This years European DrupalCon was held in the German city of Munich, which Paul Gregory and I attended to represent Access to learn more about Drupal. With 1,800 attendees, over 100 sessions spread across 8 tracks, as well as numerous other meetings and events there was a lot to pack into 3 days. In the spirit of contributing something back to the Drupal community and keeping these sort of events going Access sponsored the event, which we also did this last year for DrupalCon London.
The opening keynote this time was different in that it featured an interview between Dries Buytaert and Josh Koeing of Pantheon. Having watched a couple of Dries's DrupalCon keynotes over the years (via video) I found this difference, very refreshing. This interview was a good opportunity to break the mold of a standard keynote speech and ask some more probing questions about Drupal and Acquia.
The first part of the session consisted of Dries talking over a video of new features in Drupal 8. There are a few changes going on at the moment in Drupal, as anyone who is keeping up with the Drupal 8 initiatives will know. The blocks and regions interface is getting completely rewritten. The node edit form is being reworked and will now have a right hand sidebar containing some of the associated data of the content type, in much the same way as WordPress does. Another great piece of news it that the popular Views module will be integrated into core.
Another large change is that configuration management is becoming more exportable. The video consisted of a demo of a site builder saving a setting on a development site and then committing and pushing it to the live server using standard source control. Although much of this functionality is far from complete, the direction in which Drupal 8 is moving is very promising. Part of the message of this session and a theme throughout the week was that everybody can get involved in making Drupal 8 awesome with everything from documentation to core code contributions.
What stood out for me during this conference was a great feeling of community. Everyone at the conference worked with Drupal in some way and had solutions or problems that they were willing to share to help other developers. I help run the North West Drupal User Group here in Manchester and it was really amazing to meet people from all over the world who run their own regional user groups.
The feeling of community became especially apparent to me during the Friday code sprint. This was held after the main conference itself and consisted of getting people involved with contributing to Drupal or a contributed module in some way. I spent the time looking into the new templating engine being used with Drupal 8 with a group of fellow developers. Lots of work has already been done on this by some of the core Drupal development team and it was amazing to make my first contributions to a system I have been using for years.
Over the week I sat in many sessions and talked to lots of people about everything from design of websites to server configuration. I have many pages of notes to look through and plenty of new technologies to investigate. I definitely learned a lot from the conference and it was mainly from people who had real world experience of working with websites and wanted to share those experiences.
We hope to see you at the next European DrupalCon in Prague!
