Let the Project Flow: Front end and PM lessons learned from building a Drupal 8 website for one of the nation’s largest water utilities

Presenters: jds

Session Recording: https://youtu.be/ZfN5w_Y3m7k

Denver Water is Colorado’s oldest and largest municipal water utility, serving 1.4 million people in the Denver metropolitan area and its surrounding suburbs. The Denver Water site was Interpersonal Frequency’s first large-scale Drupal 8 site: we’ve built the best for some of the largest cities (sandiego.gov, baltimorecity.gov) and libraries (dclibrary.org, Saint Louis County – slcl.org) in Drupal 7. So, how did we do things in Drupal 8? How does all of this translate to a new population segment with different front-end use cases? In this session, we’ll discuss:

  • How civic user research guided our work: from information architecture to comps to code

  • Mitigating risk with existing D7 modules still in alpha for D8 and our strategy around building a maintainable site that will flourish for years to come

  • How we shook our tpl.php blues and learned to embrace the php.twig newness, leveraging the Zen theme and its helper functions to make frontend coding breezy

  • Falling in love with D8 Paragraphs and changing the way we think and train our sites

  • Accessibility (Section 508/WCAG) and front-end factors to help catch accessibility errors before the client even knows they are there

  • A few notes on frontend/end user considerations while working with the D8 caching layer plus Varnish and Cloudflare

  • Where we are one month after launch

This session is for devs who are experienced in Drupal 7 and are maybe building their first larger Drupal 8 site. It’s also for techy project managers who are interested in how we managed risk around the platform, segmenting civic end user’s needs, and staying on top of accessibility issues.

Audience
Experience Level
Intermediate
Schedule Info
Conference Year
2017
Date / Time
Room
Balcony C
Status
Accepted
Session Track
Design, UX, and Accessibility