Tuesday, 22nd September 2015Remote DrupalCon - Day 1
Release Drupal 8 and momentum will come

“Is Drupal losing momentum? Yes”.

Not the words I was expecting to hear (happens to me a lot this year) come out of Drupal’s founder Dries Buytaert as he took to the stage in Barcelona for this year’s European wing of the DrupalCon conference for his regular “Driesnote”, but as I sit here back in rainy England after having to sell my DrupalCon tickets last week I certainly empathised. Dries explains this lull happens every time at this point between major version releases and assures us a big spike will come when Drupal 8 is released, so all we can do at the moment is work as fast as possible to get Drupal 8 out.

<shameless_plug> I’m certainly excited about working on Drupal 8 projects, so do get in contact if I can be of help with any architectural, development, or other interesting work which is hopefully changing the world for the better in some way - I’d love not to miss another DrupalCon ;) Shameless plug over, it’s on with the keynote...

Move to a more sustainable release process

Once Drupal 8 is out there Dries suggests using a system of feature branching so that you can always be shippable (http://buytaert.net/always-be-shippable). This seems like a much more sensible approach than the current one, enabling timed releases and adaptability as different features encounter different issues along the way hopefully meaning they won’t have as much impact on each other as they have in the current release cycle so we don’t have to experience this huge effort to get everything working all at the same time going forward.

Whilst I think this is a good approach I fear this opening up to a huge amount of functionality being able to potentially go into core as it’s easier to develop, which is where the question of different cores for different uses comes in. There was a blog post a while back about how Drupal could evolve more like Linux has with distributions - personally I see that more attractive than putting all the things in core over time, especially if one of the major focus of our efforts in the future is to be for the non-coders as Dries goes on to cover in his keynote.

Put non-coders first to increase our impact

Dries continues to cover Drupal’s market position, suggesting our focus should now be on the user experience to make it easy to do things with Drupal. There is no point in providing functionality for non-coders if they can’t figure out how to use it so personally I’m glad to see a focus on this, and with the growing community of front-end developers, UX people and other job roles I daren’t guess as I’ll no doubt offend as it’s not my area of expertise - I believe it’ll gradually happen.

Whilst WordPress has focused heavily on user experience, Drupal has focused much more on the developer experience. Now we have achieved so much on the developer experience side of things it is time to focus on the user experience, and to cut back from comparing to WordPress as Drupal has moved on much further in terms of technology capabilities and instead to focus on the majority of sites out there which currently have no CMS. By focusing on the usability side it will be much easier for people to see how advanced Drupal is and actually make use out of it themselves instead of being baffled by terminology and ‘Drupalisms’. 

Drupal 8 will be the go-to platform for sites and apps

Dries then talks about Drupal’s technological relevance in the future as many other front-end frameworks appear and develop and are certainly here to stay. He outlines the future not as one of a completely de-coupled Drupal as you miss out on a lot of Drupal’s goodness by taking that approach and instead talks about ‘progressive decoupling’ where Drupal is much more integrated into the front-end process. I tend to agree here and put it down to current lack of appreciation of Drupal’s capabilities simply because there are so many, and as Drupal 8 is adopted more I am sure more examples will fuel the interest and we will see some interesting ‘mash-ups’ - if I had unlimited time & funds I’d certainly be hooking up views to my Oculus VR - do feel free to sponsor that one lol!

Here’s the slides from Dries’s DrupalCon Barcelona 2015 Driesnote:

Slides: http://acquia.slides.com/drupalcon/driesnote2015

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v_rv346qmM

Other sessions from Day One

Once the keynote had finished I was pleasantly surprised to see the sessions appear almost immediately on youtube, here’s a link to the Drupal Association’s video list where they appear:

https://www.youtube.com/user/DrupalAssociation/videos

DrupalCon Barcelona 2015: The Prenote!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJmfIi_YTvQ

Always a fun kick-off to DrupalCon, always a laugh and a song, watch it if you didn’t get to go along!

Content Strategy for Drupal.org

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_9qBGXqgJg

For a long time now Drupal.org, the online home of the Drupal community, has been maintained mostly by the community however recently thanks to funding more and more is being done to improve the site which is the biggest online Drupal site there is. Tatiana (@tvnweb) who works for the Drupal Association as product owner of drupal.org details the process of the work done so far to categorise the content and uses of drupal.org and covers the current and future developments.

The main area of change is around managing of projects which is moving to organic groups and should provide a much more comprehensive way of collaborating online than the current functionality provides. I am certainly enjoying all the improvements which have been regularly appearing of late and am excited about the growth that these changes will hopefully provide by making it easier to see, understand, and become part of the Drupal community, something which has been up until now quite a mystery to many people!

How to diversify your business beyond Drupal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QThwLuXHSNs

This was a journey through the trials and tribulations of Amazee Labs as they grew into different service offerings and geographical locations - always interesting to hear the issues surrounding business and a lot to be learned from one of Europe’s top Drupal agencies! 

Winning and delivering big projects from a small agency perspective

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkYPWn0qSuA

An interesting take on how to approach the business scene from a different angle focusing on your individual strengths as an agile, small business.

Configuration Deployment Best Practices in Drupal 8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F5glFDan1Q

If you want to get down-and-dirty with CMI on Drupal 8 then this is the session for you. See how to move config from one environment to another, something which was nigh-on impossible in Drupal 7 so yay to CMI!

Solving Drupal Performance and Scalability Issues

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e2_S0E4OAM

Tine Sørensen, whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting at a few Drupal events but sadly missing out this time :(, delivers a useful session covering many issues of dealing with performance and scalability from both the technical and human side of things. Often there’s many low-hanging fruit but it’s sometimes hard to get developers to work on them as they want to work on perhaps things which means they can code more like refining sql queries coming out of Drupal. Instead of this, Tine’s approach is to get the low-hanging fruit out of the way then look at the situation again as there’s hidden costs of changing what comes out of Drupal in terms of sustainability. Tine mentions the graphics library GD being one culprit, with ImageMagick being a replacement using much less resources. 

There’s way too many good bits of information in Tine’s session for me to highlight here so do watch the session as often many of these easy-to-rectify things are overlooked and the blame is put on Drupal for being slow when all it takes is a little tweaking to get it running just fine!

Drupal 8 theming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m6WR7e7qwU

I thought I’d finish off the day by watching MortenDK’s theming talk. For the first time in a long time I was sitting there wondering what had happened as there seemed to be a calmer Morten presenting - a testament to the work that’s gone into changing how front-end developers work with Drupal and I could empathise with him when he says he now looks at Drupal 8 code with a sense of relief as that’s how it also feels from a back-end developer’s point of view especially if like me you came originally from an object-oriented way of working 15 years ago then had to learn Drupal’s hook system!

Final thoughts

Drupal 8 is a game-changer and I’m excited about the possibilities - especially as the community grows around the world. Meanwhile, it’s back to youtube until I pass out on this no-frills DrupalCon experience - sad to be missing out on all the networking & fun times but sh*t happens, one lives and learns... ;)

(Click here to read 'Remote DrupalCon - Day 2')
tags: drupalcondrupalDrupal PlanetPlanet Drupal