With nine talks on topics ranging from Object-Oriented UX to Single Directory Components to image-management, DrupalCamp Scotland 2025 packed a lot into a day. I left with new insights, feedback on my work, and plenty of ideas for my University and Drupal UX leadership roles.

Drupal is a highly capable, flexible and secure open-source content management system used by the University in a number of ways, including for our web publishing platform (EdWeb2). For the second year running, the University hosted DrupalCamp Scotland, a day-long event bringing together people ‘who do Drupal’.

Thanks to online working, I’ve been able to contribute to the international Drupal community for several years, however, local, informal camps like DrupalCamp Scotland offer a brilliant opportunity for face-to-face collaboration to establish shared understanding on key issues, spark new perspectives to help tackle ongoing challenges and accelerate progress on existing initiatives. This year’s event was no exception, and attending the day as a delegate and a speaker left me highly energised to continue contributing, recognising the benefits for the University and beyond.

Read about last year’s DrupalCamp Scotland in my related blog post: Drupalling in Edinburgh: When DrupalCamp Scotland came to the University

A chance for me to represent the Drupal leadership team and talk from a product perspective

Over the past year, I’ve been contributing to Drupal in a dual capacity, tactically as a UX practitioner, applying my skills to progress individual pieces of work and also strategically as a member of the Drupal leadership team in my roles as UX Research Lead for Drupal CMS and UX Manager for Drupal Core. I’ve spoken about my UX work for Drupal on multiple occasions but wanted to take the opportunity of DrupalCamp Scotland to speak about a specific Drupal product I have been working on: Drupal CMS.

Drupal CMS v1.0 launched in January 2025, aimed at marketing and content professionals as a ready-to-use site building platform. Built on Drupal Core, but including previously developed features, well-established functionality and best-practice capabilities by default, Drupal CMS aims to provide non-technical audiences with a Drupal site-building experience ‘out-of-the-box’ without the need for significant developer time and effort upfront to build on Drupal Core to achieve the same starting point. The release of Drupal CMS v1.0 represented a pivotal moment in Drupal’s history, setting out to engage new audiences from non-technical backgrounds, to enable them to benefit from Drupal’s strengths and capabilities, and to spread Drupal’s reach beyond the more technical audiences.

Since the launch there have been many developments, significantly guided by user research into expectations and needs of the target audience. In my talk, I summarised some of the current UX research priorities for Drupal CMS:

• Installation – the part of the experience where people gain a first impression of the product, to learn how it works, what it offers, and to decide whether they want to use it.
• Content options – where audiences understand the many options Drupal offers for content – from creating it, to adapting it, connecting it, presenting it and sharing it.
• Extending – how people obtain extra functionality through the selection and application of relevant modules, recipes and templates.
• Multilingual –ensuring Drupal’s strength for handling different languages and language transitions is incorporated in the product.
• AI features – making sure innovations in Drupal AI are mindfully applied to improve varied aspects of the Drupal CMS experience.

I also provided a trailer of some of the new features scheduled for v2.0 of Drupal CMS including:

• Site templates – to be included in the Drupal CMS installation process, to accelerate the process of producing a website with theme, look-and-feel and front-end clearly tangible
• Drupal Canvas – Drupal’s new visual page page-builder with a design-tool feel, to enable in-system design and editing, with live previews in the central interface
• Improved integrations – to provide easier ways of incorporating mailing list capability (through Mailchimp) and payment functionality (through Stripe) into sites
• AI functionality – a Context Control Centre as a way of grounding, directing and controlling the application of AI technologies within given guard rails and standards, plus enhanced capability for setting up agent orchestrations, building on the process-mapping capability of the Events, Conditions, Action (ECA) module.

Screenshots to show Drupal Canvas interface screens. On the left, showing the ‘Layers’ view, on the right, showing the ‘Templates’ view.

I covered a lot in a short space of time, but provided links for the audience to learn more about the topics I had covered, being mindful of the range of interests of those attending. Questions afterwards related to:

• The relationship and dependencies between Drupal CMS and Core
• How Drupal Canvas relates to Layout Builder
• The customisability of site templates after selection in the Drupal CMS Installer

I resolved to take these points away to consider in my ongoing work.

Read my previous blog post about initial UX work for Drupal CMS: UX leading the newest developments in Drupal – a mindset shift for Drupal CMS

Read about my reflections on my changed contribution role within Drupal in my related blog post: UX leadership in open-source Drupal: Insights, lessons and future aspirations

An example of Object-Oriented UX in action from Renfrewshire Council

Running the UX Service for the University, I am always on the look-out for new methodologies and fresh ways to apply user-centred techniques and particularly, ways to ensure the user interfaces of digital platforms, systems and services match the way users think about them.

I had read about Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) a few years ago. It is a methodology that recognises the tendency for people think about real-world things (objects) and sets about designing interfaces to meet this mental model. In order to implement it in a given context, there is preparation to be done to establish:

• What the objects are
• What attributes make up each object
• Relationships exist between objects – a domain model
• What call-to-actions each object offers users

Recognising the applicability of this method to my work improving the user experience of Drupal, and working with Ralf Koller from the Drupal community, we had sought to apply OOUX thinking to an ongoing long-running initiative I am leading to open up Drupal’s terminology (which I presented on at DrupalCamp Scotland 2024). It had been useful in helping us formulate stages to work through, however, without being trained in OOUX methods, we had struggled to apply it faithfully to achieve tangible changes. Hearing about Renfrewshire Council’s practical application of OOUX was incredibly useful to prompt me to revisit this topic, to think about resuming work on establishing a domain model to ultimately translate into a system model.

