Summary of DrupalCon Europe 2020

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1 month ago, from 8 to 11 December, the DrupalCon Europe 2020 was held, which was supposed to take place in Barcelona in June 2020 and was finally held online.

Here's my feedback on this event, which is the first online Drupal community event I've attended.

Logistical aspects and generalities

I found the organisation and communication from Kuoni Congress really great. They even went so far as to have a presence on the Drupal community Slack.

As far as the platform was concerned, they were there when you needed them, really no worries.

The only point that I think could be improved is the fact that for the speakers, the platform demo/test sessions took place on the Thursday and Friday before DrupalCon week, which depending on the situation could have been short if there was a need to change hardware or something. After that, I think the organising team had more pressing matters to deal with.

About the platform, OnAir, it's up and running, but I think there are some usability points that need to be improved :

  • In the " meeting hub ", the part for chatting, it can be complicated to see that someone has sent us a message and conversely, impossible to see if someone has read our message.
  • When you receive a message or a video chat request, it appears immediately, even if you're in the middle of a session, and if you let the notification window close, it's easy to then forget to go and see the message sent. In short, I've found that exchanges aren't simple.
  • In terms of the page for viewing sessions, there is the ability to bookmark sessions and filter on them to find them easily which is a good thing, but despite this filter certain sessions or particular activities remain present and can disrupt the reading of the timeline.
  • In addition, I found the sessions poorly grouped in this timeline, given that there are 40-minute sessions and others of 20 minutes, sometimes it was complicated hard to see when a session began. With the previous point, I missed the start of a session.
  • When you attend a session, the session display only takes up part of the screen (the rest is for chats and other platform features), then in that display, there's a part that's taken up by the speaker's thumbnail, and then all you have to do is load the presentation materials and with a small font size and it can be complicated to read the material. In the end, there's very little useful space. And if you go to full screen, you can't see the platform. There would always be the possibility of several browser tabs with several screens, but it depends on what hardware you have.

Despite these points for improvement, let there be no mistake, it is perfectly possible to attend and enjoy the event. :)

I was able to meet and chat with some great people and meet some people I'd already heard a lot about ;)

Day 1

Gitlab deep dive for Drupal developers

First session of the event and inevitably, technical problem on the platform in general, so I missed the summary which wasn't a big deal.

Presentation of the use of Gitlab on Drupal.org and presentation of Gitlab in a general and basic way :

  • its ticket management system with Kanban-style boards,
  • his IDE via the browser,
  • etc.

Presentation of a CI with examples of code analysis, I'll have to look at the CI code in detail.

By chance, there was talk of standard coding on block machine names, I was able to quote an issue I had created and patched on just this subject: https://www.drupal.org/project/coder/issues/3061184#comment-13143591.

The presentation wasn't as technically advanced as the description suggested, in any case good presentation.

Taking an Axe to your Pa11y, or how to test how accessible your site is

Reminder that according to the site, accessibility is a legal obligation, a point not to be overlooked.

In terms of accessibility, it is possible to automate between 20 and 25 % of the points to be checked, this does not replace manual testing.

Presentation of a list of tools :

  • Wave
  • Firefox accessibility inspector
  • Lighthouse
  • Koa11y : Based on Pa11y
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  • Axe-CLI
  • Axe Monitor
  • Pa11y
  • Pa11y-CI
  • Pa11y Dashboard

    • Control the visibility of your content with Entity Visibility Preview

    Presentation I was able to give via Smile, on the Entity Visibility Preview module. My first session at a DrupalCon !

    Aside from a few connection problems and, unfortunately, some insistent cold calling..., the presentation went off without a hitch, and I got positive feedback as well as questions.

    A better Experience for Content Editors

    Presentation of the highly customizable Gin administration theme, as well as modules to improve the editorial experience :

    Advice on creating custom views for administration, recommended to enable AJAX on admin views (I'm personally not convinced of this advice, I still prefer to have a URL with parameters so I can share it if needed).

    At the WYSIWYG level, Gin lets you reference a CSS file to load for the BO view without having to make a subtopic.

    And a final tip on using icons in paragraph types, recommend Feather icons because open source.

    Measuring search result quality

    The aim is to measure the improvement in search results following system updates. Need metrics for decision making.

