DrupalCamp London 2019 Highlights

I headed to City University with a slight hangover, meeting up with a friend in SE London the night before doing the damage. But after some food I was ready for the opening keynote. This was delivered by Rowan Merewood, a developer for Google Chrome, talking on the user experience and website optimisation.

Rowan highlighted the need to deliver fast web pages, especially on mobile devices which now comprise over 50% of all web traffic. Tools such as Google Lighthouse can be run in Chrome DevTools, from the command line, or as a Node module. It can audit your site and provide lots of data on ways you can improve your sites performance.

Rowan had a few slides that made the audience cheer, one being that the number of Drupal sites delivering content over https is marginally above the web average. Another being site speed for Drupal sites is around the average too, not as slow as you might think! Plus some slides that made us wince, when showing that Drupal sites have a larger percentage of javascript vulnerabilities.

Radically Candid, the modern psychology that leads to effective leadership

Michelvan Velde shared his insights on transactional analysis and the drama triangle. He explained how you can help move people out of being a victim and yourself as the persecutor/rescuer, to taking the adult position, to help empower the other person to find the fix themselves.

Michelvan was very open about how working with a business coach impacted his day to day life and transformed his business. Stepping out of the drama triangle/conflict and changing the way you speak to colleagues, from an adult perspective, can defuse tensions. It can help the person raising the issue find the answer, empowering them to take control and deliver the change required.

The talk was insightful, funny, and enjoyable.

Drupal 8 SEO

Jaro from Droptica discussed his approach to SEO, including the use of modules such as SEO Checklist, Ahrefs for data analytics, SEO MOFO for SERP snippet optimisation and Backlinko for an extensive list of Google ranking factors. Lots of info to help any SEO strategy.

State of Layout Management in Drupal

Anton Staroverov spoke about the variety of modules available for building layouts and their purposes. Sadly it did highlight a known bug in the Drupal 8 Layout Builder whereby a quick change of layout, didn't take effect. Anton did explain Bricks and their use which looks quite a neat module. This is one area where Drupal is still lagging behind other systems, when it comes to quick manipulation of layouts and content, that either the customer or non-techy can handle.

Browser Wars 2019 - Implementing a Content Security Policy

Security is high on most developers agenda and George Boobyer delivered a good session on Content Security Policies (CSP) and their use. George took us back to the old days of Netscape, a blast from the past, and how we fought against browsers to now when we work together with the browsers to deliver a better user experience.

Implementing security headers, creating a CSP, to then monitor this going forward. All in order to get a better grasp of what scripts your website delivers, you'd be surprised what you find. Resources included the Mozilla Web Security Cheat Sheet, the SecKit and CSP modules and check your websites security headers with https://securityheaders.com

No Monkey Business Static Progressive Web Apps

Eli_t and Dominic Fallows, of Interactive Investor, session was on the use of decoupled Drupal, GatsbyJS, ReactJS and AWS to deliver rich content without making Google cry. A jam packed session full of great info, based on their move from Drupal 6 to a decoupled D8 site.

Gatsby sits at the heart of the pipeline taking data from Drupal and other sources to create static content, that gets spiced up with React to provide a dynamic look and feel. They mentioned the issue of previewing content, potentially having to wait whilst Gatsby generates the full site in order for editors to see changes, whereas their own custom solution allows previews of individual pages within seconds. Plenty of food for thought.

A great day rounded off at the pub, although we timed each round of drinks just moments before more money was put behind the bar, probably a good thing after my exploits the night before!