As active members of the Drupal community, we can’t miss the upcoming chance to meet developers and fans of this CMS in Vienna, Austria. And the opportunity can’t be better - several days of contributing to Drupal, listening to insightful presentations, and participating in Birds of a Feather sessions, which everyone can join and propose their ideas to discuss. Let’s look deeper at some of the points of the rich program of Drupal Dev Days.
Meet Drupal fans and get involved in the open source software development
Drupal Developer Days Vienna 2023 will gather Drupal professionals (developers, testers, project managers, and company owners) and enthusiasts of the open source solutions. There will be a chance not only to meet each other but also to develop and improve this CMS together. Contribution Sprints will take place every day during the event and give the opportunity to fix real Drupal issues, test different solutions, and design new improvements.
Not familiar with the contributing concept? Throughout the duration of the event, there will be mentors available to help you. They will guide you through the contribution processes and tools used. Also, these volunteers will help you choose your first tasks to do, considering your level of advancement.
Photo of participants of Drupal Developer Days in Ghent in 2022. Source: Facebook.
As gold sponsors of the Drupal Developer Days in Vienna, we’re getting ready for this event. That’s why we analyzed its agenda and picked some interesting sessions for you (but obviously, the rest of them sound cool too).
Open Web and community
Besides the contributing activities mentioned above, more than 60 sessions are planned in the Drupal Dev Days schedule. They will involve not only Drupal but also the Open Web in general and the communities, which are an important part of this concept.
During An introvert’s guide to open source communities presentation, Aastha Shrivastava will reveal how a shy person can find their path in a group of open source software contributors. The speaker will show it through her example of joining the Drupal community, mentoring, and learning from others.
Another useful insight on contributing to the open source systems will be the Beyond the code: Community engagement for non-technical Drupal enthusiasts session. Its author, Niklas Franke, will prove that not only developers can be open source community members. A person such as him - a digital marketing manager - can bring a lot of value there.
Backend, frontend, and decoupled development
Obviously, there will be loads of sessions on Drupal and its useful features. One of them - and long-awaited - is the automatic updates. During the presentation with the same title, Nida Shah will explain how to set up this functionality for the local website and on the server and how to customize the update process.
The Why Module Builder should be in your developer toolkit session will focus on another handy solution in Drupal. Joachim Noreiko will present the Module Builder and its importance in the development process. We’ll learn how this tool simplifies writing custom code (f.e. a config entity type with an admin UI) and creates the boilerplate for all the popular Drupal coding patterns.
The Decoupled & Frontend Development path of the event will include two presentations about the Next.js framework, a hot topic in the IT industry. Vincenzo Gambino will show how to build a fully decoupled application with Drupal and Next.js. And David Peherstorfer will guide us through the creation process of a decoupled online store using Next.js and the Commerce API Drupal module.
Innovation and future
Another frequently discussed topic in the IT industry today is artificial intelligence. It won’t also be missed during the Drupal Dev Days. The presentation Generative AI and Drupal by Iztok Smolic will give us insights into how AI can help us create and publish content, code, and introduce semantic search.
Preston So will discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on the Drupal community and ecosystem, especially the potential damage it may cause. The presentation Human machines and machine humans will cover topics such as AI bias, avatars, and anthropomorphism.
Clients and industry experiences
Drupal 7 end of life and the necessity of migrating such systems to more modern versions of this CMS is a topic widely discussed in the community. Pritam Prasun will present a case study of the progressive migration from Drupal 7, including progressive decoupling. The speaker will show this operation's challenges and the microservice architecture used in the final software.
Looking for more real-life examples of implementing this open source CMS? During the presentation How to Successfully Maintain a Drupal Enterprise Project Featuring kurier.at, Oleksandr Milkovskyi will tell us how to keep a complex Drupal platform stable and up to date. The example here will be a big Austrian news service Kurier and its issues related to scalability, legacy code, and documentation.
Accessibility
The case studies that we’ll be able to get to know during the Drupal Developer Days Vienna will also consider accessibility in web development. Tobias Tschopp will present the challenges the Theater Basel encountered on their way to digital accessibility certification. The session will cover editorial and technical topics, as well as strategies and tools useful in such a process in Drupal.
To learn even more about accessibility, it’s worth joining the Captchas and other gotchas: Make sure your secure website is accessible presentation. AmyJune Hineline will show the solutions to use for that purpose that are open source and secure and will allow all of our web page users to interact with the digital assets.
Droptica at Drupal Developer Days
As we’ve already mentioned, we can’t miss such a brilliant opportunity to meet the peer members of the Drupal community. That’s why our team of five people will be present in Vienna from the 19th to the 22nd of July. Our CEOs, Business Development Manager, Content Marketing Specialist, and Technical Director, will be happy to chat with all participants of Drupal Dev Days at the Droptica booth. We’re active users and supporters of open source technologies, so we can exchange a lot of our experiences related to Drupal, PHP, Symfony, Laravel, Mautic, and Pimcore - to name a few. See you in Vienna!
