Innovation &amp; The future

Human machines and machine humans

prestonso — Thu, 18 May 2023 21:02:27 +0000

Human machines and machine humans

Room

Thu 9:15am to 10:15am (7/20/23)

prestonso Thu, 05/18/2023 - 23:02

Time Slot

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

All Attendees

Session Category

Innovation & The future

In the Drupal community, we're contending with a rapidly changing near term and far future that have immense, even unsettling, implications for our ecosystem. This year's advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), including OpenAI's emerging integrations with Drupal, and the fast growth in voice and other conversational technologies, cast in stark relief the risks and rewards—and the dangers to our commitments to equity, inclusion, and an open web—of allowing machines to become more human. At the same time, advancements in immersive technologies like the putative metaverse raise pertinent and urgent questions about what happens when humans become more like machines. Things feel unbalanced, unhinged, and unstable.

Over the course of this keynote, we'll touch on all of these areas: conversational, immersive, and generative—and we'll look at their possible impacts on the Drupal community and ecosystem as well as the potential damage they might inflict on our sense of humanity, our sense of justice, and our sense of self. We'll look closely at topics like avatars, anthropomorphism, and AI bias to explore how our imminent future encodes oppression into our interfaces as they become more like us and reflect our society, and to inspect why we must confront difficult questions in order to keep Drupal relevant, resonant, and reliable far into the future—for everyone.

Speaker(s)

Preston So

Author of Immersive Content and Usability from A Book Apart

Speaker biography

Preston So (he/they) is a product, design, engineering, and innovation leader, digital architect and strategist, designer and developer advocate, polyglot educator and speaker, and author of Immersive Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2023), Gatsby: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly, 2021), Voice Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2021), and Decoupled Drupal in Practice (Apress, 2018). He has been a programmer since 1999, a web developer and designer since 2001, a creative professional since 2004, a content architect since 2007, and a conversational and immersive designer since 2016.

A globally recognized authority on the intersections of content, design, and code, Preston has been a product, design, engineering, and innovation leader since 2015 at organizations like Oracle, Acquia, Time Inc., and Gatsby. Preston is an editor at A List Apart, columnist at CMSWire, contributor to Smashing Magazine, and has delivered keynotes around the world in three languages. He is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved.

Revamp Transactional Email in Drupal Core

znerol — Sun, 14 May 2023 10:20:20 +0000

Revamp Transactional Email in Drupal Core

Room

Sat 10:00am to 10:45am (7/22/23)

znerol Sun, 05/14/2023 - 12:20

Time Slot

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

Intermediate

Session Category

Innovation & The future

Drupal Core currently provides a very rudimentary API for sending transactional emails. This applies to both, the way emails are constructed (markup rendered to plaintext) as well as the way they are delivered (using the very limited PHP mail function).

A growing number of contrib projects are attempting to close this gap. However, to give site builders the tools they need to make their emails look good and work with modern email infrastructure, contrib projects must apply crude hacks to work around the limitations of the core mail API.

This session is a very short introduction into core and contrib mail APIs followed by a (hopefully) long Q&A where the audience is encouraged to bring in their PoV regarding the future of transactional email. The results of this session will ideally lead to a clear and broadly accepted plan for the next step on how Drupal core transactional email is going to be modernized in upcoming releases.

Speaker(s)

Lorenz Schori

Speaker biography

Lorenz Schori (znerol)

Passionate software developer at a swiss weekly newspaper. Occasional contributor to Drupal core and maintainer of a couple of contrib modules.

Session Keywords

Core Conversations

Structured content within CKEditor 5. Do we still need paragraphs?

erik.erskine — Sun, 14 May 2023 08:11:27 +0000

Structured content within CKEditor 5. Do we still need paragraphs?

Room

Thu 3:00pm to 3:45pm (7/20/23)

erik.erskine Sun, 05/14/2023 - 10:11

Time Slot

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

Intermediate

Session Category

Innovation & The future

The Paragraphs module has become the de-facto approach to modelling a parent/child field structure within nodes. It's a tried and tested way of organising data and separating presentation from content.

This rigidity can be great, but the strictness is reflected in the authoring experience. Think of it as structure first. You need to know what paragraph type you want before you can produce any content.

Sometimes that's a barrier to content authoring. A lot of content is inherently more freeform. As an editor, you want to start with a blank page, write some rough content, and organise it into components later. You want an editing experience closer to Google Docs or Microsoft Office.

Drupal 10 and CKEditor 5 open up some more avenues in this space.

