Special Guests at our DrupalCon Portland Booth

At this year's DrupalCon, you will find me again on the microphone at Pantheon's central booth, talking up the essential value of Pantheon. Nearly a decade after teaming up with Pantheon, I'm still excited about how the platform’s scalability and deployment pipeline enable web teams to go further than they could before.

Image

However, this year's Pantheon booth experience will be a bit different. We will have more than ever special guests sharing their stories of success. When teams skip over the "do it yourself" approach at the platform layer, they can reach their goals more effectively.

Bringing three decades of web history into Drupal 10

Monday, May 6, 12:40 pm - Kanopi Studios and The Exploratorium
With a domain name registered in 1992, The Exploratorium has one of the oldest sites on the web. I recently hosted a webinar with George Perry of the Exploratorium along with our friends at Kanopi Studios to discuss how they entered the modern Drupal era. At DrupalCon we will show more about how Advanced Global CDN enabled them to split traffic across Drupal 7 and their newer site to accommodate a solar eclipse.

Customizing editorial interfaces with the Mercury Editor

Monday, May 6, 2:20 pm – Aten Design

In a recent chat with Aten Design and the City of Raleigh, NC, I learned how they collaborate more effectively using Pantheon's Multidev environments to work on site changes in isolation. Much of that work involves tailoring their open source Mercury Editor to client needs. Aten’s CEO Justin Toupin will compare how Mercury operates on a clean installation with what it looks like when customized for a real customer.

Personalization with Drupal

Monday, May 6, 3:50 pm and Tuesday, May 7, 11 am – Lytics

One of the reasons personalization remains out of reach for most web teams is that it requires a carefully crafted alignment of people, processes and multiple pieces of platform technology. Aligning those elements can waste all the time, budget and energy that brought a team to consider personalization in the first place. Through our new partnership with Lytics, we at Pantheon think we can dramatically lower the barrier to entry so that teams do not waste time on wheel reinvention.

Managing hundreds of sites with a Slackbot

Tuesday, May 7, 11:40 am – WebMD Ignite

This one will show one of the most compelling Pantheon usages. The team at WebMD Ignite manages hundreds of similar sites using Pantheon's Upstreams. That's normal. The extraordinary part is the Slackbot they built on top of Pantheon's command line interface, Terminus, to make the creation and updates of sites that much more efficient. Don't miss it!

Streamlining sites for the State of Iowa

Tuesday, May 7, 1 pm – Lullabot

Watch the Lullabot experts blow our minds with how they are pushing the boundaries forward in maximizing the balanced benefits of a shared codebase paired with isolated environments. In a livestream a few months ago, I got a glimpse of how they use GitHub Actions to simplify the management of dozens of related sites. In this presentation at our booth, we will see how they share design elements and more across sites for the State of Iowa.

Syndicating content across environments and sites

Tuesday, May 7, 2:40 pm – Content Sync

The classic Pantheon demonstrations show code moving upward from development environments to a live environment where content is directly added to the canonical database. But not every team wants all content edits to happen straight in live environments. Sometimes content needs to be deployed like a code change. Some sites share content. This problem space maddened me in Drupal 7. But I know from past conversations with Thiemo Mueller of Pantheon’s technology partner Content Sync that there's a better way in modern Drupal.

Personalization use cases

Tuesday, May 7, 3:50 pm – Blue State Digital

The raw capacity to personalize Drupal mentioned above is only valuable when paired with expert teams who know how to wield it. In this presentation from Blue State, we will see how they are already exercising the modules and methods that make Lytics and Pantheon a powerful combination.

Certification, certification, certification

For all the hours on the DrupalCon show floor in which we do not have a special guest, you'll still see me talking up the value of Pantheon. This year I will be doing so through the lens of our recently launched Certification program. If you want to join the growing crowd of certified professionals, you can sign up for an in-person edition of our Certification exam at DrupalCon.

See you in Portland!