Drupal Developer Days 2015 in Montpellier
Claudine Braendle
Thu, 04/23/2015 - 15:30

Last week, a few coworkers and I went to the Drupal Developer Days in Montpellier. With the main focus being on sprints, contribution to core and on pushing the release of Drupal 8 forward, the Dev Days are a great event for drupalistas to meet the community, share knowledge and work on Drupal.

The DDD was the best drupal related event I’ve been to so far. Its relative small number of attendees - about 300 instead of the 2000+ that attend the european DrupalCons - made it effortless to meet new people. The event was well organised, with good infrastructure and freshly cooked meals every day.

As a site builder interested in contributing more to the community I started the first sprint day in the mentoring sprints learning the best practices for contributing to Drupal. I was surprised at the kindness and patience from the mentors who spend all their time making new members feel welcome at the expense of having fun with their own code and projects.

During the sprints, Josef spent a lot of time motivating people who want to help with the #d8rules initiative - you can read an update here. Emma worked on moving forward Bartik issues as she is the maintainer of the theme. She also mentored and helped people who worked on frontend issues.

After 3 days of sprinting, sessions started on Thursday with a keynote from Angie Byron (webchick) about the Evolution of the Drupal Community. My favorite talk was “Drupal 8 Entity API” by Wolfgang Ziegler (fago) that gave a good overview of the changes in the entity system and the underlying structure on which the whole system is built. It was well presented and clearly structured, so that even non-developers like me understood the topic well.

The Amazee team was well represented at the sessions. Michael (Schnitzel) presented a talk relating Amazee Labs’ accumulated knowledge and experience on multilingual sites in Drupal 7 and the great changes to come to Drupal 8. Drupal Multilingual best practices

Bastian (dasrecht) presented Logfile Handling - Are you visualizing your logfiles? and got great feedback from the community, during the session as well as on social media.

And finally Josef co-presented a session on the rules module  Writing plug-ins with #d8rules with Klaus Purer (klausi) and Wolfgang Ziegler (fago). The amount of work that goes into porting a module of that size as well as the changes in structure were explained as well as the methods to port current Rules plugins to D8.

As at every Drupal event, we spend a fair amount of our evenings socialising and discovering the city. Montpellier is a beautiful city although a bit neglected in some areas. The weather was sunny and springier than what we are used to in the north at that time of year, and some crazy folks even dared to go swim in the mediterranean. The Montpelliérains (people from Montpellier) appear to be helpful and accomodating. And to top it all, french food everywhere!

All in all the event was a success personally as well as for the community. In one week, 138 patches were committed to Drupal 8 and by the end of the week only 38 critical bugs remained. You can also find photos on our flickr page .