Highlights from Drupalcon Vienna

So last week we went with a big crowd (16 of us) from Digitalist to Drupalcon in Vienna to join the about 2000 other attendees. We went to sessions and BOF:s about caching in Drupal 8, Symfony components in Drupal core, Docker, Config split, Decoupled Drupal, Multi-sites in Drupal 8 and a lot of other things.

Driesnote

A standard thing at Drupalcon is Dries talking about The state of Drupal - called the Driesnote – that means talking about all the good things we have in Drupal and in the community and what is working, and what we need to work on to make Drupal and the community even better. One great thing to hear is the result of the survey that the Drupal Association sent out to companies working with Drupal – a lot of the companies around the world is going very well – over 48.5% of the Drupal companies has a growing sale – and Drupal deal sizes are also growing for them – for 47% it is getting bigger.

Dries also talked about the workspace-project – that you could work on a part on the site with a bunch of content – and see how it looks – without publishing it – a big step forward for Drupal. Also some talk about adding a JS-framework to get a better UI experience in the admin parts of the site.
 

Contenta

Decoupling Drupal (also know as headless Drupal) has been something that has been done for years now – and one really nice intiative is Contenta CMS, that try to build a best practice setup for decoupling Drupal – and on their session they presented some of the work they have done – with an easy setup to make frontenders that never has worked with Drupal to get started on which end points to use etc. If you are starting a project with a decoupled Drupal – I recommend you to check Contenta CMS out, with ready examples using JS-frameworks like Angular, React etc.

ELM

There were a bunch of sessions discussing different uses of frameworks that could be used as an frontend for Drupal – one I find very interesting (being mostly a backender myself) is using ELM, presented on Drupalcon by Amitai Burstein – who the latest four years have build different solutions for decoupled Drupal.

Caching, a guru-guide

Wim Leers is one of the core contributors that knows most about the caching layer in Drupal – and his session about caching in Drupal 8 was one of the most interesting in Vienna – there a lot of stuff to think about in caching – and his session went thru the most of them.

Moving configuration around

The Drupal 8 configuration system is a hard nut to crack for some projects – and one of the solutions that are getting more and more attention is config split – used for handling configuration differences betweween different environments (dev → stage → prod). Fabian Bircher did a crowded presentation about his brain child and were also part of a BOF initiatives by the Swedish university Lunds Universitet, talking about the problems and solutions using Drupal 8 for multi sites setups.

Humanized Internet

External keynote speakers has been a long tradition – and this year we had Monique J. Morrow talking about the Humanized Internet – with a lot of focus on personal security and the Internet – one of the examples she brought up about this was the Swedish data breach inside Transportstyrelsen, and the upcoming GDPR regulation that helps protecting personal data inside EU.

And there a lot of more

Of course there were a lot more – and most of the sessions you could now watch on Drupalcons site, just go to the schedule and pick which session you would like to watch.

Next Drupalcon in Europe will be in 2019 – and I am looking forward to it!