DrupalAsia Connect

Website for DrupalAsia Connect 2027 — the first pan-Asia Drupal event, at IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 21–23 January 2027.

Production: https://drupalasia.org

Stack

Drupal	11.3 (PHP 8.4, MariaDB 11.8)
Base theme	event_horizon 2.x
Site theme	web/themes/custom/drupal_india_connect
Page building	Drupal Canvas 1.5
Event data	event_platform_helper (event term, dates, location)
Also	webform, smart_date, klaro (cookie consent)

There are no custom modules. All custom code is the sub-theme.

Local development

Requires DDEV.

ddev start && ddev composer install

The site needs a database — it is not built from config alone (see Content lives in the database). Import a dump from production or from a teammate:

ddev import-db --file=path/to/dump.sql.gz

If you use Claude Code, pulling a fresh copy from production is scripted as the db-sync-from-live skill — it backs up your local DB first, dumps the remote one over SSH into a throwaway temp location, cleans that up after downloading, imports locally, and checks for config drift. See .claude/skills/db-sync-from-live/SKILL.md. Connection details are supplied per-machine in a gitignored .claude/db-sync.local.env, never committed.

Then:

ddev drush cr && ddev launch

Local site: https://drupal-india-connect.ddev.site

settings.local.php

web/sites/default/settings.local.php is gitignored and holds local-only overrides. It is not required, but CSS/JS aggregation is worth turning off while doing front-end work — aggregated asset URLs carry long query strings that some content blockers drop, which makes stylesheet changes look like they are not applying:

$config['system.performance']['css']['preprocess'] = FALSE;
$config['system.performance']['js']['preprocess'] = FALSE;

On the production server the same file holds the database credentials, hash_salt and trusted_host_patterns. Do not commit it.

Layout

config/sync/                     exported configuration
design-system/                   brand system — tokens, guidelines, prototype
recipes/summit/                  site install recipe
web/themes/custom/
  drupal_india_connect/
    components/                  SDC components (see below)
    css/base.css                 design tokens, colour ramps
    css/global.css               overrides on top of event_horizon
    images/                      design assets that deploy with the code
    js/section-anchors.js        homepage anchor ids + scroll offset
    drupal_india_connect.theme   announcement bar, copyright, trademark

Design system

design-system/ holds the brand system: the colour, type and spacing tokens, guideline cards, component patterns, fonts and icons. Start with design-system/readme.md.

The guidelines are standalone HTML — open any of design-system/guidelines/*.card.html in a browser, no build step. The approved homepage prototype the build was matched against is at design-system/reference/DrupalAsia Connect Home.dc.html.

The one rule worth knowing before you touch colour: primary and secondary are derived, not written. Each ramp is a hue/saturation/lightness triple, and the steps are computed from it with calc(). Never hand-write a step, and never paste a hex into a component.

If you use Claude Code, the same system is wired up as a skill (/drupalasia-connect-design) — see .claude/skills/drupalasia-connect-design/SKILL.md.

Where the system and the built theme disagree, the theme wins; the build has deliberately diverged in a few places, listed at the end of design-system/readme.md.

Components

Standard SDC: a .component.yml schema beside a .twig template, with any .css/.js of the same name picked up automatically.

Components written for this site: hero, eyebrow, fact, media-placeholder, announcement-bar. The rest came with the theme bundle. Anything the base theme already provides should be used as-is — section, group, heading, text, button, badge and accordion all come from event_horizon.

Content lives in the database

The homepage is a Canvas page (canvas_page entity 1, "Home", 114 components). Its content is not in config/sync and is not in git.

That means:

• A fresh checkout plus drush cim gives you a working site with an empty homepage. You need a database.
• Copy changes, menu links, taxonomy terms and node content all move between environments by database sync, not by deploy.
• Only theme files and configuration are deployed, and only by tagging a release (see below) — merging to main on its own ships nothing.

Deployment

Deploys are cut from a tag, never from a branch. Pushing to main does not ship anything by itself:

git tag 1.2.3        # semver, no `v` prefix — see .github/workflows/deploy.yml
git push origin 1.2.3

That push triggers .github/workflows/deploy.yml, which SSHes to the server and checks out that tag in detached HEAD (so a deploy can move backwards, not just forwards — the same workflow, run manually with an existing tag as input, is also how you roll back), then runs composer install --no-dev, a pre-deploy DB backup, drush updb, drush cim, drush cr.

Because the deploy runs drush cim, anything you changed through the admin UI must be exported to config/sync or the deploy will revert it. Check before tagging:

ddev drush config:status

See CLAUDE.md for how to export safely — a bare drush cex in this project has staged unrelated files and resurrected deleted configuration that broke production deploys.

main has GitHub branch protection: force-push and branch deletion are blocked at the remote. That protects history on the branch itself; it has no bearing on when a deploy happens, since only a tag push does that.

Before going live

Still outstanding:

• Code of conduct and Privacy policy pages. The footer links to both are disabled because the pages do not exist; the privacy node (/privacy-policy) is an unedited Drupal stub.
• News — the section and its nav links were removed because there are no published articles.
• Sponsors — none yet. The band is an invitation to sponsor; the sponsor view stays in place for when there are real ones.
• Mobile — the four-up "Why attend" grid does not collapse on phones.