The first DrupalCamp in England was held this weekend (1st March 2025) in Cambridge. I drove down on the Friday with Chris Maiden to attend (and speak!) at the event.
We arrived early at the event and and started the day with a much needed coffee (or two) and started chatting with the other attendees.
The opening session was a keynote from Baddý Sonja Breidert, who talked about AI, the success of Drupal and the Drupal CMS system, and about the success of the Drupal community. There were also videos from Dries and Tim Doyle who had messages of what's coming next in the Drupal world. I think I missed Drupal being recognised as a DPG (Digital Public good) product by the Digital Public Goods Aliance. This alliance facilitates the discovery of open source technologies that follow guidelines to have things like open licenses, data security, documentation, and protection from harassment as key tenets of the system.
The first session I went to during the camp was Help! Help! My search page is getting hammered by a bot! with ifrik. This was a break down of how to use the Search API module from the perspective of a non-coder. I have recently been looking at creating a search index using Search API and had hit upon a couple of problems, all of which were addressed in the talk. I took quite a few notes from the session and will be implementing some of the lessons on my projects going forward.
After a quick break I went to the session An Introduction To Services In Drupal by me! I don't think I have practiced a talk quite so much as I did with this one and I think it went really well. Even without my speaker notes I remembered to hit all of my talking points (well, most of them) and don't think I went too quickly. At least, I hope I didn't go too quickly, the recording might prove otherwise! Still, I had a great time speaking at the camp so if you were there thank you so much for coming to listen to me. Special thanks to those of you who said nice things about the talk afterwards, I really appreciated that.
Up next was Drupal CMS Recipes, what do they do? with Gareth Alexander. Drupal CMS contains a bunch of recipes, and learning what they do and how they work has been on my agenda for a while now. Gareth had a quick look at the recipe format before looking at what recipes (and sub recipes) exist in Drupal CMS. This was a really interesting introduction into the concept of recipes, and it's clear that Gareth knows his stuff!
After lunch, which was a collection of amazing vegan lunch boxes (I had the Thai noodle salad), I went along to see Drupal Open University Initiative - Status and vision from drupalviking. I had heard about the initiative from Lenny Moskalyk at DrupalCamp Scotland in Edinbourgh last year so it was good to hear more about how it started and how things are progressing.
Next was Finn Lewis, who was talking about Rewarding contribution in LocalGov Drupal. I've worked with LocalGov Drupal recently, and even gone to the LocalGov Drupal Camp in Birmingham this year. This talk was an interesting analysis of how LocalGov Drupal is trying (and succeeding my all accounts) at making open source software development a business model. LocalGov Drupal is now used by more than 60 council websites, with councils from other parts of the world also starting to take notice. This means there is a tremendous about of drive to get bugs fixed, to create new features, and to make the package better. Finn looked at how they are rewarding organisations for their contributions to the project and how they are measuring what a contribution is. Part of this was using the architecture of participation, which is a model they have adopted to grow the LocalGov Drupal community.
Straight after this talk was Maria Young with Designing for All Minds: Enhancing Cognitive Accessibility in Drupal. This session looked at accessibility in terms of cognitive differences and learning disabilities. A really interesting look at how to allow users of all levels to use your webiste, and what sort of tools are available to assist users with their needs in that regard. I have a couple of excellent tips from Maria that I will certainly be looking at in my work going foward.
Finally, there was a closing session before we all departed for a pub in Cambridge city center. There were some hints at planning a DrupalCamp in the south of England at some point next year.
Highlights from the camp include:
- The drive down to Cambridge (and home again) with the awesome Chris Maiden.
- Chatting with a chap called Paul, who I have been working with for several months but have never met in person.
- Meeting all the usual Drupal friends, some of which I hadn't seen in years and years.
- Seeing a few new faces attending their first Drupal event. Really good to see new people at these events!
- Some of the lovely feedback from my talk, including the awesome discussions that we had after the talk itself. If you were in the talk then thank you!
- Everyone who took a Code Enigma coffee cup. Thank you.
Thanks to the university of Cambridge for being excellent hosts for the event.
Massive thanks to the organisers for creating such an amazing event and to all the sponsors to making it possible. I had an amazing time! Looking forward to the next one!
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