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You Should Definitely Review These Ten Vital DrupalCon Atlanta Sessions
This article originally appeared on Symfony Station. DrupalCon Atlanta took place March 24 - 27 of this year. Below are ten must watch DrupalCon Atlanta sessions to take in if you missed them or want to relive them. Whether you are a developer, site builder, designer, or content creator, they cover what will be driving Drupal forward in the future. Unfortunately they are on YouTube, but it is what it is. Drupal routinely makes poor decisions on the tech it uses including its dreadful social media choices, but that’s a different article. I didn’t get to attend and see the presentations I recommend live, but I did get to see similar ones from many of the same presenters at DrupalCamp Florida a month earlier. Before you watch any of their replays I recommend viewing Dries Buyaert's keynote address. It's always good to have an overview of what's new. Video Driesnote Drupal Atlanta sessions Let’s look at ten sessions that stood out. I will assign an importance rating on a scale of one to five stars. Afterwards, I provide a quick note for as to why. I will then let the presenters describe their sessions with minor edits. Links are also provided to their Drupal member pages if you want to review their qualificatioins. You should then be able to decide if you want to watch the session. Finally, there are links to the session's conference and YouTube pages. 1. Drupal CMS now and beyond Presenters: Pamela Barone and Cristina Chumillas Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Why: Drupal CMS / Starshot's effort to bring Drupal to a wider audience of site builders, creators, public servants, and marketers is vital to the ecosystem's long-term success. That success may even be a requirement for Drupal's survival. Description: With Drupal CMS 1.0 released in January, we're now well into development of 2.0. DrupalCon Atlanta was a great opportunity to discuss what's' planned next on the roadmap, provide updates on how we are tracking them, and briefly look back at the process so far. Topics covered include: Features and areas we're working on now Plans for future versions What we're looking for from contributors How we defined the strategy and scope Using the strategy to define the roadmap and what it looks like now How the community has come together to work toward the same goal Highlights from the initial work tracks and what we learned from them Conference Page Drupal CMS now and beyond Video Drupal CMS now and beyond 2. Experience Builder is coming. Are you ready? Presenter: Lauri Timmanee Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Why: In my opinion, Experience Builder is the most important thing going on with Drupal right now. It will make Drupal usable. So see what it's all about. Description: This session featured the latest news on the Experience Builder initiative from the initiative leaders. Experience Builder is set to revolutionize how websites are built with Drupal, making building Drupal sites faster and easier than ever before. Experience Builder will enable teams without Drupal experience to easily theme and build their entire website using their browser, without the need to write code beyond basic HTML, CSS, and templating markup. It will also enable content creators to create and compose content on any part of the page without relying on developers. In this session, you go step-by-step through how sites will be built using Experience Builder. Conference Page Experience Builder is coming - Are you ready? Video Experience Builder is coming - Are you ready? 3. Behind the Build: How We're Creating Drupal’s New Default Design System Presenters: Elliott Mower and Jason Thompson Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Why: Drupal CMS brings a once in a decade or two chance to get design right in Drupal. So check it out and give your input. Description: Get a behind-the-scenes look into the creation of the new default design system for DrupalCMS. This session explores how the project is coming to life: from research and exploration to the development of a cohesive, accessible, and brand-agnostic system. We dive into the collaborative process, key challenges, and the strategies we're using to balance flexibility, simplicity, and scalability for a diverse community of users. Learn what it takes to build a design system that not only empowers content creators but also sets a new standard for an ever-evolving web. Conference Page Behind the Build: How We're Creating Drupal’s New Default Design System Video Behind the Build - How We're Creating Drupal’s New Default Design System 4. No need to over-React! Navigating Experience Builder as a developer Presenter: Bálint Kléri Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Why: Did you see my note about Drupal's unfortunate tech selecting abilities. The Experience Builder UI is built with React. Which has pissed alot of people off, because React is shit. Same thing with Failwind. Fortunately, you won't have to build your Experie
This article originally appeared on Symfony Station.
DrupalCon Atlanta took place March 24 - 27 of this year.
Below are ten must watch DrupalCon Atlanta sessions to take in if you missed them or want to relive them. Whether you are a developer, site builder, designer, or content creator, they cover what will be driving Drupal forward in the future.
Unfortunately they are on YouTube, but it is what it is. Drupal routinely makes poor decisions on the tech it uses including its dreadful social media choices, but that’s a different article.
I didn’t get to attend and see the presentations I recommend live, but I did get to see similar ones from many of the same presenters at DrupalCamp Florida a month earlier.
Before you watch any of their replays I recommend viewing Dries Buyaert's keynote address. It's always good to have an overview of what's new.
Video
Drupal Atlanta sessions
Let’s look at ten sessions that stood out. I will assign an importance rating on a scale of one to five stars. Afterwards, I provide a quick note for as to why. I will then let the presenters describe their sessions with minor edits. Links are also provided to their Drupal member pages if you want to review their qualificatioins. You should then be able to decide if you want to watch the session.
Finally, there are links to the session's conference and YouTube pages.
