Higher Ed Summit

tl;dr: no specific takeaways, tbh

Lightning talks

security guy decided the best way to get the most content into his talk was to talk fast 😩

unit testing: PHPUnit, Nightwatch (for JS)

visual regression tests – Backstop JS? (or Percy that just got bought by Browserstack?)

somewhat interesting panel discussion – with the eternal reminder that “higher education” is almost so vast as to be meaningless

Drupal 9 “deep dive”

tl;dr: we should be fine migrating to D9 sometime probably late 2021. also, update PHP version before D8 launch, and double-check version of MySQL

ohhhhh most of the D8 > D9 upgrade is because of end of life of code dependencies (symfony, jquery, etc), and that’s why D8 end of life is actually sooner than D7 end of life

and also D8 means keeping deprecated stuff alongside new features that replace them; and D9 means removing the deprecated bits

deffo want to make sure production server is on php 7.3 before launch!

what version of mysql do we have? (D9 requires 5.7.8)

core compatibility is going away from module version numbering system, because modules can be compatible with BOTH D8 and D9

Images at scale

tl;dr: in combination with Media talk, this could benefit from a review before launch, but could also be good upgrades afterwards. Jim should watch this one.

images at scale slides

talk thru image styles with Jim and/or Lullabot team before launch?

better naming conventions: include aspect ratio and dimensions! – altho might need to check against migration code?

responsive image styles????? (naming convention: Use Cases) I have not even dug into this concept

responsive image style is a container/bundle for multiple image styles? applies to fields, which is good for like news sites, directory entries. is there a way to make that work for images in the wysiwyg

art direction: thinking about the focal point of an image across breakpoints – the way we do with the home page hero image

breakpoints in the theme, which I don’t think is something Justin looked at all (sample in the Bartik theme?)

[zoned out for a bit because this is probably not my thing]

note per Johanna Bates: if you have already small (appropriately sized?) images, having responsive images isn’t needed – so probably only for home hero and landing page banner images – but we should do that probably BEFORE launch?

need to enable Responsive Images core module to set this up

module: image crop wizard module (do we need this if doing ahead of time in photoshop, conversely would that allow us to skip photoshop for student assistants?)

but also might be useful for blog posts when posting to home page?

Focal Point module?

(woke up from a nightmare at 3:30 with a headache, never got back to sleep, olympia coffee was closed when I went by at 6:40 to be ready for sessions starting at 7:15)

ARGH I MISSED A SESSION YESTERDAY BECAUSE THE SCHEDULE SPLITS DAYS BASED ON UTC OR SOMETHING

Caching and Performance deep dive

tl;dr: bad presentation

Susan used to say “you can’t learn less than you already know” but I think this might have been the exception that proves the rule. I now feel like I understand even less about how caching works in Drupal, and learned nothing about how to set it up effectively.

Jumped out about 10 minutes before the end and caught the back half of a chair yoga session. That was fantastic.

Single sign on

tl;dr: useless, also recommendations in chat for the module that Erik already decided we should be using

Turns out, after almost 20 minutes of telling me why I should care about the topic I’m hear to learn about, that the example was how to use one Drupal instance to be a SAML provider for another Drupal instance, which is not at all useful

jumped to a main stage talk about personalization, although I’m not sure this is useful either – oh, it’s a sales talk

9 am session was something highly theoretical about theme migration from D8 to D9. There’s a higher ed BoF also but not feeling chatty. Taking a break to do other stuff

Performance summit (1st half only)

tl;dr: Jim might want to watch the first segment of this session; make sure news images on home page are better optimized

second half is either on decoupled or on infrastructure that isn’t something we can do anything about

“you already know that/because you’re here”

first half is frontend, which apparently even in drupal is most critical

this is probably something for Jim tbqh

caching, cdn, profiling tools (for backend)

(yup, this is a Jim thing, but I will take some notes as they strike me in importance)

webpagetest (ye olde)

[oof them news images. also, probs can drop graduation banner now][also where the heck is all the advertising script junk coming from]

lighthouse profiling tool

load testing: need to plan ahead, or get “close enough” environment with a VM (looooots of detail here, will need to possibly discuss with contegix about how to handle this)

[note, session also during this time to go back and watch later: “mind blowing content planning in native drupal]

[break for Lullabot meeting]

Configuration management

tl;dr: we’re doing fine

this is turning out to be a confirmation of everything I got out of the session I went to last year

(look up config_split_ignore)

[break]

Dates and Times BoF

tl;dr: OH RIGHT now I remember all the janky things going on with date modules in D8 🙁 also: many many many browser tabs to process; might be that Smart Date module will work for us now?

