Unimity Solutions

1025 attendees from 32 countries, 82% first #DrupalCon, 81% attendees from India, 40% vegetarian! #DCAsia @DrupalConAsia

— webchick (@webchick) February 21, 2016

Thank you! Drupal Association and Drupal Indian Community Members for putting together the most fabulous experience for the Drupal enthusiasts of the community. The Venue sponsor IIT Mumbai needs a special mention.

Our Journey @DrupalConAsia, A short message from each of our Drupal Development team and their learning and contributions at DrupalConAsia

Arun - “ It was a fascinating experience where people from  the world all over came to India to celebrate Drupal 8. “

Key Takeaways:

1. Enhanced Git functionality: Drupal 8 provides an opportunity to read the updates from a patch and paste it in the existing code, thus eliminating the chance to miss any code during the copy paste procedure. This is certainly a breaking improvement for updating the patches using a simple code in Drupal 8.

2. The Drupal 8 provides another IDE that helps to customize the rendering process of the text. This is a Drupal complaint editor that supports predefined formatting of spaces, paragraph for the editor.

3. The other aspect that was really helpful was Caching. Drupal 8 supports both Dynamic and Static content in the same page, where Dynamic content changes every time the page is loaded and the static page is cached. This improves site performance considerably.

Sprint Contribution:

1. Created a patch for: Replace deprecated usage of entity_create('node') with a direct call to Node::create() in comment, datetime, editor, field, hal, system, taxonomy, views. This involved overwriting the older entity_create() function by Node::create() in the patch deprecation_entity_create_2672600_6.patch (ref : https://www.drupal.org/node/2672600#comment-10877624)

2. Tested and updated the patch Allow selecting multiple checkboxes on "Modules" page with a single click : This involved testing of the patch and fixing the existing issue in the patch selecting_multiple_checkboxes_2104633_39.patch (ref : https://www.drupal.org/node/2104633#comment-10878586 )

3. Reviewed and tested the patch Deprecate ThemeHandler::setDefault() in favour of configuration and replace usages : This involved reviewing the code and testing the functioning of the patch setdefault_on-2635784.patch (ref: https://www.drupal.org/node/2635784#comment-10878596)

Next Steps & Pledges to Contribution:

1. Engage atleast 3 hours for the Drupal Org every week.

2. Arrange for bi-monthly sprints at the Organisation

3. Grow and be an active member of the Drupal Community in Chennai by conducting bi-monthly Sprints & Camps

Anish - “ It was an opportunity to interact with people from all over the world and build a network. This network is sure to be of great help for future.”

Key Takeaways:

1. Headless Drupal- Drupal 8 supports Ionic Module. Ionic is a good approach for mobile apps as compared to Phonegap as it uses Angular JS in contrast to Phonegap that used JQuery. Angular JS increases the performance. It uses the Rest services, which was originally available in Drupal7 as a contributed module, is a part of Drupal Core.

2. Device responsive images- Drupal 8 has lesser number of contributed modules to manage the Images/Banners. This provides the flexibility of using single image for all devices with the focus area can be manipulated for smaller devices. Also, the best practice for the banners is to use separate image for desktop and smaller devices. Drupal 8 select the images based on the system resolution. This is an improvement as the functionality is available in Drupal Core

Sprint Contribution:

1. Created patch for dropbuttons are broken in Bartik: Developed the patch dropbuttons_bartik_patch.patch. Prior to the patch, for bartik theme, whenever the drop-down is clicked,area containing the Drop-down would expand along with the drop-down window. Currently only the Drop-down would be shown without expanding the area. (ref : https://www.drupal.org/node/2666510)

Next Steps & Pledges to Contribution:

1. Want to contribute by creating a patch every week

2. Share the learnings on latest Drupal related technologies like headless drupal with other members in the organization  

3. Arrange for monthly  sprints at the Organisation

4. Organize a Drupal Camp in Chennai by June 2016

Veera - “Interest and involvement towards contributions has increased.  Want to be in constant touch with the latest in the Drupal issue queues.“

Key Takeaways:

1. Learned about Drupal Community, how they organize themselves.

2. Learned how to identify an issue that I can work on. Understand how the issue queue works.

3. Understand how Automated Testing works and how to create an Automated test. Understood the details of how to write a class and how to write test cases.

4. How to Auto deploy Drupal 8 - Use of scripts and drush to move configurations between environments (dev/stage/prod).

5. Larry’s session helped understand different strategies to Coding standards - how to avoid notice errors while writing code. (Methods with arguments, Declaration of variables, etc.).

Sprint Contribution:

1. Created patch for Deprecate ThemeHandler::setDefault() in favour of configuration and replace usages  - This patch ,setdefault_on-2635784.patch, is compatiable with Drupal 9 :( (ref : https://www.drupal.org/node/2635784#comment-10878596 )

2. Theme kill without file upload - Responded the clarification on the current issue (ref : https://www.drupal.org/node/2668696)

Next Steps & Pledges to Contribution:

1. Share his knowledge on best practices for Coding standards and create a Cheat Sheet on Thursday 25th Feb 2016

2. Sprint on Saturday ( 27/02/2016)- Minimum 10 people from Chennai community

3. My target is to support porting Apache Solr Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and commit 3 hours every week towards this

4. Move UniMity Solutions to Drupal 8 starting on 24th Feb,2016 and completely migrate within 3 weeks

A short message from our Management on What @DrupalCon Asia meant to them. UniMity Solutions were Silver Sponsors of the event.

• DrupalCon is a great place to network.

• Met agencies and development houses looking for partnerships in India.

• We also had our clients at the event!

• Interesting to know that the benefits as well as the challenges of doing business in Drupal are the same for everyone.

• Quality Drupal resources are a concern for all Drupal shops. Intense training seems to the solution that is working for all.

• Met job seekers. Had an opportunity to position our company as one that offers career growth.

• India figures as the second largest contributor to the community. But, our contributions are not in the space of what matters the most. This means that more and more involvement in the critical areas of development and maintenance such as Drupal Core.

• We all have a responsibility to grow the community. We need more and more experienced programmers, technical leads to be part of the community. We need to increase the 'quality' of our contributions.

• Looking forward to the next DrupalCon Asia!