CKEditor 5 has an internal data model that's distinct from both the stored data and the resulting HTML. It's a document editor rather than an HTML editor. With that in mind, we can define our own document structure and plugins for things that we might previously implemented as paragraphs.

This talk will demonstrate this approach. We'll go though putting together a component that is editable within CKEditor, is stored in a semantic way and is themable with twig.

We'll also illustrate when this is not the right approach, and when multiple entities organised hierarchically make more sense.

Speaker(s)

Erik Erskine

Senior Developer at Annertech

Speaker biography

Erik Erskine

Erik is a web developer based in Stockholm, Sweden. He works for Annertech doing all things related to Drupal site building and backend development, with a particular focus on migration and data structures.

Session Keywords

Drupal Site-Building

A Drupal inspired Render API for cloud and edge computing? An idea too crazy to fail.

pdureau — Tue, 09 May 2023 09:38:18 +0000

A Drupal inspired Render API for cloud and edge computing? An idea too crazy to fail.

Room

Thu 5:10pm to 5:40pm (7/20/23)

pdureau Tue, 05/09/2023 - 11:38

Time Slot

Session length

Short session - 25min, including Q&A

Audience

Advanced

Session Category

Innovation & The future

Design systems are hot and trendy right now because they are cost effective. By collecting documented UI artefacts (components, styles, themes, layouts…), they ease the collaboration between designers and developers, and they allow the reuse of the same design on several Web applications.

One of the issues challenging their adoption is their availability as universal corporate assets, agnostic about technical stacks. We solved this by packaging them as WebAssembly microservices, available on the edge, on the cloud and directly in browsers.

However, defining an API data format (high-level, declarative, serializable, safe, idempotent, stateless....) for those rendering services was not an easy task.

We are Drupal lovers. So, after evaluating other protocols (Protobuf, Graphql, RSC Wire…), we got a fresh look at the Render API and we fell in love again. This 15 year old API is a bit quirky and dusty, but also inspiring, standing the test of time, with clever ways of managing nesting, aggregation, alteration (preprocessing), data bubbling, caching…

So, our new API works like a charm, while being strongly and proudly inspired by 15 years of Drupal wisdom. We will show you what we kept, and also what we changed to make data structure flatter, 30% more compact, more consistent and predictable. With some ideas which could find their way to Drupal Core.

Speaker(s)

Pierre Dureau

Owner at Dilla

Speaker biography

Drupal professional since 2006. Fascinated about Drupal architecture (site building, business-agnostic coding, business modelling in config entities...), design systems methodology, and in a love-hate relationship with the Render API, Pierre leads the UI Suite initiative.

Session Keywords

Controlling Drupal via ChatGPT: Is Drupal coming for your Job? Exploring creating Views and interacting with a Search API index.

yautja_cetanu — Fri, 05 May 2023 17:52:38 +0000

Controlling Drupal via ChatGPT: Is Drupal coming for your Job? Exploring creating Views and interacting with a Search API index.

Room

Fri 2:00pm to 2:45pm (7/21/23)

yautja_cetanu Fri, 05/05/2023 - 19:52

Time Slot

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

All Attendees

Session Category

Innovation & The future

ChatGPT has dramatically reshaped our interactions with technology. What was initially perceived as a platform for generating amusing memes has evolved into a robust tool due to a series of incremental yet revolutionary advancements. The advent of versions like ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 have unveiled their potential to generate effective code, including YAML files, and serve as digital librarians managing our resource libraries with proficiency.

Given Drupal's inherent structure, we posit that we may be able to delegate a significant chunk of site builder functionality to ChatGPT, leveraging its natural language processing capabilities.

In this talk, we will demonstrate two modules we have developed. The first exploits ChatGPT to generate views entirely from scratch while giving ChatGPT the necessary field and entity structure to create more complex views. The second integrates with Search API, enabling queries within the resources hosted on Drupal, including PDFs, nodes, and more.

We will initiate the discussion with a high-level demonstration of the module functionality and then delve deeper into their intricacies. This will help our audience comprehend the potentially advanced applications of ChatGPT within the Drupal ecosystem. Lastly, we will explore the future trajectory of this technology and its potential impact.

The tools we will be exploring are as follows:

ChatGPT and Large Language Models (LLMs)
Vector search through Pinecone
Embedding techniques
The concept of Langchain
Drupal's Search API AI project (https://www.drupal.org/project/search_api_ai)
Freelygive's Views ChatGPT project on Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/freelygive/views_chatgpt)
OpenAI's Drupal project (https://www.drupal.org/project/openai)

Note: Summary has been written with Chatgpt because I feel that is necessary!

