DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014: Building a full site in Drupal 8 Alpha

Speakers: SchnitzelRackspaceBNX
Note: This session contains two half hour sessions back to back.

Session 1: Building a full site in Drupal 8 Alpha

Time: 10:45-11:15
Experience level: Advanced
Company: Amazee Labs

Many changes in the alpha version of Drupal 8 are currently untested “in the wild.” This holds especially true for the D8 multilingual initiative, which brings major process adjustments for building multilingual sites.

Being personally involved in the new multilingual initiative equates to extensive testing on my part. Fortunately, my team and I had the perfect testing scenario: building a fully multilingual site on Drupal 8.

The gist of our D8 story goes something like this:

We began our journey the 2nd of April (2014). And despite a long and bumpy road, we managed to launch our new site the same month on the 29th — in just under 30 days of extensive work. Not only did we make our launch date, we learned A LOT. Now, we would like to share our learnings with you:

Multilingual Drupal 8: It works and it’s awesome.
Managing HEAD to HEAD updates without an update path
The new kid on the block: using Configuration Management and deployments via GIT
Dealing with a completely missing field of contrib modules. *Spoiler: it made layouting really hard!
What’s missing in the core theme layer for building full websites
Which new site-building tasks were confusing and/or challenging to understand
Bugs in Core!
Why our experience leads us to believe no-one should fear building sites NOW with Drupal 8.
Session 2: Improve your online infrastructure to increase revenue and customer experience

Time: 11:15-11:45
Experience level: Beginner
Company: Rackspace

Today customer experience is top of mind, meaning you have to juggle many tasks at the same time. Your site needs to be interactive, contain a lot of content and be available on multiple devices. Your site has to be quick and needs to deal with both predictable and unpredictable spikes. And last but not least your site needs to be safe and compliant and the payment process quick and hassle free.

All in all, not an easy task to complete! During this 30 minute session we will cover the benefits of having a good online infrastructure and utilizing the flexibility of the cloud to deal with peak traffic, without having to commit to a costly contract.