hear it. You can send me suggestions directly on Drupal.org at rgs.

Want to continue expanding your Drupal knowledge outside of DrupalCon? Check out our calendar of upcoming trainings. Also click here to view all of our all learning resources.