DrupalCamp Scotland – the annual training camp and meetup (running for 6 years now!) brings together the people who use, develop, design and support the Drupal CMS platform in Scotland. This year the group convened at the University of Edinburgh, with members of the University Website Programme team contributing presentations on EdWeb and agile usability.

Generally, a camp is a more organised extension of an informal Drupal meet-up. It’s nothing big and fancy, but gives an opportunity for the local bright minds of the Scottish Drupal community and beyond to come together and network, share experiences, have informal conversations and much more. With the University’s EdWeb CMS having been built on the open source platform Drupal, members of our project team have become very involved and naturally members of this global community.

DrupalCamp Scotland ran over two days. It was mainly Drupal 8 focused with the new version being released in the same month. Friday was a training day and covered the process of building, theming and developing a site in Drupal 8 and other necessary skills needed to improve the development process.

Drupal elements covered:

• Introduction to Drupal 8
• Setup
• Building (non-programming)
• Theming (Twig)
• Content editing
• Module development
• Configuration management
• Drush
• Drupal Console (scaffolding)
• Git

On Saturday the main conference took place at 50 George Square on the main campus. Presentations took place in three different rooms, the University of Edinburgh room, iKOS room and the Deeson room. Three concurrent sessions ran in each of the rooms throughout the day and each event-goer had the choice of which session to attend.

Read Neil’s post about his Agile usability presentation

This was the first time that I had attended any kind of Drupal meet up, having only started to get exposure to Drupal after beginning my placement with the University Website Programme this year. It was interesting to see the engagement in the Drupal community. I got to get involved and learn from others especially on the training day of DrupalCamp where I was teamed up with others who had years of experience behind them in Drupal.

DrupalCamp Scotland 2015 website

Getting the day started with a Welcome presentation

Keynote

Jochen Lillich’s keynote titled ‘Content, culture, community’ was interesting. He talked about how he started his own Drupal-based virtual company, Freistel IT and his team’s approach to communication and successful teamwork. In his company they work with complete transparency, feeling that complete openness is the key to being a successful team. He talked about trust within his team, such as allowing his team to take leave from work whenever they feel that they need to, which helps to make sure there is no burn out. Not an approach many companies would take but some interesting points to take home.

John Lillich presentation – Content, Culture, Community

Jochen Lillich kicking the day off with his keynote

Sessions

These are the sessions that took place at DrupalCamp Scotland 2015 with links to slides and presentations where available:

Usability testing in an agile development process

Managing a network of Drupal sites with Aegir

Scottish Natural Heritage: Our intranet journey

Don’t Varnish over the cracks

EdWeb, or How the University of Edinburgh embraced Drupal and introduced a renewed website service

Drupal 8 – when is the right time for you?

(Re)building modules for Drupal 8

Using VueJS in front of Drupal 8

An Agile Front End Workflow

Including a frontend workflow in Drupal 7

Scaling glasgow2014.com through Content Delivery Networks

Hydrant Apprentices

Becoming A Drupal Master Builder

Less setup, more development: Drupal and Docker containers

Mission (Im)possible: Quality Decoupled Code with Drupal 7

Outside of this annual event the conversation continues among the Scottish Drupal community with the regional groups. More information on the Drupal Groups website:

Drupal Groups