Attention "dusty"!
This article is already a little outdated and may contain information that no longer corresponds to the current status of the topic.
This year's European Drupal Conference took place in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, from September 10 - 14, 2018. With over 1,000 participants from all over the world, the open source conference was organized 100% on a voluntary basis and thanks to sponsorship money and offered a diverse program for Drupal developers, decision-makers and users on 8 tracks. In this blog post I would like to summarize my personal highlights.
Recap
The Drupal community took a big risk with Drupal 8. The technically necessary modernization of the Drupal core and the associated break in backward compatibility as well as the neglect of user-centric features has meant that many Drupal users have not been able to migrate to Drupal 8 to date, or have even shied away from a migration altogether.
The fear of having to rebuild (and pay for) everything again with Drupal 9 has also prevented many upcoming migrations to date. Drupal 8 is therefore mainly used where it can play to its strengths. In large, often new applications!
The community and the companies supporting the community have now realized that this will drive many small and medium-sized projects away from Drupal in the medium term and thus endanger Drupal as an internationally frequently installed CMS.
DriesNote - setting the course
As usual, the founder and inventor of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, presented the status of the current core initiatives in his well-received keynote and shared some remarkable and sometimes surprising information. Here is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXB0sNreSlM&feature=youtu.be
https://dri.es/state-of-drupal-presentation-september-2018
Drupal 7, 8 and 9
The biggest surprise was certainly the announcement of Drupal 9 as the logical continuation of the changed release cycle in 2020!
This timing is not entirely coincidental: Drupal 8 is based on Symfony 3, which will only receive security updates from November 2020 and will no longer be supported from November 2021. The switch to Symfony 4 represents a change that is not backwards compatible and therefore justifies a new major release of Drupal. In the course of this, all API functions currently marked as deprecated will also be removed from the Drupal code.
Anyone who has made the leap to Drupal 8 (arocom has been developing all new projects with Drupal 8 for 2.5 years!) can look forward to Drupal 9. Since the basic architecture, unlike from 7 to 8, will not be changed, it will be possible to upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 with manageable effort. Essentially, various adaptations to Symfony 4 are required, as well as the rewriting of code that is based on announced functionality, the use of which should already be avoided today. The Drupal "investment trap" has thus been solved once and for all!
There is also good news for operators of Drupal 7 websites. Support has been extended by a full year, meaning that Drupal 7 projects will receive security updates until November 2021. In addition, commercial LTS programs, as currently for Drupal 6, have been announced.
Further details can be found here: https://dri.es/drupal-7-8-and-9
Drupal.org GitLab integration
A major change is coming for developers who are involved in the development of Drupal or modules and themes on drupal.org: Drupal's Git infrastructure is switching completely to GitLab, which will significantly change the way developers work. Instead of the patch workflow established by Drupal, the generally common way of working in open source projects will now be used, namely working with feature branches or forks and pull requests (or merge requests in GitLab nomenclature). In addition, the tried-and-tested GitLab infrastructure for CI/CD will be introduced to Drupal.
This will significantly lower the barrier to entry for developers, as they will be able to use the familiar workflows of other open source projects with Drupal, as they are already familiar with from GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.
Technology - Decoupled & more
The technical development of Drupal never stands still, end users as well as site builders and developers benefit from ongoing improvements. At Drupal, they are driven by so-called Core Initiatives, small teams of developers who work together on specific topics. There are currently 12 such initiatives for the Drupal core.
Independently of the Drupal core, there are currently a number of other efforts aimed at making Drupal even more flexible and simple. The objectives can perhaps be summarized in three directions:
With the end user / editor in mind
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Media library in the core
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Layout builder for designing pages
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Modernization of the administration interface
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Improving the usability of content forms, e.g. through modern editors (Gutenberg, Elementor) or Paragraphs extensions
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Workflows / workspaces
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Out-of-the-box (Drupal pre-installation with test data)
Improvements for Sitebuilder
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Automatic updates
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Stable migration from Drupal 6 / 7
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Long-term support (LTS)
New features for developers
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Composer support
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Improved configuration management
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Modernization Javascript (ES6, React instead of jQuery)
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API first (REST, JSON API, GraphQL support)
Another major topic for Drupal is decoupled architectures, which are supported by different interfaces and technologies and thus make it possible, for example, to use Drupal as a central content hub, while the front end can be implemented for specific target groups and devices.
Drupal Business
As CEO of arocom, I had the opportunity to talk to many interesting company representatives.
Marketing Drupal, USPs
The evaluation of Drupal is made much easier with this guide https://www.drupal.org/docs/official_docs/en/_evaluator_guide.html and the Quick-Start Script included for the first time in Drupal 8.6. However, this is not enough to convince potential Drupal users of Drupal. After all, Drupal can be adapted to any requirements with thousands of extensions. As Drupal agencies, we are therefore required to introduce Drupal to people interested in web technology at schools, colleges and universities at an early stage, as well as to show company representatives and other web agencies successful projects and explain the USPs of Drupal.
Enterprise Drupal
It is also important to understand that successful projects do not only depend on the out-of-the-box features of a CMS. As Drupal agencies, we have to create realistic and sustainable added value with our projects. This includes aligning our range of services with the actual success factors: support model, security model, migration, efficient time to market, continuous integration and digitalization consulting. Last but not least, we need to talk about our successes and communicate them to the world. Admittedly, as a technology-oriented community, this is no easy task.
After 8 years, I was able to speak to Dries Buytaert in person again at the CEO dinner and thank him for his motivating keynote.
Drupal Diversity
When you realize that there are currently over 100,000 active Drupal supporters around the world, you can appreciate the importance of the Drupal community in spreading world-opening values.
In this respect, it is not surprising that "diversity" was one of the central community topics at DrupalEurope 2018. Diversity in a social community has always been practiced in the Drupal community and has never been questioned. There were several sessions at the conference that showed me once again what a pioneering role Drupal plays in issues of social equality. I am delighted to be part of this community with arocom! Because as a company, we also live these values by giving people equal opportunities.
Conclusion
In addition to the realization that vegan food can also taste good and the anticipation of the next European conference in Amsterdam, one thing remains above all: motivation.
After years of concentrating on technical basics, I am looking forward to the next few years with Drupal 8 and 9. We will build on the foundation we have now created and move closer to the needs of our users and new user groups.
The goal is to create unique added value with Drupal.
PS: If you would like to test Drupal 8, you can now do so easily within 2 minutes: https://www.drupal.org/docs/official_docs/en/_evaluator_guide.html
PSS: If you would like to test or use the Drupal installation for conference management, you can get it here: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupaleurope_website
