And Drupalcon Prague is a wrap. It was a good one. Some of my highlights:

Media core conversation

• Presented by Janez Urevc
• Video and slides

Although the code and architecture apparently leaves much to be desired, the top user-facing feature requests have all been added to Drupal 8. Multi file uploads, WYSIWYG integration, re-use of media through a site-wide media library are all in place.

The conclusion was that there is no clear overall picture of all the moving parts on the API level. A brainstorm session was held on sprint Friday. Have a look at the proposed architecture.

As a user experience designer, it was great to see that Janez had conducted user research and that the sprint focussed on getting a shared understanding first, possible solutions second.

Keynote: Experience Driven Open Source

• By Aral Balkan
• Video

Aral made a compelling case for the importance great user experience in open source projects. All those awesome free web services are free because you provide your data. Owning your data is an important topic. So yes, there’s definately room for what Aral calls “Experience-driven Open”. Read more about his Codename Prometheus project here.

My take-away for Drupal here was yet more confirmation that we really do need a more usable and useful initial setup for Drupal 8…

Viva Snowman!

• Presented by Jeff Eaton and yours truly
• Video

The idea for a core install profile that serves a more specific use case has been around for a couple of years. It’s only now with Drupal 8 that we actually have enough tools and features in core that such a specific configuration is now possible.

It was fun to see the room agreeing that this is a good idea yet immediately go looking for ways how to keep it outside core :-)

Has to be in the box to be available out of box though! Keep an eye on the Snowman discussion group.

Future-friendly evolution and the Drupal release cycle

• Presented by Larry Garfield
• Video

Larry took a packed room of core developers through how we have been working now, roughly summarized as a three year cycle of slash-and-burn-out without really evolving the APIs of the current release.

But what if we did allow/force ourselves to improve and evolve Drupal 8 instead of directly diving into Drupal 9 to reinvent and improve all the things?

Take 6 months for each 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 release and allow new features and API improvements. Open up Drupal 9 development not before 1 year of Drupal 8 being released.

We’ll see more discussion around this topic for sure. Larry provided us with a great framework for how we can live up to the level of maturity the Drupal project has achieved by now.

Announcing Drupalcon Amsterdam

A personal highlight was announcing Drupalcon Amsterdam for 2014 with Baris and Bert. Our orange suits performed well it seems :-) Looking forward to yet another greatest Drupalcon ever in Amsterdam.

Meeting all of you

Drupal.org content working group meetings, beers in the lobby, sponsoring ycheds new laptop, late night walks through Prague or coding in the coder lounge…

The best thing of course is meeting all of you. So great to talk, drink and dine with the real humans behind all those nicknames in IRC.

So many very special people with a heart, it’s inspriring and energizing. Thanks all.

Tags: drupaldrupalplanet