drupal community

Drupal is better than ever, but whether it is more successful is questionable. A pincer threatens Drupal. One side, Drupal's own power and complexity, discourages new users and contributors. The other, proprietary platforms, increasingly squeeze out custom web development through sheer economies of scale. Retreating into Drupal's new fortress, the enterprise, leaves many of us on the outside— and it doesn't escape the pincer, which will continue until there's nowhere left to hide.

I joined the Drupal community about 7 years ago at a moment in my life when I was looking for more than just a CMS. Drupal and the Drupal community have filled needs for me that extend beyond the technical requirements of a client project. Sometime, I wonder if I expect too much from a loosely structured community that came about to create and support an open source software project.

Any Free/Libre Open Source Software project will have elements of do-ocracy (rule of those who do the work) but not all decisions should devolve to implementors.  Rather, a basic principle is that decisions should be made by the people who are most affected.

It can sometimes feel overwhelming to keep up with evolving technology. If you’re worried that migrating your organization’s Drupal 6 or 7 site to the latest version, Drupal 8, is going to cause headaches, this session is for you. Major benefits of migrating your site to D8 include: built-in responsiveness for mobile and other platforms, faster page loads and optimized performance, and a more streamlined and intuitive content editing experience. But change can be scary, I know.

Volunteering is cool, nobody questions that, but we are all pragmatic humans and thus need motivation. In this session I will share with you reflections derived from my experience of contribution to open source. Mostly it has been Drupal (6 years) and just recently initiated Gentoo Linux (6 months). During these 6 years I grew as a contributor to the status of a co-maintainer of Webform 8.x module.

Drupal is an extremely flexible system. To achieve this, various layers of abstractions were built into it. A lot of concepts were created to explain these abstractions. Unfortunately, they are not always intuitive. This session aims to explain the basic building blocks for assembling a Drupal site and how they relate to each other. Many examples will be presented to help you understand Drupal and why it is so powerful.

Learning objectives:

Watch the session video here.

Diverse communities are strong communities, and Drupal is less diverse than it should be. Open source has the potential to transform society for the better, but we are currently missing out on much of that opportunity. We can make the Drupal project better by making the Drupal community a place where a wider range of people can participate and contribute their knowledge and skills.

Cue Pink Floyd music and me wailing on my guitar like a Pied Piper trying to lead you out of your insular ways. I don't mean to be harsh, but any time I try to get a "Drupal developer" to go to another PHP-related meetup no one wants to join me, even when there are free beer and food involved.

There are many ways you learn anything new that interests you, like attending classes for the same, talking to ones who have done it already etc. But what I believe is that the best way to learn something is by doing it practically!

Here, I am talking about learnings you can get while organising an event (example local Drupal Camps). In my opinion, there are so many things one can acquire when working towards making the event successful and that is what I will be presenting in this session.

Session Overview:

SimplyTest.me has been a long-standing tool that has served Drupal community members with  an easy-to-use tool for creating Drupal sandboxes. This session walks through how people use SimplyTest and shares the various features of SimplyTest and the current underlying technical architecture, including the distributed computing infrastructure, use of LXC, and the Drupal 7 based provisioning platform. Based on lessons learned and emerging technology, a roadmap has been created to both modernize and evolve SimplyTest.