DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023 is approaching fast! If you haven’t been to a DrupalCon before, Pittsburgh will be a great opportunity to experience the event. You will have the opportunity to connect with other developers, designers, content creators, and business leaders who use Drupal to build websites and digital experiences. DrupalCon offers a range of sessions, including hands-on workshops, technical talks, business case studies, panel discussions, and Birds of a Feather sessions providing attendees with the latest information and best practices for using Drupal to build some of the world's most innovative digital experiences.

What are Birds of a Feature (BoF) sessions?

"Birds of a Feather" (BoF) sessions are formal roundtables or informal gatherings of attendees who share a common interest or topic. They are usually organized during conferences and provide a space for attendees to network, discuss, and exchange ideas and experiences on a specific subject. Unlike normal sessions, BoFs are not typically led by a speaker or panel. They are more of an open discussion among participants. At DrupalCon, BoF sessions can cover a wide range of topics related to Drupal, including technical issues, business challenges, community initiatives, and more.

Why should you attend BoF sessions?

Attending Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at DrupalCon is a great way to enhance your conference experience. They provide opportunities to learn and engage with other attendees at the conference. They provide a relaxed and informal setting for attendees to connect, learn, and grow. As an attendee, here are four ways BOF sessions can benefit you at DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023:

1. Networking: BoFs provide a platform for attendees to network with others who share similar interests and challenges, creating opportunities for building new relationships and collaborations.
2. Knowledge sharing: BoFs allow attendees to exchange ideas, experiences, and best practices on specific topics, providing a deeper understanding of the subject and helping attendees to stay up-to-date with the latest developments.
3. Community building: BoFs contribute to the sense of community at a conference and help to foster a supportive and inclusive environment for attendees.
4. Personal growth: Attending BoFs can help attendees expand their knowledge and skills, and also provide new perspectives on their work and challenges.

When will BoF sessions happen at DrupalCon Pittsburgh?

Birds of Feather sessions happen all day every day of the conference and sessions often run concurrently with other programming. There are designated areas where the BOF sessions are held and a schedule is usually posted outside of the area for sign-ups.

How do I find out about BoF sessions?

In previous years, Birds of a Feather sessions were organized organically at the conference, and they provided ad-hoc meeting areas for informal sessions. This year at DrupalCon Pittsburgh, the Drupal Association is taking session submissions for BOFs to provide more visibility into topics and spread awareness. The Birds of a Feather schedule will be posted one month prior to the conference on the DrupalCon Pittsburgh website, and there will be write-in slots available on-site for ad hoc BoF sessions.

Birds of a Feather sessions are a great way for attendees to take advantage of networking and learning opportunities to make new connections and strengthen existing relationships within the Drupal community. Have a session you are interested in submitting? Submissions are open until the slots are filled! Submit your Birds of a Feather session today.

It happens often. Early in a project, a team member will offhandedly say something like "the site is slow," "my computer is slow," or "Docker is slow." Those all may be true. But it takes specialized knowledge to track down the root cause of performance issues. This article covers the same tips we share with our team to help solve workstation performance problems.

As you may have read in our previous blog post, the Drupal Association is pleased to be hosting Young African Leader Initiative (YALI) Fellow Denaya Dennis! The Mandela Washington Fellowship, YALI’s flagship program, empowers young African leaders. We invite you to get to know Denaya and learn more about his background!

Meet Denaya Dennis

Denaya Dennis is South Sudanese and is passionate about digital education, peace, and people’s development. In 2019, Denaya was a Mandela Washington Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. A graduate of IT, Denaya volunteers as a teaching assistant at the University of Juba, School of Computing, with majors in Business applications and information systems. In 2017 he co-founded Alela Technologies Ltd, a tech company providing ICT services to private, corporate, and public institutions in South Sudan.

Denaya is the founder and Executive of Koneta Hub. This innovation-driven organization uses the approaches of Human-centered design in providing community-driven solutions with an emphasis on digital literacy and rights, business incubation, tech 4 peace, and innovations on the SDGs. Denaya believes in the power of innovation as a driving force for sustainable development!

Within his community, Denaya is also an ICT trainer and mentors young people to learn new skills that are important in today’s job market. As a startup trainer, he strongly believes in the power of Design Thinking in providing long-lasting people and community-driven solutions. Within East Africa, Denaya has volunteered with many organizations in supporting startups as a mentor and innovation challenges judge. His experiences are helping to shape the South Sudan startup ecosystem.

Outside of tech, Denaya is a recording artist singing Christian contemporary songs in the Star Eagles Music, which he co-founded with Tony Manas. Denaya got married to Teddy Grace in December 2022.

I got to know about Drupal when I attended the CMS Africa Summit in 2016 in Kampala, and since then, I have loved everything about Content Management Systems. My desire to use the CMS platforms grew, and I was able to create business opportunities for myself. One thing I am confident about in life is that you can do anything, provided you are committed to it.

- Denaya Dennis

The Drupal Association is thrilled to have Denaya on our team until 2 March 2023!

Introduction

PDFs that are not adequately formatted can be difficult or even impossible for people with impairments to access. This can result in the loss of critical information and limit the document's usefulness.

