DrupalCon 2019

Every year we visit DrupalCon, we bring a large and diverse team of account managers, sales team members, developers, and designers. We always look forward to connecting with the Drupal community, educating others on what we know best, and learning more about the open source programming platform we all know and love.

DrupalCon introduced the Global Splash Awards from the European tour of DrupalCon this year. The Splash Awards recognize the best Drupal websites today that represents a step in the right direction in digital innovation. Among some strong competition, we won Best Drupal Corporate Project of the year for our work with CentralSquare. 

As a Platinum sponsor of DrupalCon, we brought in a handful of our team to speak at the conference. This inspiring team included: Judd Mercer, Mike Lander, Gurwinder Antal Lauren Motl, and Lily Berman and Nick Switzer. 

Lily spoke first of our group on day one with her piece, Storytelling Toolkit for Effective Project (And People) Management. She began by describing how to best make connections with both coworkers and clients through the duration of a project. One way to hold onto this connection is “how to keep [your client’s] story alive”. Your client’s story is the goals they have for the project they have tasked your agency with from budgets to the final launch. 

Judd stepped up next with his piece, Cvent.com: Shifting from a Homegrown CMS to Drupal 8. He leveraged our work with Cvent to describe how to move a static website into a modern, dynamic site that engages audiences without relying on IT services. This feature through Drupal allows companies of all sizes to succeed. 

Following soon after was Mike Lander’s piece, Anonymous Personalization Without Leaving Drupal. He guided audiences through what personalizing looks like on a site and how easy it is to do on any developer team. He introduced Smart Content in this piece for anonymous users (ex. users not signed in). Smart Content uses conditions the user is setting by browsing the site and outputs subsequent reactions using Smart Content Drupal features.

The next morning of DrupalCon, we saw Lily on stage again coupled with Nick Switzer in their piece, Empathy for internal users: Build and Train for Real Content Admins. They ran through how to build and train content admins in Drupal. Nick spoke to how to create components that have clear, focused content objectives like required fields, and concise content type names. Lily drove the conversation towards what’s next: Training! After the components are built and ready to be used, your clients need to know how to use them. She explained who, why, when, and how to best conduct a training session. 

What's for Dinner? Using Predictive UX to Help Users Decide was Gurwinder and Lauren’s piece to close out the conference for our team. They took the stage to explain not only how predictive UX is different from personalization but of course, how to use it in your day-to-day Drupal uses. Predictive UX adapts content based on a user’s past choices the way that personalization does, and leverages machine learning and statistical techniques to make informed decisions on the user’s behalf.

We are delighted with this year’s DrupalCon and looking forward to getting back next year in Minneapolis, MN!