Last year, Drupal Association has decided to take a break to consolidate and not organize an official DrupalCon Europe in 2018. Twelve community members stepped in and developed a plan to organize a DrupalCon replacement − named Drupal Europe. The final result was outstanding.
More than 1000 Drupalers from all over the world gathered in Darmstadt, Germany from 10th to 14th September 2018 to attend the yearly biggest European Drupal event. The new event brought a new concept. It featured 10 amazing tracks that guaranteed high-quality content for all of the Drupal target groups − developers, marketers and agencies. Additionally, it created more room for contribution and collaboration outside session slots.
We supported the event by giving three talks in two different tracks.
On Tuesday, Miro Dietiker, founder of MD Systems, gave an interesting talk about integrating Digital Asset Management systems with Drupal. He compared the benefits of existing solutions and provided a practical guide what kind of solutions you could use to fulfill your media management needs.
More information about the session and slides can be found on https://www.drupaleurope.org/session/connecting-media-solutions-beyond-drupal while the session recording is available below.
On Wednesday, Miloš Bovan held a session about Paragraphs module and its best practices. The full room of people proves that people love and use Paragraphs a lot. The talk focused on answering frequently asked questions when it comes to working with Paragraphs. Those covered some of the new features that are not well known as well as ideas on how to improve the editorial experience easily.
The session summary is available at https://www.drupaleurope.org/session/enrich-your-paragraphs-workflow-features-you-didnt-know-about.
The conference featured many interesting sessions that provided ideas and actual implementations on how to make the Paragraphs user interface better (Creating an enterprise level editorial experience for Drupal 8 using React, Front-end page composition with Geysir, Improving the Editor Experience: Paragraphs FTW). The discussions about Paragraphs continued during all the conference and resulted in a BoF that happened on Thursday where Drupalers have discussed the future of Paragraphs UI. We look forward to fruitful collaboration.
Wow - A full house BoF about a next generation UI for #paragraphs at @DrupalEurope - thanks all for participating! pic.twitter.com/DDy7gIz1Mb
— Miro Dietiker (@miro_dietiker) September 13, 2018
John Choque, our colleague, gave a talk about the personal knowledge management distribution he has created as part of his bachelor thesis. The talk gathered people interested in education to get ideas how to improve knowledge management in their organizations. The session summary as well as slides are available at https://www.drupaleurope.org/session/drupal-pkm-personal-knowledge-management-drupal-distro.html
Social activities
Besides sessions, contributions and coding we enjoyed attending social events as well. On Tuesday, the organizers brought participants to the Bavarian Beer Garden to taste traditional German bratwurst and beers. The place was located in the park and there was no chance to miss the great event.
On Wednesday, we joined our fellow Drupalers from the Swiss community for a dinner. It is always nice to catch up with local people in an international event such as Drupal Europe.
#DrupalSwitzerland reunion at #DrupalEurope with @karinechor @fantastic91 @DavidSuissaJJ @MichaelSilvert @oritlewski @btemperli @schtifu @dpacassi @miro_dietiker and more https://t.co/sX8DWxx7Y1 pic.twitter.com/seXfiuaAtk
— Josef Kruckenberg (he/him) (@dasjo) September 14, 2018
As usual, the event came to an end with traditional and yet always exciting Trivia Night.
What’s next?
During Drupal Europe, the project founder, Dries Buytaert has announced that Drupal Association signed an agreement with Kuoni, an international company specialized in events organizations. This results in bringing the official DrupalCon Europe event back in 2019 and it is going to happen in the capital of The Netherlands − Amsterdam.
We hope to see you all there!
