I was lucky to be invited to speak at DrupalCon, the annual European conference for Drupal. I delivered several sessions and attended others to learn more about advancements in Drupal.

Drupal is the open-source system underpinning several of the University’s digital systems, including our main website. DrupalCon Europe is an exciting fixture in the Drupal calendar, bringing together the Drupal community both from Europe and further afield. The three-day conference programme includes around 90 talks, workshops and discussion sessions from individuals, organisations and agencies, and is a chance to meet and collaborate with people with a shared interest in all things Drupal.

Over time, I have gradually found my feet as a Drupal contributor. As I keep learning more about it, with the help of the supportive Drupal community, I continue to find ways to apply expertise and knowledge through the open-source model to keep improving Drupal both for the University and more broadly. Attending DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 not only allowed me to familiarise with the latest developments in Drupal but also to meet fellow contributors face-to-face to ask questions, check understanding and collaborate – therefore enabling me to accelerate progress on issues I am involved in. This blog post summarises my takeaways from this year’s event.

Progress towards v1 of Drupal CMS – a web builder for non-technical audiences

During his Driesnote in DrupalCon Portland in May 2024, Dries Buytaert, Drupal’s founder, made an announcement signalling a change in direction for Drupal at a strategic level. He launched Drupal Starshot, a product for non-developers to use to build websites. Almost six months later, Dries shared progress towards the vision of Starshot (renamed Drupal CMS) in his opening Driesnote at DrupalCon Barcelona.

Access a recording of the Driesnote from DrupalCon Barcelona on YouTube

My own involvement in Drupal CMS

Shortly after the launch of Starshot in May 2024, I was honoured to be asked to join the Drupal CMS Advisory Council, formed to guide and steer the strategic direction of this new product towards its intended goals and audiences. I also began to contribute in more practical ways within the Drupal CMS UX track.

Read my related blog post on my work supporting Drupal CMS:

UX leading the newest developments in Drupal – a mindset shift for Drupal CMS

The Starshot track at DrupalCon Barcelona

The Driesnote created a palpable buzz about Drupal CMS, and carrying this through, the conference programme included a specific Starshot track with sessions delving deeper into some of the aspects involved. I was especially interested to hear about Experience Builder, Recipes, Project Browser and AI as I saw these as important elements of Drupal CMS where UX input and direction would be required.

Experience Builder – easing the transition of designs into code

Experience Builder (XB) is a Drupal project to build a low-code editor which can be used by content creators for designing sites. Given the Drupal CMS vision to be the first choice for no-code website building, XB will play a critical part in achieving this aim. In his session, Product Lead Lauri Timmanee from Acquia explained the driving force behind XB: to provide a viable Drupal offering for organisations that have a need to build sites but have little or no development resource, and related to this, to ensure Drupal offered an editorial interface with a much better UX than it does currently, out-of-the-box.

Lauri outlined how XB will provide content editors with elements, components, sections and page templates which they can use to build sites in a visual drag-and-drop interface, resonant of familiar editorial tools like PowerPoint and Google docs. Providing more detail on the technology, he introduced the concept of Single-Directory Components (available in Drupal 10.1 onwards) which group together all the files needed to render the interface component in one package, and therefore simplify the presentation layer (alleviating the need to use Entity Display, Block Layout and Views to manage content display), as well as supporting content re-use across channels and managing content at scale.

About Drupal Single-Directory Components (on Drupal.org)

Experience Builder (on Drupal.org)

Following a demo of XB in action, Lauri provided a timeline for its implementation – explaining that it will not be included in v1 of Drupal CMS, instead it will form the default experience for Drupal CMS and will be included in the first stable release is planned for Q3 of 2025.

Access Lauri’s session on Experience Builder from DrupalCon Barcelona on YouTube

Recipes – applied not installed for a more flexible way to build functionality

Recipes have been described as starter templates, bundling together pieces of functionality as predefined configurations that can be applied to Drupal sites. They are designed to include text files in the recipe package which can be Drupal-read for easier configuration, alleviating the need to find and refer to documentation, and ensuring consistency when dealing with multiple sites and distributions. Recipes are composable and can be applied at any stage of a project – offering a more flexible alternative to install profiles which traditionally need to be added at the start and set a ‘path of no return’.

In their initiative talk, Martin Anderson-Clutz Senior Solutions Engineer from Acquia and Mark Casias, Senior Drupal Developer from Lullabot talked through the premise of recipes, illustrating how they worked with a demo of the ‘Alerts’ recipe.