Speaker(s)

Jamie Abrahams

Director at Freely Give

Speaker biography

Jamie Abrahams

Jamie is a systems architect and co-founder of Freely Give that has been focusing on native Drupal CRMs for almost a decade. This niche has led Freely Give to create business applications in weird and wonderful ways. Since playing with ChatGPT he's managed to create his first module.

He's given a number of talks on Native Drupal CRM and GDPR

Session Keywords

Wed 4:15pm to 5:00pm (7/19/23)

Generative AI and Drupal

Iztok — Wed, 03 May 2023 20:57:37 +0000

Generative AI and Drupal

Room

HS4 (Ground level)

Iztok Wed, 05/03/2023 - 22:57

Time Slot

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

Intermediate

Session Category

Innovation & The future

Generative AI will change how we create and consume content, and as a CMS, Drupal will need to adapt to the new paradigms. As of this writing, Chat GPT 4 can write complex and creative content that is indistinguishable from humans. With some help, it can explore the latest information online, conduct research, connect with other services, or retrieve proprietary data. This greatly affects the work of creators of content: Drupal's users. What about using the CMS to build and publish content? When I first started building websites, content editors needed to write HTML. Then they started building rich pages with the WYSIWYG editor, then using components (paragraphs in Drupal); now it’s expected that users have a drag-and-drop experience. With AI, even this may become obsolete. We now have a tool that understands what we want to achieve by simply describing the desirable outcome (e.g., "build me a product landing page"). What about the front-facing interface? Will we still need filters and facet searches? Again, AI can trigger a semantic search with precise filtering by understanding the context, knowing the data structure, and with simple questions. And, of course, coding. If you have ever tried using ChatGPT to assist with coding, you get shocked by how useful it can be. It enables people who are never coded to use natural language to describe a problem they want to solve. The AI returns with (mostly) working code in any language and framework desired. In this session, we will go through the following: 1. The current state of AI and Drupal What is available right now? What can you start using today? In the context of creating content and digital experiences, where can we find value in utilizing generative AI, semantic search, and other ML-supported utilities? 2. Experiments with AI and Drupal: We will start with the obvious examples of AI generating content, metatags, and tagging our content. But the best example of harnessing AI capabilities is introducing augmented context/prompts and giving AI access to execute actions. 3. Integrations with other AI systems: Hooking up AutoGPT/BabyAGI with Drupal and integrating Drupal into ChatGPT with Plugins (note: I assume plugins will be publicly available by June 2023). 4. Running an AI model locally Drupal culture is about owning the code stat stores and processes our data. In the last couple of months, this has become a reality. Numerous open-source Gen-AI models are available, and we will try to connect one with Drupal. My experiences with AI come from first-hand experiences using OpenAI API to build two products and AI to help me along the way (i.e., using Copilot to code in PHP).

Speaker(s)

Iztok Smolic

Managing director at Agiledrop

Speaker biography

Hello, my name is Iztok Smolič, pronounced as "Eestok Smoleech." I'm based in Ljubljana, the beautiful capital of Slovenia. I'm a proud husband and father of two wonderful children, who are at the heart of everything I do. My professional journey began as a designer with a passion for creativity and technology. I started designing print and web projects in high school, which helped me develop a strong foundation in visual communication. In 2007, I transitioned into professional web development, working in trenches on over 50 web development projects and honing my skills. As I gained experience, I became increasingly involved in the global web development and open-source community, attending and speaking at events worldwide. This involvement allowed me to share my expertise with others and exposed me to a network of talented professionals and cutting-edge ideas. In 2013, I founded Agiledrop, leveraging my technical skills and industry insights to build a successful web development company. I took on various roles as the company grew, but mostly focused on driving business growth and fostering strong client relationships. Today, as the CEO and Managing Director at Agiledrop, I lead a talented team of developers, helping agencies and in-house teams create amazing online experiences. I aim to leverage my skills and expertise to help businesses thrive in the digital world. I'm always open to new opportunities and collaborations, so let's connect and explore how we can work together to bring your ideas to life!

Session Keywords

Why we moved the database drivers to their own modules

daffie — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 09:51:10 +0000

Why we moved the database drivers to their own modules

Room

Fri 11:45am to 12:15pm (7/21/23)

daffie Sat, 04/22/2023 - 11:51

Time Slot

Session length

Short session - 25min, including Q&A

Audience

Intermediate

Session Category

Innovation & The future

In Drupal 9.4 the database drivers for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite were moved to their own modules. This session is about why we did that and what we want to do next.