Introduction

There are a plethora of mobile app accessibility automation tools available. But not every tool is infallible when testing for mobile accessibility. This raises several questions:

Introduction

Web Accessibility is not only for people with impairments; instead, it's for everybody. Web accessibility results in better user interaction with the website by enabling the utilization of tools and technologies that aid the site's perception, understanding, operability, contribution, and navigation.

Introduction

There are more than 6 billion mobile subscribers worldwide. Recent research from the World Health Organization says that about 15% of the world's population is in some way 'specially-abled.' And it’s usually believed that people with impairments own significantly fewer mobile devices than people without impairments. But this number is increasing exponentially.

Introduction

A few months ago, Aaron Crosman posted What I Brought from Drupal to Salesforce. While I've done a lot of CMS/CRM integration work, I've only been integrating Drupal with Salesforce and its related services for a few years. I still consider myself new to Salesforce development and I'm still learning about the open source side of Salesforce at events like Salesforce Community Sprints.

If I do get something wrong, please let me know and I'll update the posts.

Another reason for writing a series highlighting some of the similarities between Salesforce and Drupal is to respond to a recent post by Jacob Rockowitz questioning whether his Blueprint project that leverages Schema.org had a future.

I briefly mentioned Blueprints in a presentation at BADCamp, but I wanted to dive in deeper into Blueprint as well as some of the other features starting to mature in "modern Drupal" where I've seen similar approaches working well in Salesforce.

To keep myself sane, I'm breaking this up into 3 parts;

• Project Browsing - Project Browser and AppExchange
• Schema Management - Blueprint and Educational Data Architecture
• Advanced Configuration Management - Config Patch GitLab API and GearSet

Project Browser and AppExchange

The UI in the work coming out of the Drupal Association's Project Browser Initiative is very similar to Salesforce's AppExchange (and MetaDeploy, AppExchange for open source and Commons supported Salesforce packages).

Visually, the UX of the Project Browser and AppExchange are very similar.

Out of the box, Project Browser isn't really that exciting for developers.

So I can search for modules inside the application I'm building and then go to Composer to composer require drupal/[PROJECT NAME]? Why would anyone get excited about this?

The exciting part of Project Browser isn't using it to browse the same projects on Drupal.org in a different UX, it's being able to customize that experience for a specific use case or infrastructure. A feature that gives users a list of projects they can install directly on a test/sandbox version of their site is a game changer in a higher ed use case.

How do I know?

On the CMS side, we wrote something similar to Project Browser the University of Colorado in Drupal 7 we called Profile Module Manager. While the colorado.edu sites are now run from a monorepo/custom upstream approach on Pantheon, the original on-prem infrastructure paired Profile Module Manager with a custom devops solution to add a "bundle" of code to a site's codebase. The user experience of Profile Module Manager within Web Express in D7 and Project Browser with a customized project feed in D10 will be very similar.

Project Browser won't really be exciting until it can be combined with the Auto Update Initiative work. That work requires Composer 2.3.5 or later which many hosts (including Pantheon) do not support yet.

On the CRM side, when browsing packages and clicking Get It Now of free packages will bring up a prompt asking you where to install the package based on instances you have registered with the account you are authenticated with... or to spin up a new sandbox to test just this package.

While Drupal's Project Browser UX is designed to be used with the CMS instance you are planning to install the package on, it's not hard to imagine large, Drupal centric hosts like Acquia or Pantheon offering customized Project Browser feeds that list platform friendly/approved modules.

Modern Drupal still has to define a way to install front end dependencies required by PHP projects. Salesforce solves this to a certain extent with Lightning Web Components, their open source Web Component foundation.

While there is some traction around #2873160 to use NodeJS installer for Composer and #3340712 to get single directory components into Core, this is still going to be a challenge.

It is also important to acknowledge that most packages you can install through the different Salesforce project browsing services are NOT free or open source. Between the AppExchange and MetaInstall services, you'll find 4 different types of packages.

• Free, Open and Transparently Maintained on GitHub - The Summit Events package maintained primarily by staff from the University of St. Thomas at https://github.com/SFDO-Community/Summit-Events-App is a good example code maintained openly with BSD license.
• Free, maintain by Salesforce - The Educational Data Architecture (EDA) is a good example of this. I'll write more about EDA in Part 2.
• Free, Closed Source - You'll find a mix of free loss leader products, feature limited version with a paid upgrade, and free package that requires a service subscription, but the source of these packages cannot be modified.
• Paid, Closed Source - 75% of packages charge. Most use a per licensed user/per month model. Some offer free trials.

Paid plugins are more common in the WordPress ecosystem, but the underlying plugin code is considered a derivative of WordPress where distribution triggers the GPL-2.0 or later licensing requirement.

Where I think this is going to get interesting is the potential for more commercial Drupal packages in SaaS offerings. We've already seen some large hosts charge for value added services for sites hosted on their infrastructure like Acquia Site Studio. We may see more groups exploit the GPL SaaS Loophole enabling customers to install commercial modules and themes from customized Project Browsers.

As long as the end-user is interacting with your software over a network and you control the hardware / infrastructure the software is running on, that is not considered distribution.

While different than traditional, pure GPL Drupal sites, after seeing the quality in competing packages in Salesforce, I personally think a tier of commercial, closed source modules would be good for Drupal.