Drupalcamp London: And all that jazz

Drupalcamp London was a bootcamp literally in light of the weather. This affected the schedule a bit but it was well worth attending.

The first session on my list was not the intended module development but:

Flexible content editing with paragraphs and Drupal 8 - with Baddý Sonja Breidert who stepped in at short notice. We were encouraged to look at Open Doors as an example of Paragraphs being deployed. The fact that there were 25 types of paragraphs prompts the thought - not so much how many would I would need but the users? Apparently, paragraphs are not that user friendly to edit. Navigation was indicated 'Manage Display' - 'Preview' - 'Paragraph'. The 'environment indicator' flagged whether the site in use was live or dev: a reminder. A future tip included not using entities, but media for anything reusable. Reusable paragraphs were applied to banner and images, using simple entities. There were some special functions (and specific modules) in the table of contents, entity embed, entity browser, insert view and add map.

In considering when to use paragraphs this connects with choosing content types - another key question for me. There was a lot more in what was a 'changed session'. I'll check the slides / videos were available and for those below. The three keynotes were excellent too:

Let’s take the best route - Exploring Drupal 8 Routing System

Drupal in the era of microservices

"Hi user, I am Drupal. How can I help you?"

Accelerating Drupal projects with Thunder: a case study

In 'Make your site findable' dutchyoda Dick Rensema pulled me up short. So, I will check out the metatags module and use this from the outset. As for being findable - it's also best to have separate text and images not have both within a WYSIWYG editor. Another point is to 'make it long'. That sits well for the archive pages for Hodges' model.

Lunchtime on Sunday was preceded with gambry on Plugin API, a key idea being:

ENTITY - Same model different data
PLUGIN - Same "thing" type different ways

This was a captivating, dense, rich session and one to revisit.

Finally, the 0930 start in London helped as I'd been up late. Ronnie Scott's is an amazing experience, the second house from 1030 doors open through to 0300: I left at 3 thanks also to Resolution 88.