1xINTERNET at DrupalCon NA 2021

DrupalCon North America is taking place online, 12-16th of April. This year 1xINTERNET is sponsoring the Hallway Track in hope for some inspiring and informative chat's in between sessions. We are looking forward seeing old friends, and making new ones. This year we have few of our team members from 1xINTERNET hosting session and panels, in good company of many other great speakers. 

Panel: How can we foster open source contribution from companies to Drupal?

Baddy Sonja, our CEO at 1xINTERNET is hosting an interesting panel taking place at the main stage on Monday 12th of April. She has invited Jeff Walpole, CEO and co-founder of Phase2. Katherine Druckman, Co-Host and producer of the Reality 2.0 Podcast and a former director of digital experiences at the Linux Journal. Danese Cooper, Emeritus Board member Open Source Initiative (OSI) and a Chairwoman at InnerSource Commons Foundation and Deborah Bryant Senior Director Open Source Program Office at Red Hat and a board secretary at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to join her and discuss what could be done to get companies more involved in the the contribution phase. To keep up with growing CMS and DXP systems we need a strategy of how Drupal could be evolved to give companies faster and more direct return on their investments.

Relaunch blog of Unity.com with headless Drupal 8, Next.js

Dr. Christoph Breidert,  Managing Director & Co-Founder of 1xINTERNET and  Lars Linnet from Unity Technologies will join forces during this session.  After many years of successfully running an interactive blog in 9 different languages using Wordpress, Unity decided to relaunch the blog using headless Drupal and Next.js.

The goal was to build a state of the art blogging system that provides a state of the art editorial experience for the team and contributors of the blog and to decouple the frontend completely from the backend.

The goal was achieved by exposing all necessary content such as page types, paragraphs, menus, media, meta tags, redirects, etc. using GraphQL, and building a fast and beautiful frontend with Next.js.

The development was done with a mixed team of frontend and backend developers working closely together.

Some of the most notable highlights of the implementation are:

•  Flexible content model using paragraphs
• Support of meta tags, redirects, and media
• Optimal image cropping and resizing by combining Drupal and Next.js
• State of the art editorial experience with workflows and translation management
• Migration from unstructured Wordpress data into a highly structured data model

In the session Christoph and Lars will showcase the final project.  

Make sure not to miss out on this session.

Enterprise grade editorial experience with Drupal

In this session Stefan Weber our CTO at 1xINTERNET  will talk about the way we build CMS systems today and how it has changed. At 1xINTERNET we have developed new modules to improve the editorial experience of editors, in order to meet the expectations of our clients: One module allows re-using entities as content templates with a similar UI as Google Docs. Another one, that we are currently developing, allows us to edit entities directly in the frontend.

Both modules are built on top of Drupal, using as much of the API as possible. At the same time the integrations are lightweight and can easily be extended. The plan is to contribute both modules.

In this session Stefan will demonstrate:

• what we consider being an enterprise grade editorial experience
• how the template module works and how it integrates with editorial workflows
• how editing content directly in the frontend works, and how Drupal’s API is used for this

The case for web components in Drupal frontends

Adam Juran from 1xINTERNET and Christopher Bloom from Knapsack will walk through the pros and cons that must be considered for implementation of web components on Drupal frontends. They will cover topics such as:

• SEO
• Performance
• Flash of unstyled content
• Server side rendering
• Styling and custom CSS variables
•  Encapsulation
•  Composition vs inheritance
•  Integration to existing JavaScript frameworks

They will go over the possibility of replacing 90% of your Twig code with an even more powerful templating language and look at the scenario if templating language was supported natively by all modern browsers?

Don’t miss out if you are an intermediate to advanced Drupal frontend developer. These two experts promise you'll walk away with the knowledge of whether or not web components are right for your next Drupal project.

Drupal 10 survival manual for developer, agency and clients

The life cycle of major Drupal versions is always becoming shorter. Whereas Drupal 6 was supported for 8 years, Drupal 7 will be supported for nearly 12 years before it its EOL in late 2022. Drupal 8 will only be supported until next November, 6 years after it launched and Drupal 9 will only be supported for less than 4 years after it was released, shorter life cycles will probably be the new norm from now onwards.

We did an excellent job with the Drupal 8 to 9 migration, as most sites able to run on Drupal 8.9 can be upgraded to Drupal 9.1 with only some minor effort required. This is in large part because of the excellent community initiatives to get modules ready for Drupal 9. However, some sites are still blocked in Drupal 8 as they depend on unmaintained modules. As a personal example, in the past few months, I became co-maintainer of many modules just to get them Drupal 9 ready for this reason.

In this session João Ventura will propose how we can alleviate this problem both when building and maintaining sites, and in supporting the community.

Why you should attend

At 1xINTERNET we encourage all of our team to attend all Drupal events and especially the DrupalCon's every year. We find it important that everyone are aware of the power of the Drupal community where we learn and share our learnings to grow as a company and as individuals.  

This year, the program is loaded with great sessions, if you are new to DrupalCon make sure you don't miss out on Driesnote where the Drupal founder Dries Buytaert will go on stage and talk about the state of the Drupal project. 

Make sure to check out the program for Initiative Days  but each day, in addition to the traditional DrupalCon content, there will be a focus on one of the Drupal Project’s Strategic Initiatives starting with an Initiative Keynote. Key members of the Initiative will take us all on a journey through the goals of that initiative, and how it will help create a better product for us all to build future digital experiences. 

Baddý Sonja, CEO of 1xINTERNET will take part in the Decoupled Menus Day 13th of April with a great group of other Drupal experts.

If you still haven't made your mind up, check the agenda and register for a great week of Drupal magic.