Two weeks ago, from 17 to 20 October, the DrupalCon Europe 2023 was held in Lille.
The event welcomed around 1,300 participants, which was a slight increase on last year's attendance.
This year Smile was present as a platinum sponsor.
Here's a summary of the sessions I was able to attend.
Design System in Drupal : Build your website without coding! (sponsored by Smile)
As platinum sponsor, Smile had a presentation slot on the open stage. With Nicolas Loye, we presented the Streamlined CMS, the project on which we are devoting a great deal of R&D effort within Smile in order to provide Drupal sites that are easier to learn and quicker to set up while improving the Drupal modules and ecosystems we use. Here is the presentation support.
© Vincent Maucorps licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0.
Presentation of the Streamlined CMS on the Open stage.
Having your cake, and eating it too: Using Varnish to serve content from your new Drupal site alongside your Legacy platform - keeping 2 platforms live at the same time.
The 15-minute introduction to the topic didn't convince me and I left the room after that time.
Drupal 10 localization server upgrade initiative status
The latest news on the migration from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 of the community translation server.
It's very interesting to learn that the team is now at the stage of migrating data and resolving data volume issues. And that the team is in the process of considering the addition of features that have potentially been hanging around in the form of suggestions in the issue queue for years.
How to onboard the next generation of Drupal engineers
Presentation of a process for recruiting and mentoring Drupal developers.
After selecting developers on hiring, the process goes through a long training phase, with mentoring that continues on an ongoing and permanent basis. The speaker's comparison between his experience of re-entering the Drupal community and that of a recruited and mentored developer clearly shows the impact of mentoring on the time between the first contact with Drupal and the first contribution, dropping from several years to 2 or 3 months, as well as their quality.
We also feel that the Drupal community's effort to communicate about mentoring and simplify the contribution process is bearing fruit.
Develop, Test and Deploy at scale: quality process for deliveries, experience and tools for clients, developers and project managers.
Project feedback showing very good coordination between provider and client teams with a robust testing process.
How JSON:API 1.1 will make Drupal better
Perhaps the session that interested me most in relation to the Entity Share.
A priori the new features of the JSON:API 1.1 will mainly have an impact for applications consuming JSON:API endpoints, allowing them to better manage the relationships and links between data, to better identify the "objects" being manipulated. I was essentially reassured to know that there was only added functionality (normal, compared to semantic versioning, but you never know) so no impact for Entity Share.
I was even able to say two words about it after the presentation to the speaker (one of the maintainers of the JSON:API in the Drupal core) who told me he was also familiar with Entity Share and used it and that there would be no impact.
A Drupal inspired Render API for cloud and edge computing
Revised and improved version of the presentation given at Drupal Dev Days 2023, with a more polished Dilla site and a live demo. The audience was more attentive and receptive. It's a shame that the presentation took place in the last session slot and on the last day, because due to a delay in the previous session (perhaps itself having been delayed beforehand) there weren't just one or two questions, as the closing session was taking place.
Contribution print
The weekend before DrupalCon, I had revived the topic of making the PHP CS Fixer configuration I use for Drupal compatible with the latest version of PHP CS Fixer. Thanks to Kevin Wenger for his collaboration and for becoming the new maintainer of this library. And thanks to Pol Dellaiera for his quick response. So I continued this testing work mainly during DrupalCon as well as the weekend that followed. This resulted in new versions of the configuration that are now up to date with PHP CS Fixer.
I was able to take advantage of DrupalCon to discuss with the other people involved in the UI Suite ecosystem to make progress on certain subjects requiring decisions or discussion.
Sprint table on UI Suite.
Indirectly related to UI Suite, I was able to speak with Sascha Eggenberger, maintainer of the Gin theme and its ecosystem to talk about integrating Gin Layout Builder and improving its maintainability. As well as presenting him with a few merge requests I've made either for bugs or new features to get his live feedback.
I also took part in an interview for the Log4U service. As one of the first users of this service, I was interviewed to gather my impressions and suggestions for improvements to the service.
And I was able to spend some time documenting what had been set up in terms of Gitlab CI templates on drupal.org to check what was currently covered and how to modify PHP CS configuration if necessary, for example. I therefore analysed the gap with the tools I currently have on my skeleton project and have for the moment noted my analysis in this ticket. I'd like to take advantage of the move to Gitlab CI to have the tools I use that aren't yet in the Drupal.org templates or that are present, but using my configuration for the projects I maintain. This will save me having to retrieve the code locally for each merge request and run it through my code quality tools. Next time I look at this subject again, I'll try to contact the team in charge of templates to see if I can suggest that this be integrated directly into the templates or at least find out a bit more about the roadmap planned for templates.
Conclusion
An event rich in discussions, especially with people from the French community, colleagues or ex-colleagues, as the event took place in France.
Another point that gave me great pleasure too was the mentions of Entity Share in session slides or in discussions about using the module on projects of different natures and where getting to grips with it was quick and easy.
The dates of the next events were announced as usual in the closing session, to remember:
- Drupalcamp Rennes (Roazhon) from 28 to 30 March 2024
- DrupalDevDays 2024 in Burgas in Bulgaria from 26 to 28 June
- DrupalCon Europe 2024 in Barcelona from 24 to 27 September
Thanks to the organisers, sponsors, participants and Smile for sending me there.
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpeDXSh4nHjTALaf6oy_sIq6PryRzxKup