Recipes Initiative (on Drupal.org)

Recipes will be included in Drupal CMS as the way for site owners to build and extend the capability of their sites. Drupal CMS v1 is intended to include a ‘base’ recipe as well as recipes for data privacy, contact forms, blog, events and SEO.

Access the Recipes Initiative Update from DrupalCon Barcelona on YouTube

Project Browser – to help search and surface what Drupal does

With the extend or ‘add-on’ functionality to be provided by Recipes, Project Browser (PB) will provide a way of presenting the Recipes to content editors and site builders, to help them select the right Recipes for the capabilities they want. Modelled on an app store, PB offers a way to search thousands of recipes, modules and projects using factors like keywords, category, security status, maintenance status and development status.

PB is looked after by Chris Wells and Leslie Glynn and their presentation described their recent work in preparing PB for Drupal CMS. Several of the changes made focused on improving the UX of PB – for example: ensuring each module, recipe and project was presented in a consistent way (as a tile with a logo, and one of three status indicators: ‘installed’, ‘install’ or ‘add and install’). Leslie and Chris described how previous iterations of PB had proved overwhelming for people, and explained how the PB contributor team had addressed this by reducing the number of available categories to 19 and asking maintainers to allocate a maximum of three categories to the tile about their module, recipe or project.

I was pleased to hear that the work writing microcopy descriptions for modules was still continuing within PB, as I had helped with this at DrupalCon Lille 2023, recognising the connection to my Drupal terminology work. There was a further opportunity to collaborate when Chris attended my Birds of a Feather (BoF) session later in the conference schedule.

Access Chris and Leslie’s session on Project Browser from DrupalCon Barcelona on YouTube

AI – now offering creative and practical ways to support humans

At DrupalCon Lille 2023 several sessions shared case studies showcasing the potential for AI to be applied to the kind of problems site builders, content editors and marketers have traditionally faced when using Drupal. At DrupalCon Barcelona, this potential was more tangibly realised with an AI agent included in the demo in the opening Driesnote, showing how an automated chatbot could help a content creator add complex functionality to a website without the need for developer time and expertise. Several sessions later in the programme helped improve my understanding of how AI can be used responsibly to solve administrative problems and to reduce inefficiencies.

Insights into AI development in Drupal – with a UK case study

Jamie Abrahams from Freely Give, track lead and co-maintainer for the Drupal AI module, shared details of how his company had used the native Drupal CRM and AI to improve the efficiency of a claims handling process in the UK. Compensating passengers for delayed rail journeys had traditionally depended on lengthy manual checking of routes, timetables and tickets to assess validity of claims and to calculate payouts. Freely Give designed a new front-end online form that made it easier to upload scans of tickets, worked with APIs to extract route data from antiquated databases and trained AI agents with vision models to scan and validate tickets, saving human effort and resulting in a quicker claims turnaround process. Speaking about AI more broadly, Jamie explained the propensity for AIs to add structure to unstructured data – giving a use case of AI being used to triage emails to extract relevant data and identify sentiment and patterns. He also gave a sense of the speed with which AI technology can be iterated and improved – sharing details of the implementation of a typical AI workflow incorporating evaluations with a human in the loop.

Access Jamie’s session from DrupalCon Barcelona on YouTube

A primer in how GPTs and AI assistants work with LLMs – 1X Internet

Christoph Breidert from 1X Internet gave a talk which provided an excellent overview and explanation of the way Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI works as well as a live demo of an AI assistant on an interface. He explained the way custom AI applications can be built around LLMs. Typically, the LLM (a statistical application, capable of predicting output text based on input text) works in response to a prompt (data input) and under a set of instructions advising how the AI is to respond. With reference to a demonstration example, he showed the impact of using different-sized LLMs on the quality of data output and illustrated the resulting cost-per-conversation when using models with more tokens (a measure for the quantity of text the model has been trained on). On the point of improving efficiency, he introduced the concept of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) which can be used as a pre-processing mechanism to help LLMs generate a more accurate response by searching relevant sources (such as internal databases or web sources) or running data queries, instead of the data prompt passing directly to the LLM. He presented examples of AI Agents that could be used in different scenarios (including an ‘Issue Board Assistant’ to help a development and design team stay up to date with tickets contained in software like Jira or Github) and it was easy to see the potential for these assistants in helping humans achieve typically time-consuming tasks.

