Drupal future

The present and future of Drupal initiatives

Gábor Hojtsy — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 18:43:20 +0000

The present and future of Drupal initiatives

Room

HS1 (Ground level)

Gábor Hojtsy Wed, 06/07/2023 - 20:43

Time Slot

Fri 10:45am to 11:30am (7/21/23)

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

All Attendees

Session Category

Open Web & Community

Initiatives were born out of a need to give contributors a framework to organize their work on specific goals for Drupal core. We've been widely successful with some of them, while major things happened outside of initiatives too. We'll discuss recent progress on key initiatives, look at where the model worked and I will share my thoughts on what may be the future of initiatives.

Speaker(s)

Gábor Hojtsy

Full Stack Community Organizer at Acquia

Speaker biography

An avid open source enthusiast and contributor. A Full Stack Community Organizer working with and on the open source project itself at Acquia. A regular Drupal event speaker and organizer and does communication and social media for various initiatives.

He used to be the Drupal 8 multilingual initiative lead and the former release manager of Drupal 6.

You can also find him passionate about singing, music and amateur acting, especially when these are all combined, however he have little time for that alongside his two adorable kids and the private school he is co-leading.

Session Keywords

Contribution

Community

Drupal future

Visual Layout Suite for ambitious site builders

crzdev — Mon, 22 May 2023 21:14:05 +0000

Visual Layout Suite for ambitious site builders

Room

HS4 (Ground level)

crzdev Mon, 05/22/2023 - 23:14

Time Slot

Wed 3:00pm to 3:45pm (7/19/23)

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

Intermediate

Session Category

Innovation & The future

VLSuite travels far because it is standing on the shoulders of giants, leveraging Layout Builder and contrib modules to provide a content editing experience to ambitious site builders.

This session features the capabilities of VLSuite, a set of modules that allow to deliver maximum value in the shortest time possible when it comes to site and content building. But talk is cheap, so what does VLSuite really offer?

VLSuite is under heavy development but it already features:

Much more organic preview during the editing process, no need to save to see how it looks constantly, a WYSIWYG at the layout and content level.
Easy creation of new content components at the site building layer, for specific nodes or as a library components.
Integration with any type of entity that can use Layout Builder.
User experience greatly improved over what core provides.
Out of the box solutions to daily use case applications.
Optimization of development times, serving as launch pad for site builders, developers and clients.
No entity fields to customize component look and feel.

How is this achieved? Thanks to the following premises:

Core Layout Builder ecosystem based.
Flexibility is the most important decision criteria.
Aiming to facilitate the basis of any development through a reusable and extensible suite.
No dependency on any distribution, profile, theme or admin theme.
Optional dependencies to provide out of the box functionalities.
Compatible with other approaches: if it works with Layout Builder it should work with VLSuite.
Allows switching used CSS classes thanks to internal identifiers so you could switch from one theme to another specifying the matching utility classes of the new theme.
Maximum use and optimization of existing styles, both initial and customized, avoiding the need of adding new CSS constantly.
Totally Libre Software without any external dependencies or costs.

You can get more info the module's page along with some videos that features the power of the VLSuite.

Speaker(s)

Cristian Aliaga

Drupal senior developer (frontend specialized) at metadrop

Ricardo Sanz

CTO at Metadrop

Speaker biography

Cristian Aliaga (crzdev)

Senior frontend Drupal developer with a strong backend knowledge, Cristian loves Drupal and Tetris equally.

Ricardo Sanz Ante (tunic/sanzante)

Involved in the Drupal Community over 10 years ago when he came to a local event and was convinced to talk about jQuery at the next event, the Community has always been a home. Interested in JavaScript, the Form API, the Configuration System, testing and DevOps, it's always a good time to learn something more, or share knowledge with others.

Session Keywords

Drupal future

Innovation

Decoupled Drupal in Jobiqo: a retrospective

joaogarin — Thu, 18 May 2023 08:25:53 +0000

Decoupled Drupal in Jobiqo: a retrospective

Room

HS1 (Ground level)

joaogarin Thu, 05/18/2023 - 10:25

Time Slot

Wed 5:10pm to 5:40pm (7/19/23)

Session length

Short session - 25min, including Q&A

Audience

All Attendees

Session Category

Decoupled & Frontend Development

When we at https://www.jobiqo.com/ started our decoupled journey in 2018 the Drupal decoupled scene was new, very different and less mature than it is today. We found ourselves having to navigate very uncertain waters, not all was easy, but a lot of it was new and exciting and drove a lot of interesting times, personal development, struggles and yes maybe even some tears!

Today we can look back at past mistakes, good decisions, bad decisions, difficult decisions and implementations, great collaboration efforts and things we are not yet even sure were good or bad.

In this session I will go through the initial business (and technical) motivations to change jobiqo’s product which is a SAAS software for creating job boards from a very typical Drupal 7 architecture with a decoupled architecture using Drupal GraphQL and Next.js, what were some of the things we wanted to achieve with it, the risks we knew of, the risks we didn't know of, and analyse if we have delivered on those ideas today.