We had a number of problems with the old situation:

1. Having contributed modules with a database driver copy their driver files to the directory drupal_root/drivers is not very composer friendly.

2. The database driver classes are unfortunately not enough to make Drupal work for a specific database. All database drivers need to override things like (views and other) plugins and entity storage classes. Those overrides need to live in a module

3. Tests are not always the same for every database driver. Those overrides also need to live in a module.

4. The by Drupal core supported database drivers are the example for contributed database drivers. Just like the Drupal core module and themes are the example for the contributed module and themes.

5. Database drivers should be able to extend another database driver. Just like modules can do.

Having the by Drupal core supported database drivers in their own modules makes it possible to do:

A. Create a new database driver for MySQL that allows queries to be run asynchronously. For instance with multiple blocks on a page, the block data can be loaded in parallel from the database instead of synchronously. PHP 8.1 has added the Fibers functionality and that allows I/O and database queries to run asynchronously. The database driver for MySQLi allows Drupal to use asynchronous queries.

B. Store content entity data in a document format. Content entity data is now stored in multiple tables and with a high number of entities, getting entity data out of the database will become slow. When used in combination with authenticated users and a lot of content, will result in Drupal becoming slow. Storing content entity data in a document format will make it fast again. The only database that a the moment has enough functionality to make it work with Drupal is MongoDB.
Using caching is great, but has it limitations. If we make hard Drupal calls a lot faster, we can use Drupal without any caching or with a lot less. PHP is fast enough for this. Databases are fast too. Only storing data following the relational database rules makes will result in complicated queries for getting the data out of the database. Complicated queries with large amounts of data will result in a performance nightmare. That is why we are using so much caching with Drupal sites. For anonymous users this is not a problem, only with authenticated users is caching a lot of times not possible. The solution is to store content entity data in a document format. In that way we almost always can get the data out of the database with a simple query (and therefor a fast query). When all queries are simple queries, the resulting Drupal page call will be fast.

I have already build a database driver for MongoDB. The driver is in the form of a Drupal module and the project can be found here: https://gitlab.com/daffie/mongodb867. It is based on Drupal 8.6.7 it hacks Drupal core with a >1.5 MB patch file. This is totally not maintainable. To fix that problem I have started to work on Drupal core to make the MongoDB database driver module work without patching/hacking Drupal core.

I would like to end with a group discussion about what we want to do next. What does the group think. Do they have other/new ideas. Hopefully get other people involved in what is next. This can also happen after the official session.

Speaker(s)

David Bekker

Drupal developer at Finalist

Speaker biography

David Bekker

I am the main contributor in having the database drivers moved to their own modules, I am also the subsystem maintainer for the Database API and I have over 500 Drupal core commit credits.

Session Keywords

So I logged in, now what? The Dashboard initiative welcomes you

penyaskito — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 04:42:03 +0000

So I logged in, now what? The Dashboard initiative welcomes you

Room

Thu 11:45am to 12:15pm (7/20/23)

penyaskito Sat, 04/22/2023 - 06:42

Time Slot

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

All Attendees

Session Category

Innovation & The future

When you log in into a Drupal Site, by default you land on a mostly empty page which shows you how old your account is in the site. That’s not the best UX out there.

We aim to provide users with useful information and commonly used actions by default in Drupal core.

But different personas have different needs, so we had to go deep into the needs of the provided roles in the Drupal standard profile together with the Personas Initiative, but taking into account what other needs the Drupal community might have. That’s how the Dashboard initiative was born.

Dashboards will provide a better and personalized experience giving the opportunity to get at first glance information in an easily understandable format, even consisting of charts, graphs, and other visual aids.

In this session we will share with the audience the joy of our achievements, tell stories about our journey, and gather feedback about what’s next. There are ways everyone can contribute too, and we will point the audience about what’s needed to get our goal and how they can help.

Speaker(s)

Christian López Espínola

Cristina Chumillas

Senior Frontend Developer at Lullabot

Speaker biography

penyaskito

Christian is a Drupal contributor previously known for being involved in the Drupal 8 Multilingual initiative, and the Migrate initiative. Now trying to get these beautiful dashboards in core. These days he is freelancing.

ckrina

Cristina is a Provisional Front-end framework manager, Usabiity and Claro maintainer, and a lot of other things for the Drupal project. She works as a Senior Frontend Developer at Lullabot.

Session Keywords

Core Conversations

Keynote: Keeping Drupal competitive on the modern web

Kingdutch — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 14:59:26 +0000

Keynote: Keeping Drupal competitive on the modern web

Room