Speaker

Martin Anderson-Clutz

Martin Anderson-Clutz

Solutions Engineer at Acquia

London, Canada

Martin started his Drupal journey in 2005, with version 4.6. Since then, his passion the community has been shown in his frequent participation at Drupal user groups, local Drupalcamps, and Drupalcons, often as a speaker. He was with Digital Echidna (now Northern) from 2015-2021, and recently joined Acquia as a Solutions Engineer. He also maintains a number of contrib modules, including Smart Date, Search Overrides, and a few others.

Configuration Kits: Reusable Site Building Patterns

With a renewed focus on site builders, Drupal has an opportunity to enable these critical users to quickly build out even complex functionality: an events calendar, a locations map, and more. By leveraging the power of configuration management built into modern versions of Drupal, configuration kits empower site builders, and provide a "known good" baseline that can help maintainers when troubleshooting. In this session we'll perform a live install a number of configuration kits, to show the transformation of a fresh Drupal install into a robust site with sophisticated content management capabilities. In addition to the benefits to site builders, we'll discuss how this approach can make life module developers, as well as how simple it can be to create your own.

promo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYthmswX5es&authuser=2

Parallel Development: Turning One Codebase Into Many

Solutions like Acquia Site Factory and Pantheon Upstreams can be effective (but platform-specific) tools for managing multiple sites with similar requirements. The session will discuss a less scalable, but more portable approach using forked repos in Gitlab, that allow for development and site building from a central, template repo, while adding site-specific changes to individual sites that extend off the template.

I have a great idea for a module! Now what?

One of the key strengths of Drupal is its flourishing ecosystem for contributed modules. Best of all, you can jump in and add yoour own module! All you really need is a good idea, though of course some programming knowledge, understanding of Drupal coding standards, and a few other technical things would help.

This talk will focus less on how to write code or what code you should write, and more on the process of creating a module, submitting it on Drupal.org, and getting it adopted by the community. We'll touch on such topics as:
- Looking for similar modules that already exist
- Getting help from the community
- Submitting your module - sandbox or full project?
- Getting the word out

You'll hear about the firsthand experiences in developing Smart Date, which went from an idea to one of the top 500 most popular modules on drupal.org in less than two years.

Martin Anderson-Clutz

Solutions Engineer at Acquia

London, Canada