Doing a radical stack shift like this on a stable and mature product is no easy task, risks are involved, emotions are involved and a lot of buy-in needs to happen in all parts of the organisation (not just from developers) for it to truly succeed.

In this talk we can explore some of those risks and challenges such as :

Time to market (and development time in general)
Lack of knowledge from the team on specific flows / tools to be used
Security and accessibility

And much more.. We also will touch on specific patterns you can find youself fall into that can be detrimental to the team's success such as

Isolating backend and frontend development teams
Working on silos for the sake of "separation of concerns" (spoiler alert, both work on the same concern)
Lack of knowledge sharing

The session does not require any previous knowledge of any specific framework, just a basic understanding of the differences between a typical monolithic architecture and a decoupled architecture.

Speaker(s)

Joao Garin

Senior frontend developer at jobiqo

Speaker biography

Joao Garin

Joao is a senior frontend developer at jobiqo. Has been working at jobiqo for 8 years and worked on both the Drupal 7 version of jobiqo's product and the newer decoupled product. Joao is a tech lead on the product team and is passionate about frontend development, CSS, Javascript and Drupal.

A father of 2, loves surfing, skating, video games and frontend development, huge tolkien nerd also 🤷‍♂️ . You can find him in Lisbon and once every 2 or 3 months for a week in Vienna to join the team in the office and hang out.

Session Keywords

Automatic Updates!

nidashah — Mon, 15 May 2023 14:33:55 +0000

Automatic Updates!

Room

HS1 (Ground level)

nidashah Mon, 05/15/2023 - 16:33

Time Slot

Wed 10:45am to 11:30am (7/19/23)

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

All Attendees

Session Category

Backend Development

In this session we will discuss the much awaited feature automatic updates. We ll also discuss how you can set up automatic updates for your site to make maintenance for drupal sites easy.

Attendees will be able to take away the following from this session:

Setting up Automatic updates for your local site and on the server.
How we can ensure our site is ready for automatic updates.
Customizing the update process.
Caveats and limitations of automatic updates.

Speaker(s)

Nida Shah

Solutions Architect at Netnode AG

Speaker biography

Nida Shah is a developer from Kashmir, currently working as a Solutions Architect at Netnode.

Session Keywords

Drupal future

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

HS13 (2nd floor)

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

Time Slot

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

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

Innovation

Drupal future

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

HS1 (Ground level)

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

Time Slot

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

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

Drupal future

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

HS13 (2nd floor)

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

Time Slot

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

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

HS1 (Ground level)

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

Time Slot

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

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

Drupal future

Godot <3 Drupal

rteijeiro — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 17:48:16 +0000

Godot <3 Drupal

Room

HS13 (2nd floor)

rteijeiro Sat, 04/08/2023 - 19:48

Time Slot

Fri 4:15pm to 5:00pm (7/21/23)

Session length

Short session - 25min, including Q&A

Audience

All Attendees

Session Category

Innovation & The future

This presentation will introduce different scenarios where a game development engine like Godot can easily be integrated with a content management system to provide diverse digital experiences. You will learn how to create simple solutions like a video game scoreboard to complex elements like an inventory for your games. You will be able to improve your digital storytelling adding dynamic dialogs or player avatars. Build the next-generation e-learning or e-commerce experience thanks to Extended Reality.

Speaker(s)

Ruben Teijeiro

Drupal Hero at Lulu Game Studio

Speaker biography

Ruben Teijeiro

Active contributor of the Drupal Community with more than 12 years experience working in different Drupal projects for the public and private sector. Speaker in more than 25 countries, organiser of Drupal events in 5 countries and volunteer in more than 30 events. Co-founder of Youpal Group, an ICT consultancy company from Sweden and Lulu Game Studio, a game development company from Spain.

Session Keywords

Next Drupal admin UI improvements

ckrina — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 15:05:57 +0000

Next Drupal admin UI improvements

Room

HS1 (Ground level)

ckrina Fri, 03/24/2023 - 16:05

Time Slot

Sat 11:00am to 11:45am (7/22/23)

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

All Attendees

Session Category

Accessibility, User Experience & Marketing

After getting Claro as the default Drupal administration theme, now we can focus on improving the administration experience beyond the visuals.
We will cover several existing and future initiatives that will improve the default experience users have with Drupal's administration UI, both for site builders and for content editors. Whether you want to see what's coming next or you want to get involved, we will walk through which exciting changes are happening and where, which parts of the existing interface will be improved and which new features are around the corner.

Speaker(s)

Cristina Chumillas

Senior Frontend Developer at Lullabot

Speaker biography

Senior Front-end Developer at Lullabot, Drupal core provisional front-end framework manager and UX and Claro co-maintainer.

Session Keywords

Editor Experience

Drupal future

Design