What's Cooking at Pantheon's DrupalCon Booth 2025

I love the hallway track at in-person conferences. Sure, the official sessions will show you the polished version of how web development should be done. But I want to talk to people about how it is really done.

What do their real workflows on real sites really look like? That's what we'll be highlighting at our DrupalCon booth this year. Pantheon is known for our high-energy demos that show fictionalized sites like Umami – we'll still do some of those. But don’t miss the "show & tell" with our customers and partner agencies. It’s like a live broadcast - anything can happen!

Here's the full schedule:

• Monday
  • 5 pm: Four Kitchens and YaleSites
  • 6 pm: Evolving Web and Drupal Recipes
• Tuesday
  • 9:50 am: Pantheon's Content Publisher
  • 12 pm: Managing government websites with Lullabot
  • 1 pm: Content Sync
  • 2:20 pm: Kalamuna and New Relic
  • 4:10 pm: Our Sponsored Session - Drupal CMS: The Exciting Parts
• Wednesday
  • 9:50 am: SEO lessons from WordPress with Digital Polygon
  • 12 pm: Museum websites with Urban Insight
  • 1 pm: Drupal 7 LTS with Tag1
  • 2:20 pm: Drupal Recipes with Kanopi Studios

Lights, camera, GitHub Actions

I might spend the plurality of my time in Atlanta talking about GitHub Actions. At last year's conference, I was intrigued by Lullabot’s presentation about how they push out updates to related sites for the State of Iowa through GitHub Actions. Since then, I have seen more and more teams gravitating toward GitHub Actions, especially to orchestrate deployments to multiple sites. (Find me at the booth if you want to chat more about GitHub Actions!)

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Lullabot will be back at our booth during the Tuesday lunch hour showing off more from this project and how their GitHub Actions have evolved.

Similarly, our friends from Four Kitchens will be our guests at the opening night reception at 5 pm to show off their work with YaleSites. YaleSites operates a version of Software-as-a-Service within Yale University quickly allowing departments to get their own branded sites while not overwhelming supporting IT teams. Poignantly, YaleSites also uses some slick GitHub Actions to handle the deployment of hundreds of sites. 

Creative use of GitHub Actions to parallelize deployments will be a central part of our sponsored session at the Higher Education Industry Summit on March 24. UCLA Health’s Web Systems Manager Paul Babin will walk us through how his team deploys simultaneously to 170 sites on two different Drupal platforms.

Drupal CMS game show

Speaking of sponsored sessions, our main sponsored conference presentation is on Tuesday afternoon. Drupal CMS: The Exciting Parts will resemble a game show  Our three contestants: Nikki Flores of Lullabot, Baddý Sonja Breidert of 1xInternet and Jim Birch of Kanopi Studios will compete to persuade the audience that they know the most exciting part of Drupal CMS. Earlier this year I could not agree with myself on the right answer, but I eventually landed on the time-bending power of recipes.

Recipes, Recipes, Recipes

Recipes’ impact will also be on display back at our booth. We'll have at least three agency partners showing off how they approached their stewardship of this new feature in Drupal CMS.

• Evolving Web leads the analytics recipe. See them at 6 pm during Monday's opening reception.
• Digital Polygon will show how they brought SEO lessons from WordPress to Drupal at 9:50 am on Wednesday. 
• Jim Birch of Kanopi Studios will walk through his contribution to Recipes and show off his agency’s unique Recipe releases at 2:20 pm on Wednesday. 

Managing content in a Content Management System

Sometimes I get so excited about the developer workflow enhancements within Drupal CMS that I forget about other efforts to address the Content Management System part of the equation. At our booth, we'll see products and topics recently featured on our YouTube Livestreams that cover this space. Our friends at Content Sync will show off some of their latest capabilities. And Pantheon's own Content Publisher enables content publishing straight from Google Docs to front ends like Next.js, WordPress and Drupal. (I still need to get used to referring to Drupal as a "front end" in this context!)

Partners to keep sites safe and speedy

Just keeping sites running can be a challenge too. A huge portion of Drupal sites still run on Drupal 7, which was released back in 2011! To keep those sites safe Pantheon has partnered with Tag1 to provide Long-Term Support for Drupal 7. Stop by after lunch on Wednesday at 1 pm to see how it works.

When a Drupal site slows down, Pantheon includes New Relic Application Performance Monitoring to show where the milliseconds are going. That monitoring is even more effective when used in conjunction with Kalamuna's new module that adds more Drupal-specific logging data to New Relic. See how it works on Tuesday at 2:20 pm.

Don’t forget your T-shirt

I hope to see you at our booth in Atlanta. As always, you can get a T-shirt custom screen printed just for you after watching one of our sessions. I expect we'll see a lot of those shirts at our Wednesday night afterparty!