1. Drupal CMS now and beyond
Presenters: Pamela Barone and Cristina Chumillas
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
Drupal CMS / Starshot's effort to bring Drupal to a wider audience of site builders, creators, public servants, and marketers is vital to the ecosystem's long-term success. That success may even be a requirement for Drupal's survival.
Description:
With Drupal CMS 1.0 released in January, we're now well into development of 2.0.
DrupalCon Atlanta was a great opportunity to discuss what's' planned next on the roadmap, provide updates on how we are tracking them, and briefly look back at the process so far.
Topics covered include:
- Features and areas we're working on now
- Plans for future versions
- What we're looking for from contributors
- How we defined the strategy and scope
- Using the strategy to define the roadmap and what it looks like now
- How the community has come together to work toward the same goal
- Highlights from the initial work tracks and what we learned from them
Conference Page
Video
2. Experience Builder is coming. Are you ready?
Presenter: Lauri Timmanee
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
In my opinion, Experience Builder is the most important thing going on with Drupal right now. It will make Drupal usable. So see what it's all about.
Description:
This session featured the latest news on the Experience Builder initiative from the initiative leaders.
Experience Builder is set to revolutionize how websites are built with Drupal, making building Drupal sites faster and easier than ever before.
Experience Builder will enable teams without Drupal experience to easily theme and build their entire website using their browser, without the need to write code beyond basic HTML, CSS, and templating markup.
It will also enable content creators to create and compose content on any part of the page without relying on developers.
In this session, you go step-by-step through how sites will be built using Experience Builder.
Conference Page
Experience Builder is coming - Are you ready?
Video
Experience Builder is coming - Are you ready?
3. Behind the Build: How We're Creating Drupal’s New Default Design System
Presenters: Elliott Mower and Jason Thompson
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
Drupal CMS brings a once in a decade or two chance to get design right in Drupal. So check it out and give your input.
Description:
Get a behind-the-scenes look into the creation of the new default design system for DrupalCMS.
This session explores how the project is coming to life: from research and exploration to the development of a cohesive, accessible, and brand-agnostic system.
We dive into the collaborative process, key challenges, and the strategies we're using to balance flexibility, simplicity, and scalability for a diverse community of users.
Learn what it takes to build a design system that not only empowers content creators but also sets a new standard for an ever-evolving web.
Conference Page
Behind the Build: How We're Creating Drupal’s New Default Design System
Video
Behind the Build - How We're Creating Drupal’s New Default Design System
4. No need to over-React! Navigating Experience Builder as a developer
Presenter: Bálint Kléri
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
Did you see my note about Drupal's unfortunate tech selecting abilities. The Experience Builder UI is built with React. Which has pissed alot of people off, because React is shit. Same thing with Failwind. Fortunately, you won't have to build your Experience Builder custom components with React or Tailwind. Hurray SDCs and Twig.
Description:
Experience Builder (XB) will not only enable site builders to theme and build their entire website in the browser, it will also unlock content creation with unprecedented UX in Drupal.
I'm excited about empowering developers to author components and build XB extensions that will expand upon our foundational building blocks.
XB is a React app that lives inside Drupal. Spoiler alert: This doesn't mean developers have to write JavaScript—unless that's what they prefer. Extensibility has always been Drupal's strong suit, and even with the "React-ification of Drupal's admin UI" and it remains an important priority while maintaining the PHP-based ecosystem.
XB components will primarily be authored using established Drupal techniques—specifically, Single-Directory Components (SDCs) via Twig templates. The session demonstrates both this approach and the experimental capability of using JavaScript frameworks like React, Preact, Vue, or Svelte.
Conference Page
No need to over-React! Navigating Experience Builder as a developer
Video
No need to over React! Navigating Experience Builder as a developer
5. Recipes - It's About Time!
Presenter: Martin Anderson-Clutz
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
Recipes are a big part of bringing Drupal CMS to the site building masses. But they are also a great tool for Core Drupal sites. See one of them in action.
Description:
One of the key elements of the Starshot Initiative is the rapidly evolving system for Recipes. Designed to accelerate site-building, recipes will help people new to Drupal to solve for common needs, and for users of all skill levels to quickly build out content architectures using best practices.
This talk takes a deep dive into the Events recipe and its available add-ons, allowing you meet even complex requirements quickly and without custom code. We discuss what capabilities are available out-of-the box in Drupal CMS, and the options available to extend them.
We'll also talk about how you can add the same capabilities to a site not built with Drupal CMS.
Conference Page
Video
6. Jumpstart Your Drupal Projects with Recipes - Simplifying Configurations and Speeding Up Going to Market
Presenters: Mark Mahon and Olu Adeyanju
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
Simplification is better than complexity. That's the main idea behind Drupal CMS. It's also the one behind recipes. So learn how to use them to save time and money when you need reusability and composability.
Description:
Forum One initially created a set of modules and an install profile that we used internally to easily get things like an accordion Paragraph and a WYSIWYG paragraph, reasonable security defaults, and more.
We have pivoted to Drupal Recipes and have been migrating these features to new recipes. We have implemented some baseline paragraphs, a baseline configuration for CKEditor, metatags, and default configurations for hosting vendors like Pantheon, Platform.sh and Acquia.
