Many designers are praising the benefits of designing atomically. Doing so focuses more on individual, reusable components rather than the pages they fill. Taking this same approach throughout the development process can provide many of the same benefits to developers. The most important of which is a well-organized and maintainable codebase, regardless of how enormous it becomes or how many developers are involved.

Atomic Drupal Development will walk through every step of building an individual component the Drupal way. From back-end (hook_theme implementations, render arrays, and preprocess functions) to front-end (component-specific templates, jQuery, and Sass). It will touch on the best practices for each and how to keep them organized amongst each other.

This session should be especially helpful for:

• developers in smaller organizations that often have to cover a wider range
• back-end developers of that want to set their front-end friends up for success
• front-end developers that hate asking the back-end team to make tiny changes

This session will not cover in depth:

• Web Components (custom DOM elements... that’s different)
• the many and best ways to place the components on the page