So long DrupalCon Europe!

Last week I attended DrupalCon Vienna. And I must say, it’s been one of the better and most positive DrupalCons in a long time. The past 12-18 months have been really tough on the community. There’s been a lot of fatigue, doubt and uncertainty in Drupal 8 as a product, as well as other issues in the community. But I really think we’ve come out of this period stronger than ever!

This time everything was different because Vienna was the last European DrupalCon for the foreseeable future. The event was also scaled back, with no official events on the Monday, nor any extended code sprints which has been a tradition for many years. However, the local community pulled together an amazing program for the Monday, with trainings, code sprints etc. to fill the void.

The week was full of positivity. You can tell that Drupal 8 has really got up to momentum, and so many amazing things are being delivered with it. Not only are there many impressive site builds and client projects out there, but core development itself has picked up some impressive steam. This is partly due to a constantly evolving and improving core governance process with its strategic initiatives. All initiatives seems to be in a very good place, and Drupal 8.5 is shaping up to be an amazing release!

In traditional fashion the event started off on the Tuesday with Dries’ keynote. If you work with anything even semi-related to content management systems I would really recommend you watching it. The industry is changing, and so is Drupal. What I really liked with this keynote is that it was made clear that Drupal is no longer for everyone, and as a product we need to start focusing on certain customers and their specific needs.

Later on the Tuesday I held a core conversation to update everyone on the Workflow Initiative and on Wednesday I talked about the upgrade path to make entity types revisionable. I was really happy with how both the presentations went and the general excitement from the public around this topic.

Further, I really enjoyed the update on the Layout Initiative and the session about Contenta, which is an API-first distribution of Drupal. These two sessions are not only exciting because they showcase some really good technology, but also because they showcase two entirely different uses of Drupal. The featured photo was taken during the update on the API-first Initiative which I also enjoyed a lot!

I can’t wait for what’s coming next, both in terms of Drupal 8 development and the future of Drupal events in Europe. Next year there won’t have a DrupalCon on this side of the pond, but I have a feeling it might not be such a bad thing. There’s already such a well-established set of events over here with Drupal Dev Days, Frontend United etc. I think this will increase the focus on our local communities and growing the grass-roots movement even stronger in the process!