Here, we go over creating a simple recipe, how to import it into your site, and share some of our recipes to show how you can quickly scaffold out baseline configurations.
Conference Page
Video
7. Documentation Initiatives for Starshot and drupal dot org
Presenter: Joe Shindelar
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
Documentation is the most important part of any project. End of story. If you don't know what things are for and how to use them, they are worthless. And if projects have documentation but it's bad, they are shit projects regardless of their code.
Description:
High-quality documentation is crucial for Drupal CMS's wider adoption, community growth, and overall success. As part of the Drupal Starshot initiative, we're focusing on improving our documentation and creating a highly curated, best-in class Drupal CMS User Guide among other things.
In this session updates you on the progress that’s been made and future plans.
The Drupal community, Drupal Association, and Starshot team are working to address the challenges of creating, and sustaining best-in class documentation. This includes funding models, processes improvements, governance, and tooling.
Key topics include:
- The Adopt-a-Document initiative
- Progress of the new Drupal CMS Guide
- Efforts to fund dedicated documentation staff
- Ongoing Drupal.org changes for better documentation collaboration and maintenance
- Ways to get involved
Conference Page
Documentation Initiatives for Starshot and drupal dot org
Video
Documentation Initiatives for Starshot and drupal dot org
8. IXP Fellowship - Using Contribution Credits to encourage organizations to hire new Drupal talent
Presenters: Michael Anello, Carlos Ospina, and Ana Laura Coto Tristan
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
It's no secret that most PHP developers and Drupal ones in particular tend to be older, whiter, and male. That needs to change. We need more young people in Drupal. And if we are successful in this endevour we will naturally have more diversity as well. So get to work hiring young developers.
Description:
The IXP-Fellowship, a Drupal community initiative for onboarding inexperienced developers has its initial goal of using Drupal's contribution credit system as an incentive for Drupal organizations to hire new and inexperienced Drupal developers.
One of the major challenges for new Drupal developers is landing their first paid gig. As a community, we can't expect Drupal to grow if there are limited ways for new, inexperienced Drupal developers to gain that important initial experience.
Over the past year, the IXP community initiative has worked to define and implement a process to utilize existing drupal.org functionality to incentivize Drupal agencies and other organizations to hire trained, inexperienced developers in exchange for drupal.org commit credits.
In this session, you learn about the overall scope of the initiative, its current status, and how you and/or your organization can get involved.
Conference Page
IXP Fellowship - Using Contribution Credits to encourage organizations to hire new Drupal talent
Video
IXP Fellowship - Using Contribution Credits to encourage organizations to hire new Drupal talent
9. The Future of Drupal Theming - AI, Experience Builder, and Beyond
Presenter: Mike Herchel
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
Going forward with new Drupal sites most work will be done in the Experience Builder. And thankfully that includes theming.
Description:
Drupal’s theming layer has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years. We’ve seen new Twig filters, theme generation tools, and the introduction of Single Directory Components.
Those changes, however, will pale in comparison to what’s coming in the next few years. The introduction of Experience Builder paired with modern artificial intelligence will revolutionize how we work.
In this presentation, I’ll walk you through
- Developing components for Experience Builder
- How will AI fit into your front-end workflow
- What should be a component and what is not?
- Best practices that will reduce code bloat
- How to future proof the code that you’re writing now
To get the most out of this session, it’ll help to be familiar with general Drupal theming practices, gotchas, and painpoints.
Conference Page
The Future of Drupal Theming - AI, Experience Builder, and Beyond
Video
The Future of Drupal Theming - AI, Experience Builder, and Beyond
10. Mixing the Schema.org Blueprints module into a Drupal Recipe to bake a sweet content model
Presenter: Jacob Rockowitz
Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Why:
Jakob's schema module has been out for several years but has never gotten the credit or love it deserves. Why? I don't know, but it needs to change now. Implementing it with recipes is a smart and easier way to go.
Description:
The Schema.org Blueprints module provides a new way to build a standardized and structured content architecture in Drupal. A Drupal Recipe is a new way to predefine and package configurations that add features to a new or existing Drupal implementation.
This presentation introduces attendees to building a Schema.org based content model using the Schema.org Blueprints module and demonstrates how to 'bake' it into a Drupal Recipe. During the presentation, there are demos for building structured content types, as well as hierarchical content and organization charts.
Conference Page
[Mixing the Schema.org Blueprints module into a Drupal Recipe to bake a sweet content model
Video
Mixing the Schema.org Blueprints module into a Drupal Recipe to bake a sweet content model
Wrapping it up
As you have seen there are many new developments in the Drupal community that will greatly impact its destiny.
The Experience Builder, recipes, single directory components, and content schema implementation lead the way to better Drupal sites. Meanwhile Drupal CMS will bring Drupal to a wider audience.
Most importantly, we all need to work toward bringing new, more diverse, and younger blood into the community. The new efforts will help and these sessions can inspire us to do so as well.
Thanks for reading and enjoy viewing your selection from these vital DrupalCon Atlanta presentations.
Author
Reuben Walker
Founder
Symfony Station