    Somewhat mathematical and theoretical presentation. Interesting to see issues like this addressed. What's more, in a way that's decorrelated from Drupal, which has the advantage of seeing the bigger picture, but the disadvantage of making it difficult to see how they could be used with Drupal.

    It's interesting to see issues like this addressed.

    Reference was made to the Search Api Learn To Rank module about a presentation I was able to attend at Drupal Dev Days 2019.

    Keynote: Drupal Core Initiative Leads

    Presentation of the various core Drupal initiatives and their status :

    • Olivero: Theme now in Drupal core, presentation of expected features.
    • Automatic updates : Making progress, particularly with Composer 2 management, whose performance improvements are enabling this initiative to have a greater impact. Updates still need to be secured, and a graphical interface and tests need to be provided.
    • Gitlab Drupal.org: Presentation of the new fork system and merge requests .
    • Composer 2: Great improvement in memory usage, speed, metadata, caching due in large part to better dependency calculation. Drupal core Composer plugins updated and stabilised.
    • Decoupled menus initiative: organisation, recruitment and decision-making in progress.
    • Drupal 10: among the points, there's a change in logic for core themes. The idea is now to have a starterkit to take as is at the start of a project and no longer make inheritance to be able to evolve themes more quickly and abstract from backward compatibility/stability constraints.
    • Bugsmash: Sorting old bugs to reduce the amount of bugs accumulated and never closed. Credits given issue triage and code reviews.

    Day 2

    Open personalization with Apache Unomi in the GDPR era

    Reminder on the value of content personalization.

    Presentation of modules and solutions enabling personalisation :

    • Smart Paragraphs
    • Hotjar : Enables behavioural analysis by taking into account which variation is displayed to the user in order to have consistent data. The data is stored in a Matomo.
    • Browser extension to preview the site according to segments.
    • Mautic Paragraphs.

    Apache Unomi has a consent management framework.

    Building Frictionless Customer Journeys with Drupal, Mautic and Unomi

    I missed the start of the session and it was short, so nothing noted about it.

    Autosave and Concurrent editing (conflict resolution) in Drupal 8/9

    Introduction to the Autosave Form and Content locking modules. Quick demonstration of the modules.

    Render me this...lazily

    Very good examples and explanations of how lazy building works to allow parts of pages to be cached even if located in uncacheable parts.

    Github repository: https://github.com/joachim-n/drupalcon-europe-2020-lazy-builders

    QA Automation: Removing repetitive tasks while giving real value

    Explanations of the logic of setting up a CI and the interest.

    Demonstration of visual regression tests based on screenshots so should only be implemented when the design no longer moves and what's more on the environments where visual regression tests are run, no change to the content is required.

    Presentation of the TestRail tool for aggregating test results.

    Driesnote

    We're in the age of the digital experience and Drupal needs to take a leap to stay up to date. Hence the JS menu component initiative, which becomes the decoupled menus initiative.

    Aspects in which Drupal needs to make progress :

    • end user experience,
    • surrecting commercial interest,
    • reward organisations that contribute.

    Video presentation on the commons with the message of the need to accept others in order to progress. And a reminder of the value of the Open Web.

    Presentation of the programmes :

    • Drupal Steward : if hosted at Acquia or Pantheon, membership of this programme allows security flaws to be avoided where possible to allow more time to apply the update.
    • Diversity and inclusion: setting up a low-cost training programme over 18 months.

    And reminder of work in progress on how to integrate non-PHP components into the Drupal.org packaging system.

    Drupal.org Update - The latest collaboration tools to help you build Drupal (Panel)

    Review of the developments deployed on Drupal.org in recent months :

    • information to improve inclusivity,
    • the Merge Request,
    • tools to help prepare for Drupal 9,
    • community events page: to retrieve data useful for statistics (Code of Conduct, who sponsored, etc.),
    • improved help to guide new contributors into the community.

    Advanced front-end debugging techniques for back-end developers

    List of tools for front-end development, very interesting presentation, particularly on the remote debugging  part:

    • Firefox has a grid inspector.
    • Chrome not ideal for grid inspection.
    • Firefox equipped for Flexbox and typography.