Access Christoph’s session on LLM technology from DrupalCon Barcelona on YouTube

Hacking for good – the ‘Defend Iceland’ cybersecurity initiative

Theódór Ragnar Gíslason, CTO and Head of Innovation at Syndis, an Icelandic cybersecurity company delivered a thought-provoking keynote based on his lifestory. In the 1980s Theódór had begun hacking and writing exploits when a childhood accident had reduced his mobility and driven him to passing the time on his computer. His reckoning came when he was arrested for cybercrime, and he decided to turn things around and use his talents towards improving cybersecurity. After a series of roles testing systems for threats and vulnerabilities, he joined a group of ethical hackers, working to expose security threats in exchange for ‘bug bounty’ rewards. Motivated by the prospect of improving cybersecurity for everyone (not just the companies that could afford to put up rewards) he applied to the European Commission Innovation fund and after several knock-backs, was successful in securing a grant as part of the digital Europe plan to set up the ‘Defend Iceland’ cybersecurity initiative. His story was an inspiring one, not least to illustrate the power of thinking like a hacker (defined by Theódór as ‘One who enjoys the intellectual challenges of creatively overcoming limitations’) to solving problems.

Access Theódór’s keynote from DrupalCon Barcelona on YouTube

Standardisation to reduce complexity in Drupal

A key strength of Drupal is its flexibility, it is a powerhouse capable of generating a myriad of varied solutions for every eventuality. Its flexible capabilities can present a problem, however, when it comes to selecting the ‘right way’ to do things, the choice available can lead to analysis paralysis. Several sessions addressed managing this trait of Drupal to help make it simpler and less daunting.

My BoF session: Opening up Drupal’s terminology

I’ve been leading a long-running issue aimed at standardising Drupal’s language to make it easier to understand since 2023. In the course of this work I have learned a lot and had great support from very talented and dedicated members of the Drupal community, however, I have often doubted myself in the process and questioned if we could be doing things differently. BoFs (Birds of a Feather) sessions are a great feature of DrupalCons as they permit time and space to have discussions about topics and to hear others’ ideas and feedback about activities within Drupal. I leapt at the chance to run a BoF on the ‘Drupalisms’ issue at DrupalCon Barcelona and was very grateful for encouragement, input and guidance from some very experienced members of the community, to take back to the group I am working with. Furthermore, DrupalCon Barcelona provided the opportunity to ask members of the community to complete a terminology quiz, to gather data about the most complex concepts in Drupal. When the quiz closed at the end of October we were thrilled to have received over 400 responses.

Read more about my work on Drupal terminology:

De-jargoning Drupal – working with the community to open up Drupal’s terminology

Schema.org Blueprints module – a way to install a pre-defined data structure

Jacob Rockowitz’s session was enlightening as it showed the potential of combining Schema.org with Drupal for a more standardised and sustainable approach to web design. Schema.org is an initiative to provide a defined way to structure online information, and given Drupal’s strength for handling structured content, it was logical to leverage Schema.org when building sites with Drupal. Jacob demonstrated how this was possible using the Blueprints module which he maintains. He showed the module adopting the rules, structure and logic of Schema.org and applying these to build a content model to structure the data within a Drupal site. He also showcased the starter kits available within the module – which can be used to set up and configure solutions for common use cases (for example to build a podcast or an organisation website). I could appreciate how widespread adoption of Schema.org for website building could result in a more unified presentation of content and a more consistent approach to information architecture design – which in turn would contribute to a more organised internet that could better support searching, filtering and sorting data.

Access Jacob’s session on the Schema.org Blueprints module from DrupalCon Barcelona on YouTube

Celebrating Drupal’s strengths and spreading the word

DrupalCons are an important opportunity to bring the community together to work on common issues, to improve Drupal using the power of the open-source contribution model. They also provide a welcome chance to appreciate Drupal, both in terms of its achievements and its capabilities.

Promote Drupal: The ultimate toolkit

When I started contributing to the Promote Drupal Strategic Initiative I helped to restructure parts of Drupal.org with an emphasis on supporting people coming to Drupal.org to evaluate Drupal as a Content Management System (CMS) provider. In the course of this work, I learned a lot about the factors that influence people’s selection of a CMS, and their associated decision-making process. When I was approached by Rosie Gladden (VP of Marketing at ImageX) to join her and Paul Johnson (from 1x Internet) in co-presenting a session to share ways to promote Drupal with the community, I was keen to include a UX perspective – sharing what I had learned about the needs and expectations of Drupal’s ‘Evaluators’ and offering ways to meet those needs. For example, I highlighted the tendency of people evaluating Drupal to look at aspects like documentation and user guides to make a judgement, and explained how the community could play a part in making this content better and make Drupal a more desirable choice in the process.

Access the session ran by Rosie, Paul and I about promoting Drupal on YouTube