Not the city but the people
I spent four nights in Barcelona but as for the landscape, I pretty much got to a conference center that was just the same as any other center and a hotel that was just the same as any other hotel. But for me the event was not about the city but the people attending.
Having worked in Drupal Core teams actively for some years I meet other developers and specialists on weekly bases in online meetings. With the Starshot initiative going on, with some people I even have regular meetings twice a week. DrupalCon is an excellent place to meet those people live or at least some of them. What a great feeling to actually meet someone after a couple of years of regular meetings over the internet. And also to meet your friends and acquaintances from the previous DrupalCons of course.
This time I had prepared a checklist of people I should have a chat with – to talk about a common task, ask advice for a project, to offer testing for a module or just to catch up. And by the last day of the trip I was happy to see all the names on the list checked, while having also made a number of new friends.
The cutting edge Drupal – a two edged sword
But it’s not only the people – we are also interested in what they do. This Summer and Autumn has really rushed the tech forward on many fronts. After the Starshot initiative was announced at DrupalCon Portland in the Spring of 2024 the community has really pulled together trying to make the deadline of Drupal CMS release in mid-January 2025. A lot of usability improvements have been planned to the Drupal CMS package, most important of which is the Experience Builder. Experience Builder allows easy but powerful wysiwyg page building experience with cutting edge components.
Experience Builder will unleash the creativity of the content editor, but Drupal has many faces. While one module or recipe will emphasize freedom another will be built on strict standards and structure. I myself can’t say which excites me more, the free flow of Drupal CMS and Experience Builder or the Schema.org Blueprints that automates Drupal content building using the Schema.org standard information structures. Sticking to the predefined content standards will make the site content extremely compatible with search engines and other automated tools. I expect it will probably also help with AI tools as well.
So I am looking at two seemingly opposite approaches to web content and love them both – they both have their uses but may even work together at the same time. Building components respecting the standards and fluently organizing them into pages using a modern page builder is something where Drupal can easily manage both in the future.
Being the one who always complains
For a few months I have been working as a member of Drupal Starshot’s (now officially named Drupal CMS) accessibility team. As Drupal CMS extends Drupal Core with a selection of prominent contributed modules we also wanted to expand the accessibility audits.
Dupal has a lot of great contributed modules and a lot of good people have poured their time and hearts into making them. Those modules that will be included in the Drupal CMS have now been under public spotlight for several months. As some of them have only one or two maintainers, I can imagine it’s a lot of pressure. (There are more people contributing code of course, but a maintainer has to make the decisions which fixes and changes go into the releases.) And now – on top of everything else – there are also me and my friends testing for accessibility and asking to fix this and that to meet some WCAG criteria.
Here the live meetings at DrupalCon help a lot. It’s one thing to send a formal sheet of accessibility issues by email to the maintainer and say: please fix this – and something quite different to have a cup of coffee with the person and say: Hi, nice to meet you. Has your module been audited for accessibility? If you like, I could do it. How would you like to get the list of findings?
A lot of developers are not so great with people skills and under pressure worse. I myself often say that I’m good with numbers and bad with people, but I try to learn. And I think I’m making some progress, as is Drupal’s accessibility.
Read also:
DrupalCon Barcelona: Reflections on Community Evolution and Business Insights
Photo Bram Driesen, licenced as deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 The original image was edited by narrowing it.
