Drupal GovCon is taking place from July 31st – August 2nd at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Forum One will be sponsoring, exhibiting, running multiple sessions and trainings, and so we’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Forum One sessions

Changing the Face of Public Education: How Fairfax County is managing 195 websites with a Drupal 8 Platform

The 10th largest school system in the country, Fairfax County Public Schools has 23,000 employees, serves 186,000 students, and 195 schools and centers. Beginning in late 2015 FCPS set out to replace the 200 individually managed websites with a single platform that would increase the quality, consistency, and management efficiency for those 200 websites. A year and half later and FCPS is now runs it’s ecosystem of websites on a Drupal 8 platform.

In this session, we’ll have a candid conversation with the team responsible for making it happen about what worked, what didn’t, and what it’s like using Drupal 8 as platform for a large ecosystem of websites.

Assumptions Need Validation: Making User Testing Work For You In Government Projects

Validation is a big word that is used very little in government web builds. As UX experts, designers, developers, and project managers, we all need to work a little bit harder on proving our project’s worth with real, validated data. Unsurprisingly, the best form of validating your work is done by testing your users! User testing and validation are often sidelined on big, complicated web builds – but we must bring them to the forefront to do the best possible work.

In this session, our UX experts will lead you in discovering just what you can test to validate different types of work, why you should test often and always, and how you should tailor user validation exercises according to your government project. Most importantly, we’ll offer you strategies and a plan for “selling” your user testing plan to both your internal team and external stakeholders.

Section 508 Refresh: Alt Tag, You’re It

Section 508 was updated on March 2017. Federal agencies have a grace period that ends on January 2018 to comply with the updated accessibility law. Join our accessibility experts as they go over the updates to Section 508, how the updated rules tie with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), as well as some Drupal tips and tricks. 

In this session, we’ll cover the basics of the updated section law, how the Section 508 update ties into existing accessibility guidelines, how to best take into account accessibility in Drupal 7 and 8 builds, and general accessibility best practices and tips.

Enhance Content Discovery

With small site you can get away with simple lists of content. With thousands and tens of thousands — dare I say more? — nodes it’s no longer enough to just show them all. Even conventional approaches like filtering and faceting often yield so many results as to be almost useless to a user trying to find what they’re looking for.

In this session you will learn tools and techniques for enabling your users to more easily find what they’re looking for. This will include: intelligent ranking of content, enhancing the power of search, and providing recommendations to individual users.

Create Truly Remarkable Data Visualizations with D3

There’s no escaping the fact that data visualization is hot right now. Everyone wants to tell their data’s story visually, whether it be through a map, chart, or more detailed presentation. The difficulty is there are so many different tools that solve this, each one with their own benefits and limitations. We feel D3.js is the most awesome tool for handling this task — which is the approach we’ve used for the sites like the Nation’s Report Card, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina, GlobalChange, and others.

In this session, we’ll cover: what D3 is and why you should be using it, getting data out of Drupal and into D3, and D3 visualization techniques.

Taming Godzilla: Agile Drupal Development with JIRA and Confluence

JIRA is a powerful issue tracking, project management, and collaboration tool, but it can easily become a monster. While the Atlassian tools can accelerate agile development and empower teams to work together more effectively, they can also quickly become a burden to users and create unnecessary overhead for team members who are just trying to get their job done.

This presentation will show how JIRA and Confluence can be leveraged to help teams work together throughout the lifecycle of a Drupal development project. It will share best practices to help teams successfully tame the monster and use JIRA and Confluence to work together more efficiently. 

Forum One training

Component-Based Theming with Twig in Drupal 8

Each iteration of Drupal introduces new and exciting ways to manage content. However, the display of content is even more important along with the knowledge of how to convert a design to a theme. While we have all read about, watched, and even worked with Twig to create new themes in Drupal 8, the way we work with Twig has changed.

Join us as we walk through the theming variations that started with the traditional theme-centric design and has quickly moved into component-based design. 

If you’d like to set up a time to meet with the team during GovCon, just shoot us at message at info@forumone.com.