DrupalCamp Ruhr 2018 Recap

Two hundred and fifty people from across Germany and its neighbouring countries gathered in Essen on 17 and 18 March for DrupalCamp Ruhr, an event full of fresh discussions, workshops and presentations. The organizers decided to use the Open Space / Barcamp format that provided attendees with the option to pre-select certain sessions, but which could also be combined spontaneously with ad-hoc sessions that the participants had presented in the kick-off session. This meant that, in contrast to our regular conference experience, each of us got to quickly present our idea and were also able to adapt the camp’s schedule collaboratively before we started.

On each day, we would then agree upon the session plan. I ended up doing a planned session and two spontaneous ones. Before I start to explain what I talked about, I would like to highlight what stood out for me, in terms of discussions and themes at the conference: Drupal 8 Distributions are ready The initial panel discussion on distributions was a great moment to hear Distribution Maintainers and Leads talk about NP8, deGov, Thunder, Varbase, Commerce, OpenSocial and the Out of the Box initiative. It was great to see how much progress the distribution space has already made in Drupal 8. Distributions are an excellent way to highlight what Drupal can do and push for reusable, generic solutions. As I had worked 4 years with the epiqo team on Recruiter, one of the first Drupal 7 distributions, this was also a good reminder of the interesting challenges we face when creating products based on Drupal. In addition, the panelists also discussed how to best manage configurations using approaches like Features and Config Split.

Local Communities starting to collaborate Another highlight was the discussions around aligning Drupal community efforts. The project, Local Community Distribution, was created to combine efforts in order to build and maintain local community websites. Representatives from various country initiatives were brought together, along with neighbouring countries such as France and the Netherlands, to share their codebases in the interim, which can be used as a solid foundation to get these projects off the ground. Details of the discussion can be found in this ticket.  

Coincidentally, we recently started an initiative to create a new Drupal Switzerland website, so keep an eye on our group’s page or join one of the Zurich Meetups to follow the progress and join the discussion. Communication moving from Slack to DrupalChat Over the last few years, a large percentage of instant communication has moved from IRC to Slack because of superior usability. Unfortunately, Slack’s commercial focus limits the community using it - currently most of our channels appear empty due to the fact that Drupal Slack hides old messages. The local communities, therefore, decided to go for DrupalChat.eu as an alternative. If you are interested, follow this issue or join the BOF at DrupalCon NA.

Drupal 8 Initiatives are making progress In my talk - Drupal 8 Initiatives, I tried to give an overview of the status, history and achievements of the initiatives that are contributing to the Drupal 8 project. It was a great opportunity to highlight how much Drupal 8 has already been evolving over the years as well as to show how any future contributions can be done collaboratively. In the spontaneous session, we spoke about Agile and Project Management practices as well as the #d8rules initiative.

Keeping an eye on upcoming Drupal events in Europe Thanks to the DrupalCamp Ruhr team for putting together such a dynamic event! We are really looking forward to more collaboration and exchanges within the Drupal community during 2018. For those who can’t make it to DrupalCon Nashville, 9-13 April, Europe has you covered. Keep an eye on these events:

• DrupalHack Camp, Bucharest, Romania 8-10 June,
• Drupal Developer Days Lisbon, Portugal 2-6 July or
• Drupal Europe, Darmstadt, Germany 10-14 September.

As usual, you can also find many more regional events on Drupical and finally, if you are interested in an unconference using the Open Space format, make sure to join us for Agile Lean Europe Zürich 2018, August 22-24. For more information on DrupalCamp Ruhr, check out the event website, the #dcruhr18 twitter hashtag or find more pictures on our flickr page.