My first Drupalcon. Actually my first Drupal community event. Here's what I think you have missed.
I was impressed with the vibrant community of developers, digital agencies and business owners. A lot of content was provided in different tracks, both business oriented as technical deep dives. Drupal trainings were held and there was a lot of active contribution happening at the event. It was so good to see our talented and super ambitious team host several sessions, and obviously it was great fun to be in Amsterdam with the team for the week!
Inspired by the future of Drupal
And then there was the “Driesnote”... A full auditorium on the second - early - morning. All of us very curious to learn about the vision for the future of Drupal in Drupal 9 and beyond. My take-aways?
- Ease of use
The learning curve for Drupal is currently rather steep, starters have a hard time finding their way, while advanced users are delighted about the richness of features and capabilities. It’s a very different learning curve from other CMS like Wordpress or proprietary solutions like Adobe or Sitecore. One of the strategic tracks will be about initiatives to make it easier to get started for different roles: developers, editors and marketers.
Drupal 9 is open for development now, so the community can start working on it in advance.
- Effortless upgrades for a sustainable platform and low TCO
Upgrading from Drupal7 to 8 can be quite painful for organisations. Lessons have been learned, and moving from Drupal 8 to 9 should be much more simple. For Drupal 9, 16% of the top 200 modules is ready, 50% requires only minor changes (as in a few lines of code). Drupal 9 is open for development now, so the community can start working on it in advance. By the time Drupal 9 is there, this number should already be much higher. As this is a very important differentiator as an open source platform, a strategic track will continue on this subject.
- Focus on data management
More and more data is being gathered. Not only the amount of content produced is growing, the amount of visitors coming online is even growing faster. And the amount of data we capture from these visitors as well. Think of all behavior on your site, 3rd party data, social data, geolocation data, and all online ànd offline interactions. Data security, privacy and Digital asset management are important drivers on this track. As well as new technologies to stay on top of these gigantic data volumes and unstructured data formats.
- Ready for a new era of UI and a post browser world.
With more and more focus on headless applications, api-first and decoupled architectures, we start preparing for a post-browser world. Today, 60% of the world is online. By 2025 we can expect 4 billion more people online as well as an exponential growth in the number of devices: from 20 billion today to 300 billion in some years. So your digital platforms better be prepared to move post browsers.
Drupal remains an ideal fit for midmarket organizations looking to invest in a sustainable digital platform that can integrate with their data and martech stack.
Mostly, I was very happy to see how the vision for Drupal aligns smoothly with our vision to build Open Digital Experiences on Dropsolid Experience Cloud.
Thank you! We boosted Drupal core by 2190 minutes.
Drupalcon, you were amazing! It is so great to see all these live contribution sessions happening at the event. A big thank you for helping us donate 37 hours contrib time.
Drupal is in our company DNA. We find it important to contribute to the community: as a Diamond Sponsor to the event and in our daily work. Also as our booth give-away we wanted to make a difference. Here’s what we did: at our booth, all attendees had the opportunity to fill out a short survey for which we donate 15 minutes of Core Contribution time for each survey. And yes, we’re excited about the result: we will donate 37 hours of development to Drupal core!
What we were doing there? DXP for Drupal.
We were proud to be here as the only European Diamond Sponsor. Being here with our team of developers and digital advisors, it was a great opportunity for us to connect with different people in the Drupal community and talk about their challenges and the tools they are using. We hosted 5 sessions, all of them in some way demonstrating our expertise and offering to the different stakeholders in building digital experiences. Click to watch the recordings:
- Stop Buying Drupal Websites, Buy Open Digital Experiences to Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Dominique De Cooman, Founder and CEO Dropsolid, talked about the differences between Drupal being “just a CMS” for “just building a website,” and how Drupal can be a truly comprehensive Digital Experience Manager.
- The Battle of the Local Development Tools [Panel Discussion]
Mattias Michaux, Drupal Developer, and DevOps Engineer joined a Panel on local development tools.
- Machine Learning: Creating More Relevant Search Results With “Learn To Rank”
Nick Veenhof, CTO Dropsolid, hosted the opening session about machine learning. More specific about how can you use it for a pervasive problem, namely the relevance of your internal site search.
- Drupal SEO Pitfalls and How To Avoid Them
Wouter De Bruycker, SEO Specialist and Brent Gees, Drupal Architect, explained how Drupal can be your perfect technical SEO platform, but to get the most out of it, you have to make sure it’s set up as it should be for search engines.
Overall, we’ve received great feedback. Drupal remains an ideal fit for midmarket organizations looking to invest in a sustainable digital platform that can integrate with their data and martech stack. It’s future-proof, will support effortless updates, can handle the complexity of multiple markets, languages and various (future) device interfaces. A Drupal based Digital Experience Platform can be a differentiator for companies who want to move fast and stay ahead of their competition in a sustainable fast pace.
To re-use a quote from the Driesnote: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Next events?
We’ll be back at Drupal Dev Days in Ghent, 6-10 April 2020. Hope to see you there!