Two Annertechies speaking at Drupal Developer Days 2023: Austria

Drupal Developer Days see people gathering from all over the world to contribute to the progress of the powerful, open source CMS.

They give those who are intimately involved with Drupal the chance to learn about the latest developments, have discussions with leading experts, and enjoy the opportunity to network.

This year it will take place at the beautiful University of Vienna in Austria from 19 to 22 July. And it’s all systems go – tickets are on sale and the programme was published last week.

Event highlights include sessions in a variety of categories, workshops and contribution sprints, where participants come together to develop, test, document, fix and design to improve the platform. The various session tracks at Drupal Dev Days range from backend development to project management and business.

Two Annertech developers have been invited to present sessions. Erik Erskine will be talking about whether Paragraphs is still needed with the release of CKEditor 5, while Christopher Torgalson will be tackling the topic of reusable and accessible JavaScript interactivity.

Erik will be presenting on “Structured content within CKEditor 5. Do we still need Paragraphs?”.

This talk is aimed at an intermediate audience and is on the Innovation and The future track. His presentation centres around the Paragraphs module. It may be a tried and tested way of organising data and separating presentation from content, but its rigidity can be a barrier to content authoring.

Erik believes that editors would prefer to start with a blank page, write some rough content, and organise it into components later – an experience closer to that offered by Google Docs or Microsoft Office. CKEditor 5 is a document editor rather than an HTML editor.

“With that in mind, we can define our own document structure and plugins for things that we might previously have implemented as paragraphs,” Erik says.

“This session is for you if you're involved in site building and reach for the Paragraphs module to handle nested content, but feel it's overkill or clumsy for what you want to do,” he adds.

“We'll look at CKEditor’s architecture in comparison – how we might use it for components that typically live within other content, and whether that results in a more streamlined setup.

“This talk is part of the innovation and the future track, so we'll look at current efforts that are happening in this area, and we’ll also chat about things that will hopefully be possible later this year,” he says.
 

• Erik’s presentation will take place on 20 July from 3pm to 3.45pm.

Christopher’s session is titled “Stupid Simple: Creating Simple, Reusable, Accessible JavaScript Interactivity in Drupal (or wherever).”

It is aimed at front-end developers with at least a basic understanding of how to use JavaScript in Drupal. Christopher notes that there are a few kinds of JavaScript-based interactive components that experienced front-end developers have typically built many times.

“We usually do this because we think the implementation needs to be specific to a given project even though we routinely reuse other code (like contrib modules and base themes) on every project,” he says.

But reusable, extensible, customisable implementations of these small interactive components are surprisingly simple – and fast.

This session is definitely worth checking out if you’d like to learn a way to:

• Decide the appropriate roles of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS when building interactive tools,
• Make JavaScript responsive, or
• Design JavaScript for:
  • progressive enhancement,
  • reusability and
  • extensibility, customisibility, responsivity, and accessibility

“This will reduce time spent reinventing the wheel, by making it possible to back-port bug fixes and new features to existing projects,” he says.
 

• Christopher will be presenting this session on 19 July from 10.45am to 11.30am.