Spokane Day-time Learn/Co-Work Group Oct 15

What we discussed at the meeting:

• Upcoming:
  https://2015.badcamp.net/ - BADCamp, Oct 22-25, Berkeley CA
• Shawn gave us a report on the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit, Oct 10-11, Seattle (http://2015.pnwdrupalsummit.org/2015). Notes:
  - Drupal Development Pipeline: Use SASS or similar logic framework for CSS. Mobile first: 54% of traffic is mobile in general, but may depend on the type of site; so design for mobile first. Use HTML5. Modules to aid development: Features, Strongarm. Stage File Proxy. Admin Views. https://www.drupal.org/project/features https://www.drupal.org/project/strongarm https://www.drupal.org/project/admin_views https://www.drupal.org/project/stage_file_proxy
  - Putting out a Digital Product: i.e. making money out of your development work. Use https://recurly.com/ for recurring billing.
  - Drupal 8 Primer for Developers: Need to learn about YAML, object-oriented programming, Drush, PHPstorm. Drupal as a service for serving data rather than an engine for making web sites. Better API documentation (thanks Jennifer!).
  - Auditing a Drupal site: Site Audit module https://www.drupal.org/project/site_audit has several components. http://www.webpagetest.org/ is useful; another session suggested using the "2G" setting to see how a typical phone user would see the speed, and to be able to better measure whether changes you make are effective. Google's Page Speed Insights (part of Google developer tools). For Accessibility testing: http://wave.webaim.org/ .
  - Component Driven Design: uses the Paragraphs module https://www.drupal.org/project/paragraphs ; Fences https://www.drupal.org/project/fences ; Field groups (part of Drupal core) -- together these allow you to have pretty good flexibility with control over how content gets put together. Also https://www.drupal.org/project/fitvids . https://www.drupal.org/project/plupload for uploading files.
  - Performance: Use these two modules: https://www.drupal.org/project/advagg and https://www.drupal.org/project/boost to speed up your site. Also be sure to run cron on your web hosting and not use the built-in automatic cron within Drupal. There is more advanced caching like memcache and Varnish you can use if you have a more advanced web hosting service. Plus other modules for within-Drupal caching (Entity Cache, Render Cache, Cache Expiration, Image Info Cache, APDQC, etc.). Set up "Fast 404" as well -- check the settings.php file.
  - Mobile development: making apps, and getting data out of Drupal to populate it.
  - Theme development: Try the Theme Developer module. Use the Drupal UI standard stuff, don't develop your own. Also recommended tools: Drush, Gulp. http://gulpjs.com/ https://github.com/drush-ops/drush
• We discussed the fact that the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit isn't really great for Drupal beginners -- it's more for people with a certain amount of experience. There needs to be something for the beginners; Jennifer says there are resources:
  - There is free training available at larger conferences (DrupalCon, BADCamp, etc.).
  - Video training sites (not free): Lynda, Build A Module, etc.
  - https://www.drupal.org/project/user_guide (User Guide for Drupal 8 - in progress)
  - https://www.ostraining.com/blog/drupal/drupal-8-rc1/ - Video training for Drupal 8 - in progress
• Jon mentioned "Accelerated Mobile Pages" - a new thing from Google that is good for mobile web sites:
  https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/introducing-accelerated-mobile-p...
• Jennifer explained what the Features module does for Drupal 7 (a way to share configuration between sites), and why Drupal 8 doesn't need this (built-in configuration export/import capability).
• Jennifer suggested that everyone watch Dries' keynote address at DrupalCon Barcelona (skip all the intro stuff and start when Dries gets on stage):
  https://events.drupal.org/barcelona2015/driesnote
  (Interesting perspectives on Drupal's presence in the web, headless Drupal, Drupal as a service, and why Drupal 8 took 5 years to come out and how to change that going forward.)
• Jon wanted to talk about the Semantic Web; he'd seen this article:
  https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-rdf/
  Jennifer says: RDF is to some extent in Core in Drupal 7 and 8. There is also a supplemental module: https://www.drupal.org/project/rdfx