[break for advisory committee meeting]

Media

tl;dr: this is one area of the site that could use a thorough once-over before launch.

media slides

feel clearer about how it works and that it really IS stable

might go back to that media library bug, see if it actually helps to do the tip I remember seeing last about recreating the media types?

do we still need Entity Browser/Entity Embed? (maybe for the work that Marcos did last year?)

ENTITY USAGE module

“media entity X” where X = Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud

(this might be a good one for Jim to watch, up to the final Q&A, to get a basic overview)

So DrupalCon Minneapolis got canceled, because coronavirus, and they switched to an online format, and I’m going to take some notes. Rough notes here for work reference, and then maybe later put some notes on my personal website?

Optimizing for search engines

tl;dr: come back to this, might be some things to check with Echo Delta?

Torn between the accessibility session and the search engine session, but since Jim just took a multi-day workshop on accessibility testing, I’m going to do the search engine one.

slides for search presentation

chrome extension for web core vitals – test current vs new to see if improvement?

schema.org markup for search boxes, sitelinks, breadcrumbs – are these all set the way we want?

the rich snippets – I’m assuming this is something that Echo Delta has some knowledge/experience with and will be handling the research

“google has said” vs actual practice (yikes)

I hate the whole idea of AMP, but should we be using it for the news section/blog content type? – talk to Christine about whether we want to be in news results on google, I guess

“ultimately, if you want your video in google, upload it to youtube” (cool story, still monopoly)

schema markup for events, now includes virtual, postponed, and canceled events

knowledge panel (is this something that Echo Delta will be working on?)

“SpecialAnnouncement” structured data

Rich Results Test to go with Search Console – does the web team have access to either?

schema.org module (already have metatag module, probably need to be better with figuring out descriptions

he doesn’t add the metatag fields to forms, but instead creates fields that map to them, I think so you can more closely control the display

real-time SEO for Drupal module, SEO checklist module

simple XML sitemap, XML sitemap – both are fine, can’t remember which we have (simple XML sitemap allows for multiple sitemaps, might have one for each section?)

SEO Starter module, why this over SEO checklist?

analytics DOES not include JS turned off, adblockers (if this is the case, what should we be using to track internal search?)

Driesnote

tl;dr: nothing critical to us for the next year

(tbqh I usually skip the driesnote, or on one notable occasion, stood out in the hall with friends being snarky thru the whole thing)

block layout system is being deprecated in favor of layout builder?????

Webform

tl;dr: WOW WEBFORM IS POWERFUL! specific actions: install webform example module if possible, at for Jim on local to use the style guide, and research honeypot module

webform talk slides

generate PDFs from submissions (will help for people who have been complaining about printing emails) (is this built in by default or does it require addons)

webform example module includes style-guide with all the possible field types and messages for styling – should probably work together with Jim on this

“more” option (vs tooltip or description) might be good for some specific uses we’ve seen recently

they do support on Drupal Answers (stack exchange), help inside of the module includes a bunch of video links

tooltips have multiple accessibility features

[HOLY SHIT SO MUCH FUNCTIONALITY]

he recommends honeypot for spam capture, we should do that

“I feel like people get overwhelmed” 😂

you can point the form to another backend for processing (I want this to be the future for admissions CRM integration) and not save to Drupal at all

Webform Encrypt module

Different email to different people based on responses to form

COVID-19 response work

nothing especially new/useful here, altho interesting to know that whole Aus gov is using Drupal, I think?

2:15 session time

jumped around a bunch of sessions, looking for something useful

Layout Builder components (can break your site)

tl;dr: probably can continue to ignore Layout Builder for a while

layout builder slides

Jim should look into Layout Builder, probably, for a v2 of the design

altho: whew, a lot of complicated issues to figure out for versioning and workflow; this is dauntingly complex

[interrupted by search issue]

fwiw, layout builder (now) only works inside the main content area, so other regions are still managed via Blocks

thing I don’t quite get: how does Layout Builder interact with Paragraphs (now that I (sort of) get how it interact with Blocks)

Adoptable goats

(checked in on a couple of talks, trouble focusing)

this was just pleasant and charming