Opening up Drupal’s terminology – my presentation at DrupalCamp Scotland 2024 on You Tube

De-jargoning Drupal – working with the community to open up Drupal’s terminology – my blog post from 2023

Ideas for improving the image editing and management experience in Drupal – Gareth Alexander and Tony Barker

Of the many tasks content editors need to complete using a content management system, tasks relating to images are often rated as high priority, with editors wanting options to manipulate and tailor images to fit the context of the pages they appear on. Gareth Alexander, Senior Web Developer at the University, and Tony Barker, Front End Specialist at Annertech, Lead Developer at LocalGov Drupal, Media Management Track Lead at Drupal CMS, and Director at DrupalCamp England gave a talk that Gareth provoked fresh thinking about ways to handle images in Drupal, notably:

• How to improve the selection of aspect ratios and focal-points for images, to ensure images give the intended visual experience
• How to include multiple alt text descriptions for the same image, to ensure non-visual experiences of images accurately reflect different illustrative purposes.

User testing and research had showed that Drupal provided a less-than-optimal image editing and management experience, and Gareth and Tony had lots of suggestions for how to improve it.

Before implementing these improvements, it was important to consider wider UX and accessibility implications and, critically, to understand content editors’ expectations and mental models when working with images—avoiding the risk of inadvertently adding complications. Mindful of developments in the broader Drupal ecosystem, I felt that Drupal Canvas could potentially guide progress in this area, sensing that its wider adoption would shift trends towards visual editing, reshaping understanding of what was possible for images in Drupal.

To guide progression in the shorter term, however, I commented on the relevant issue with recommendations for tweaks to the current interface, based on the results of user research.

Read more on the issue on Drupal.org:

Design a UI to allow various kinds of alterations to reference Media entities in a modal

Top priorities for web publishing at the University – blog post by Bruce Darby – illustrating the importance of image management tasks to content editors

A useful deep-dive into Single Directory Components from Phil Norton

When it comes to making Drupal easier to learn and use, Drupal theming – to achieve a desired front-end look, feel and functionality – has traditionally been an area to target. Single Directory Components (SDCs) are a concept that could potentially simplify theming in Drupal – each SDC contains everything needed to render the component in a user interface in a single folder to facilitate easier maintenance and reuse when designing interfaces.

Seeking to learn more about SDCs to support my work for Drupal CMS and Drupal Core I have grappled with understanding several SDC-related terms – particularly ‘props’ (short for ‘properties’ – referring to parts of SDCs that accommodate data with a defined structure – such as title, classes, etc)  and ‘slots’ (referring to parts of SDCs that accommodate more unstructured data such as body copy, images, etc). I therefore appreciated the talk from Phil Norton, Web Developer from Code Enigma, explaining how he had used SDCs with the Storybook module which covered an end-to-end application of the concept in a tangible use case.

Lessons in learning Drupal from Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson

Compared to other site building platforms, Drupal has enhanced capabilities and flexibility, however, communicating this to people who are new to Drupal is difficult to do without overwhelming them. For this reason, Drupal has traditionally been associated with a ‘steep learning curve’, and although online courses and videos exist to help people learn Drupal, teaching people face-to-face to offer on-hand support for them to get to grips with how Drupal works remains a very effective way to onboard people to Drupal, to help them understand how to use it, why they should use it and to inspire them to recognise its huge potential and to appreciate what it can do for them.

Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson – Web developer and Adjunkt professor at the University of Iceland and Reykjavik University – has been teaching Drupal to students with great success and in recent months has sought to make his curriculum and methods more widely available through a Drupal Open University initiative. It was inspiring to hear of the success and the popularity of the initiative, particularly of two ‘Drupal-in-a-Day’ events this year which resulted in large groups of junior developers learning about Drupal and being inspired by its potential. I was encouraged to think about how we could adopt Hilmar’s teaching approach at the University, to ensure our institution continues to support upskilling new generations of Drupalists.

Valuable conversations with Drupal community members to align on shared goals

In between the talks, DrupalCamp Scotland provided valuable time to have conversations with others in the Drupal community to learn about what people are working on, to collaborate over shared problems, and spot opportunities to work together and support each other on future initiatives. Several areas I will be following up on:

• Aligning with the Drupal AI initiative – collaborating with Paul Johnson from 1x INTERNET to ensure we continue to contribute learning from our AI UX research work to the Drupal AI initiative and wider community.

Read our series of blog posts about our Drupal AI research work

• Learning from LocalGov Drupal – recognising shared needs for University and council websites, I am keen to continue tracking the progress of the LocalGov Drupal group, sparked off by conversations with Tony Barker (Lead Developer) and Finn Lewis (Technical Lead).
• Developing shared approaches to common Higher Education website challenges – such as the development of an improved staff profiles provision in collaboration with Paul McCrodden (Technical Product Manager) and others from the team at the University of Cambridge, in response to our research findings.

Read my blog post collecting recommendations for an improved staff profile provision, based on UX research: The Role of Profiles is to represent our staff: Recommendations and reflections from our project