The last time I wrote a DrupalCon recap, I was in a cafe in Copenhagen. It’s definitely different this time around in my office. However, it wonderful to see the resiliency of the Drupal community that DrupalCon was able to rapidly be turned into a digital event. Even though we are not meeting face to face, we are still making connections.
Yesterday I went to five sessions. I will not go into the details of everything I learned. I will cover some highlights that might be of interest to those in search of great tools on the Internet or wondering what is coming next in Drupal.
Every DrupalCon recap has to talk about the address from Dries Buytaert or the Driesnote as it is often called. This year Dries focused on the successful release of Drupal 9 and the condensed release cycle of Drupal 10.
The release cycle is abbreviated because other projects that Drupal relies on are coming to end of life (EOL). These include the current versions of PHP, Symphony, and Ckeditor. Other libraries like Twig are ending support, but we do not know yet if they will end security releases. Deciding what to do with these key libraries in Drupal provides major inflection points for how Drupal operates at all levels of the Drupal ecosystem. Dries called the selection of these libraries, “Drupal 10 Readiness,” and proposed this for the first initiative.
The remaining four initiatives proposed by Dries for the next 16 months are “easy, out-of-the-box”, “new front end theme”, “automated updates”, and a “JS menu component”. These goals are ambitious. I think the Drupal community will rise to the occasion. The bugaboo is 16 months.
A DrupalCon photo will be assembled on the Celebrate Drupal site. I added mine (see above).
I went to a great session on Automated Visual Testing with Shweta Sharma. Getting humans to test the visual elements on a website, especially the small nit-picky things, is inefficient at best so I am very interested in this subject. I walked away still thinking I am going to start with BrowserStack and Selenium, but now I know why I think these are a good idea. I also know why I should be excited that BrowserStack owns Percy now.
The healthcare summit was more about healthcare tech and less about Drupal. My world has me immersed in both these topics, and I was definitely interested. The best single takeaway from the event was this paraphrased quote, from Evan Lovely, a single point of truth when not careful is a single point of failure.
The most technical session I went to was Moshe Weitzman's talk on Drupal Cache Traits (DTT). DTT is about testing real-world sites that already have content in them rather than tearing everything down and starting from scratch to do a test. I will share my adventures with this module when I get to use it, but for now I am just very excited about the opportunities.
On to day two.