Session

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.

I think we've all heard the mantra of trying to "get off of the island", but was that a promise that only core and/or really involved contributors took to heart? What about the regular ole' Drupal developer who doesn't maintain any modules but likes the framework, community, and multitudes of contributed code? Have we helped them get off of the island or at least peek out of their periscope?

The first step in this 12-step process is to actually go to another gathering where people talk about things not only related to Drupal. I've been to as many of those gatherings as I can attend recently, and unfortunately, most everyone I talked to thinks Drupal is really insular and they haven't had a chance to interact with many or any Drupal developers. I found the Drupal community to be very friendly and welcoming, but why do other developers not think so?

Also, unfortunately, these same developers have made fun of Drupal in their presentations as they thought maybe there were no Drupal developers in the audience. Think again, buster! I've gone up to the presenter afterwards to ask them about their experience with Drupal, and they usually walk back their statements because they don't know much about Drupal. This is partially due to the fact that it's hard for them to meet anyone who uses Drupal a lot.

And it isn't just an issue with Drupal; the problem exists across the PHP world as compared to, say JavaScript, where many nebulous JavaScript meetups exist and are well attended. Why is it so hard to just talk plain PHP with someone?

In this session we will go over:

• My experience searching for other PHP communities beyond Drupal
• Laravel and the awesome LaraCon Online conference you can attend for only $25
• Symfony and the awesome Symfony conference you can attend in SF (just passed for 2018)
• General PHP user groups and advice on organizing a meetup
• Podcasts and newsletters surrounding the communities mentioned
• A redesign of http://php.ug/ using Laravel + Vue and how you can help push that project along
• Any experiences from other attendees in talking to other PHP communities
• How DrupalCamps can evolve to become more general in nature and welcome other PHP developers