I valued the opportunity to hear from and speak with other Drupal enthusiasts from Scotland and beyond when the University hosted DrupalCamp Scotland, a one-day event on 25 October 2024 organised by the local Drupal Association.

Drupal is an open-source content management system widely used at the University of Edinburgh. It is an open-source system supported by a strong international community. As a contributor to the community, most of the work I have been involved in with Drupal has been online, conducted with people from around the world through emails, Slack messages and Zoom calls.

DrupalCamp Scotland brought people passionate about the power of Drupal, including developers, designers and agency representatives, closer to home. It was refreshing and energising to have a full day in-person with 50 other Drupalists to listen to talks and spend time having conversations, brainstorming and making plans to make Drupal even better by working together, harnessing the power of the open-source model.

My key takeaways from DrupalCamp Scotland 2024 are described below.

Understanding more about the history of EdWeb from Billy Wardrop

When I joined the University in 2020 as a Content Designer in the UX and Digital Consultancy team I quickly grasped how important Drupal was to the University web publishing platform and wanted to learn more. I faced a steep learning curve, however, not only to learn more about Drupal but also to learn how the University had historically implemented and configured it to build EdWeb1. With the build of EdWeb2 on the horizon, I picked up information from colleagues but found it difficult to get the full retrospective picture at a time when there were so many things to learn starting a new job. Billy’s talk set out the timeline of the stages and decisions that led us to EdWeb1, which was useful to help me fully appreciate the previous choices made and the subsequent direction adopted for the build of EdWeb2.

Hearing about the long view from Lenny Moskalyk from the Drupal Association

In the day-to-day of University business, Drupal manifests as the interface through which to build content, and it is easy to think that this is where Drupal begins and ends. Lenny’s talk presented a zoomed-out view of Drupal, illustrating not only the potential and impact of this remarkable system, but highlighting the unwavering impetus of the community to keep making it better. She shared details of the Drupal documentation project, aimed at improving the quality of Drupal documentation by encouraging organisations to ‘Adopt a document’, and also spoke of an idea to upskill people in Drupal by making Drupal teaching content (written by Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson at Reykjavik University) widely available for all.

Valuable feedback and ideas on my work relating to Drupal terminology

Last year I stepped up to lead a Drupal issue aimed at making Drupal’s terminology easier to understand. I blogged about the issue earlier in 2024:

Dejargoning Drupal – working with the community to open up Drupal’s terminology

The issue began with a seemingly modest aim to make a list of the most confusing terms used in Drupal, however, recognising the impact that clarifying Drupal’s language could have on making it easier to understand and learn, the scope of the issue soon grew. I have had the privilege of working with some very talented and experienced people from the worldwide Drupal community on the issue (including Cristina Chumillas, Benji Fisher, Thomas Howell, Ralf Koller, Aaron McHale, Megh Plunkett and Lauri Timmanee), however, as lead, I am responsible for guiding the path of the issue and at many points over the past year I have doubted my judgement and the direction we are taking.

DrupalCamp Scotland presented the perfect opportunity to talk openly about our approach to the issue, to share what we had done, and explain our plans for what was next, to tap into the community’s wisdom and insight. I presented an honest account of the issue’s progress (citing the ‘cans of worms’ opened along the way) and was heartened and grateful to receive useful and supportive feedback and critique on our actions so far and inspiring ideas for what to do next.

Examples of Drupal working well at scale

The University relies on Drupal to power many websites in a large web estate, and it is always interesting to learn of case studies of Drupal scaling up to this challenge in other realms.

Running a fleet of web sites with ease via LocalGov Drupal Multisites Platform

Aaron Hirtenstein, Community Lead at LocalGov Drupal shared an inspiring case study describing how UK councils, Drupal developers and web agencies collaborated to result in 51 councils [to date] adopting Drupal for their websites and microsites. The install model included a single database and code base, with control sites managing users and microsites. At the microsite level, styles could be managed separately – to give these sites their desired different look and feel without the need for custom code (which brought an unaffordable overhead, technical debt as well as security risks).

Scaling Drupal in the Real World – Rouven Volk from 1x Internet

Drawing on his wealth of experience working with Drupal, Digital Business Consultant and Drupal Contributor Rouven Volk shared his tips for achieving flexibility while maintaining a single code base. He reiterated the importance of governance, product ownership and standardised development operations and encouraged combining these with controlled opportunities for innovation – for example making use of Drupal Feature Flags (which allows features to be restricted to certain environments within one code base). His image of Drupal as a swiss army knife was memorable, carrying the strapline ‘Drupal is not the solution, you build the solution with Drupal’.

Opportunity for discussions with Drupal CMS track leads

Drupal CMS is Drupal’s newest product, with version 1 due to launch on January 15 2025. Leading up to the launch there is a lot of work going on in different tracks from AI to SEO, to search to media management. To ensure Drupal CMS remains user-centred, it is important for the UX work to transcend all tracks but things are moving quickly and it is difficult to keep on top of all the latest developments. I took the opportunity to meet with other Drupal CMS track leads at DrupalCamp Scotland to discuss progress and make plans to continue to work together.

Access the DrupalCamp Scotland schedule and read more

Paul Johnson at 1x internet wrote a great round-up of the talks and shared his photographs taken on the day:

DrupalCamp Scotland 2024 

Access the schedule from the event website:

DrupalCamp Scotland