jQuery may not be the talk of the town these days, but it remains an important piece of many Drupal projects. Unfortunately it is also one of the least understood.

This session is for those of us who don’t fully understand how to write custom jQuery for a Drupal 7 project. Too many of us copy an example file, empty the middle, hack away until something works, slap it on the page, and run away screaming. It doesn’t have to be like that.

A basic understanding of best practices and how Drupal works with jQuery goes a long way. It will improve the maintainability and performance of your Drupal project. Even better: it will restore your sanity.

This session will cover the following topics:

• the anatomy of a custom jQuery file within a Drupal theme or module
• what behaviors are, how they work their magic, and how to use them
• the many and best ways to add custom jQuery to the page
• the Drupal JavaScript object and what it does
• the future: jQuery in Drupal 8 (very brief)

This session will not cover these topics in depth:

• AngularJS or other frameworks, libraries
• how to write advanced jQuery like a champion
• headless Drupal