10 Things We Loved About DrupalCon North America 2021

As DrupalCon comes to a close for the crew at Mediacurrent, we’ve all had a chance to reflect on the experience. Here are the top 10 things we loved and learned at this year’s event.

1. Opening New Doors to ‘Discover Drupal’

Drupal talent is in high demand and The Drupal Association is focused on cultivating that talent with an emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion. That’s important to our team at Mediacurrent, too. We love helping young professionals get started in a Drupal career (like our two student interns who experienced their first-ever DrupalCon last week!) and we jumped at the chance to become a training partner for the just-launched Discover Drupal program. We will be mentoring students and providing an opportunity to intern with us after they have finished their scholarship.

Discover Drupal offers a 12-month scholarship and training program for underrepresented individuals in the open source community. Learn more and support the program. 

Speaking of training, our booth offer this year was a drawing for a free 4-hour training workshop in one of our most popular topics: Front-End Development, Decoupled Drupal with Gatsby, or Drupal Component-Based Theming. We are very excited to be drawing the names of 3 winners this week, who will learn about current technology demands and best practices using active discussion and a hands-on workshop. Watch our Twitter channel to see who wins!

2. Bright Horizons Ahead for Drupal 10 

Dries reinforced that the sun is quickly setting on Drupal 8, with community support ending this fall. Drupal 7’s days are numbered as well. If you haven’t already, it’s time to think about your Drupal 9 action plan.

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The community’s innovation efforts will focus on Drupal 9 while also looking ahead to June 2022 — the target release date for Drupal 10.

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3. Going Back to Our Site Builder Roots

Drupal’s roots are about empowering site builders to build ambitious websites with low code. 

-Dries Buytaert, State of Drupal Keynote - DrupalCon North America 2021

What made YOU fall in love with Drupal? 

In his State of Drupal keynote, Dries reflected on Drupal’s core strength to find focus for the year ahead. He reasoned that to help our community grow and become even more successful, we need to give every user a clear reason to adopt Drupal. 

Many Drupal love stories share a common spark; the feeling of being quickly empowered by Drupal’s low code approach. To give site builders that “love at first site” feeling, Dries announced the Project Browser Initiative. That goal is to make site builder basics like installing a module as easy as installing an iPhone app and rise to the competition of Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress. 

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4. Building a Better Foundation for Future Features

Everyone wants to know what comes next for our favorite digital experience platform. As always, DrupalCon sessions and the Driesnote shed some light on the innovation that lies ahead, highlighting both core and contrib initiatives that the community is working to advance.

Visitors to the Mediacurrent booth saw how Rain CMS speeds up development and gives content creators the authoring experience they crave. (If you missed it, Rain CMS now ships with Layout Builder to make page building a breeze) 

Dries shared a progress update on the core strategic initiatives that are blazing trails for future functionality and improvements in Drupal core. These initiatives shaped the program content, with a different one assigned to each day of the conference. 

• Easy Out of the Box - This initiative is improving Drupal's ease-of-use remains a top priority.
• Decoupled Menus - This initiative is positioning Drupal as the go-to for decoupled. Now, non-module Javascript projects have a home on Drupal.org.
• Automatic Updates - By getting automated security updates into Drupal 9 core, we can help site owners sleep soundly.
• Drupal 10 Readiness - Drupal 9 is just under a year old but the community is already looking ahead. Dries called for community support to hit the target release date for Drupal 10.

5. Celebrating and Encouraging Community Contributions 

Drupal continues to shine as of the most scalable, robust, and mature development communities in open source. We heard from Heather Rocker, Global Executive Director of the Drupal Association, about some of the initiatives that are making it easier for first-time and non-coding contributors to get involved.

Both individual and company-level contributors were celebrated on the DrupalCon stage. Congratulations are in order for AmyJune Hineline, the recipient of this year’s Aaron Winborn Award. The award honors individuals for their outstanding commitment to the Drupal project and community. (Check out our interview with AmyJune from season one of the Open Waters podcast.) 

Giving back to Drupal remains a core priority for the Mediacurrent team. This year, we’re proud to show our support for the Drupal Association as a Diamond Drupal Certified Partner and excited to maintain our rank as one of the top five organizational contributors. 

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6. The More Sites, The Merrier

How do you manage and maintain dozens or even hundreds of sites effectively?

That’s the question Jay Callicott, VP of Operations at Mediacurrent, set out to answer in his DevOps track session on scaling Drupal with the power of multisite. Drupal’s multisite capabilities are a standout feature, setting it apart from other CMS platforms. Yet there’s a lot to consider - configuration, deployments, site provisioning, and more. 

This session recording is now available to registered attendees with public access coming in a few weeks. Stay tuned!

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7. Making Sense of Open Source Security 

Mediacurrent’s Drupal security pros took the stage to tackle a timely topic: open source security for marketing and business leaders.

As open source software like Drupal continues to become widely adopted, sticking to security standards is a challenge. The global losses from cybercrime totaled nearly $1 trillion last year (csis.org), raising the stakes on security even higher. 

Be on the lookout for the session recording for a playbook on how to optimize your Drupal security. They covered how to become a security-first organization, embrace process automation, harden Drupal security, and create clear security policies.

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8. Higher Education: The Stage for Ambitious Digital Experiences

DrupalCon’s industry summits are always a great accompaniment to the regular program, and this year was no exception. At the Higher Education Summit, Director of Development Dan Polant was joined by one of Mediacurrent’s ivy league partners  to co-present a case study session. We saw how the university relies on Drupal to model complex data and got a behind-the-scenes look at the decoupled architecture with Gatsby. 

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9. Drupal is Powering Hope 

At this year’s DCon, we saw how Drupal is powering some of the most impactful organizations in the world. All but one of the major COVID-19 vaccine-producing companies use Drupal. 

Major nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity also rely on Drupal. Through its website, the organization has helped more than 5.9 million people build or improve the place they call home. Mediacurrent has been honored to support Habitat’s mission and partner with them to build a maintainable platform that thrives on support from the Drupal community. The Drupal Showcase session recording for Habitat for Humanity: Building a foundation for digital success will be publicly available soon. We’re grateful for the opportunity to reflect on the success we achieved through our partnership, and we hope others can learn from it. 

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10. The Momentum Continues With Drupalfest 

DrupalCon has ended but the celebration continues with Drupalfest. 

Interested in learning more about contributing to Drupal? Let Mediacurrent’s Community Lead Damien McKenna be your guide. Join Damien for Contrib Open Hours through the end of April. 

Watch the State of Drupal Keynote 

Check out the recording of the State of Drupal keynote below.

Cheers to 20 years, Drupal! We look forward to gathering again next year.