    For accessibility testing :

    • Chrome
      • Lighthouse
      • Colorpicker contrast checker
    • Firefox
      • contrast
      • colour vision simulator

    For JS  debugging:

    • conditional breakpoints in Firefox
    • multi-line console in Firefox
    • viewing attached events in Firefox

    For remote debugging on mobile :

    • iOS : tested with Safari, allows files to be modified locally without having to deploy to production.
    • Android : tested with Chrome

    Keynote: Centring humans and their rights in Open Source Design

    Only half-followed, I was coding in parallel. On the other hand, I found the Keynote very interactive with lots of polls and invitations to reflection by the speaker.

    Marketing automation and Drupal - tracking without the evil

    Presentation of the principles of marketing automation and the " Martech stack ", analytics tool + marketing tool + CRM tool, etc.

    Beware of RGPD.

    Promoting self-hosting to have control over the data collected.

    Tool recommendations :

    • Matomo : analysis platform
    • Mautic : for marketing automation

    With modules:

    Accessible Images, When It Matters Most

    Presentation of the various points that can impact image accessibility :

    • poor vision,
    • dyslexia,
    • typography and the position of text on images,
    • attention disorders.

    Attention points :

    • image types (between a decorative image of an image that carries information) and the alt attribute,
    • colours and contrast

    Some advice :

    • keep backgrounds simple,
    • don't just use colour to convey a message,
    • use text and icons.

    I still found it paradoxical that in a session on accessibility, in terms of the presentation support, there were very few titles on the slides and on the slide images. So without the presentation part, it's complicated if not impossible to read the presentation support.

    Continuously building Tailor made Drupal Commerce while still being open source friendly

    I thought the session was going to focus on Drupal Commerce, instead it was " How to motivate open source contribution in your company ", here via Drupal Commerce projects.

    Very interesting nonetheless.

    Implementation of a headless corporate website with integrated B2C-shop based on Drupal & Magento

    Feedback on the implementation of a Drupal 8 headless website with e-commerce parts via Magento on a salt exploitation company in Switzerland.

    Use of the GraphQL module in its version 4 even if at the time of the project under development because more flexible.

    The Evolving Charts Ecosystem

    Presentation of the Charts module and its ecosystem of modules :

    Full of little Views add-on modules that allow you to do simple calculations in Views without having to do specific code.

    I found the demonstration examples really good because they were both advanced so that they were concrete cases and simple enough so that you had time to see that in terms of configuration it wasn't complicated to set up.

    The Olivero theme: Genesis and Update on Drupal 9's Newest Theme

    Redit a bit of what was said at the initiatives keynote and the Driesnote. The points were to well inform that during the development of Olivero a focus on accessibility testing was done. The dark mode functionality will arrive shortly.

    When asked why, for example, Olivero does not manage the forum integrated into the Drupal core, the answer was because for the moment it is an MVP that is integrated into the core. We'll see when it stabilises.

    Sprints

    In terms of contribution, I tried to advance a feature of the Config Ignore module with test writing, without success because I didn't know too much about the module's code and the maintainer had set up methods to help with testing, but when you don't yet know the module's logic it makes it harder to understand.

    I focused instead on making the Config Development module Drupal 9 compatible because it was the last module in my stack not Drupal 9 compatible and preventing me from migrating my project template and site to Drupal 9 :

    I took the opportunity to do a little advanced Entity Share with the following issues :

    And the release of https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_share/releases/8.x-3.0-beta2 and https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_share_cron/releases/3.0.0-beta1.

    At Drupal core level, I have continued work on certain issues :

    I'm now concentrating more on bugs as I find it's more likely to be merged especially with the Bugsmash initiative.

    Conclusion

    So with an online event, no goodies... Well, yes despite that, thanks to Acquia, for the free t-shirt ! It's really cool to have a free t-shirt that you can choose the colour and design of.

    As usual, a pleasure to meet new people and see acquaintances again. Even if the " online " side of things helps to keep events going, a face-to-face event still has more impact I think. It's better for networking and the social aspect, plus the travel aspect which gives a change of scenery normally.

    Thanks to the organisers, sponsors, participants and Smile for " sending " me there.

    Photos : https://celebratedrupal.org/2020/drupalcon-europe-official-photo

    Videos : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpeDXSh4nHjTP7vRC6LCak9adK2yp1P5S

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