DrupalCon Austin: Call for Sessions

I’m excited this year to be co-chairing the User Experience Design (UXD) track with Aaron Stanush from Four Kitchens. The UXD track is where you’ll learn all about research, prototyping, content strategy, and visual design for Drupal. Have a topic you would like to share? Submit a session! We’re looking for sessions on the following topics:

• Prototyping for Drupal
• Content strategy
• Authoring experience
• User testing
• Design process
• Visual design

This is an exciting time for User Experience Designers. The ways we think about content and users is evolving and the UXD track is a great place to learn how.

Techniques in front-end development move super fast and developers are going to have even more tools at their disposal with the upcoming release of Drupal 8. I’m excited to have the opportunity to co-chair the Front-end Track in Austin along with Kathryn McClintock of Amazee Labs and Ivan Boothe of Root Work.

The front-end track will feature:

• Twig and the new Drupal 8 theme system.
• Front-end development best practices and workflows.

The front-end track at DrupalCon Austin will give you a headstart on Drupal 8 and provide insight into tools and current best practices for Drupal 7 and the wider web community.

DrupalCon’s new Case Studies track allows presenters to tell the whole story of important Drupal-based projects. The track is open to case studies from any field, including nonprofit, education, government, media and the corporate sector. I have the pleasure of working with Zach Chandler, Web Strategist at Stanford Web Services, as co-chairs for the track this year. We are encouraging session proposals to focus on one of three themes:

• Breaking new ground; redefining what's possible
• Solving common problems
• Embracing failure as a path to success

We’re excited for this track to highlight Drupal projects that are truly innovative, that have created better solutions to problems that we all face, or that have delivered hard-fought wins after overcoming initial losses.

This will be my first time as a global track chair for the Site Building track, and I am excited to be working with Erik Summerfield from Phase 2 in Austin, and Dann Linn from MetalToad in Portland.

Site building is where we take all 22,000+ building blocks of Drupal and put them together to create value. One of Drupal’s strengths is how much someone can do without digging into the code using multiple layout tools, data modeling, and loading little blocks of social functionality.

When submitting your site building sessions consider the following topics:

• Information Architecture in Drupal 8
• Flexible theming in Drupal (how will twig make themes more flexible to site builder)
• Views (contrib) is dead long live views (in core)
• Content layouts future (scotch)
• Spark!
• Websites quick and dirty
• Building site building platforms
• Applied content strategy
• How to contribute as a site builder