Those of us in the UK had a great opportunity this last weekend to get together at the new DrupalCamp England event, held at Cambridge University. Protecting my work-life balance means I don't usually get to many in-person events, but I made it to this one. It was lovely to finally put some names to faces and build better understanding together. So thank you to the organisers and sponsors who put on a great day! A couple of us from our Coventry team went along, read on as I reflect on my own experience...
I was impressed that Baddý Sonja Breidert was doing the opening session - especially when we got to share her birthday cake! She demonstrated some fun use of an AI chatbot within a Drupal site; which looked like the kind of thing our clients could use to help visitors find what information they want. Rather than interacting with websites in the traditional point-and-click manner, browsing around pages to hunt down details, we need to watch out for how users are increasingly expecting to use the internet. Younger people aren't just typing keywords into a Google search and then gathering information like a researcher might. Instead, they're increasingly using voice or chat-based experiences, expecting the information to be brought to them, often via summaries from an AI. Including this in a Drupal website keeps users engaged directly, controlling the feel of interacting with a brand, and without surrendering the journey to external agencies.
Jamie Abrahams talking on 'Why Drupal AI might take over the world'
Jamie Abrahams gave a talk a bit later about combining AI 'agents' to complete all sorts of tasks. This combined the theory of this design pattern with some clear practical examples, to leverage LLMs' strengths in a controlled and understandable way. He also announced a new service for using AI with Drupal which would manage AI configuration (including API keys), to allow site builders to use it much more easily. At the moment they have to do hard work just to be able to ask AI to then do less complex tasks! My favourite part of the day followed immediately after when I joined my former colleague James Silver in conversation with Jamie's colleague Andrew Belcher out in the lobby. Andrew took us through a much deeper look at vector search and how these agents can be orchestrated together (as a 'swarm') within the Drupal UI, without writing any code! I challenged him on how this still needs the skills of a developer - as it requires architecting a solution, breaking work down into parts, etc - even if no code has to be written. I suppose coders and architects could be different personas; the term 'developer' might just describe the overlap. Now I wonder: could we treat each more helpfully, according to their strengths and interests?
Before long, even Baddý joined our table chat - she wanted to show off her team's efforts with AI and collaborate on using AI with Drupal. It was ace to see the authentic desire from these community figureheads to work together without egos, and to find myself actively participating in bouncing dreams together of what the internet might look like before long! Why invest in web pages when an AI can provide our content, or even build designs for us? How can we influence the window that people look through to our online presence? Going beyond well-structured content, could we provide structured brand metadata to shape how it is presented by AIs? For me, these conversations were the most valuable part of the day - putting our brains together as a community as we inspire and challenge each other. (Thanks to everyone for letting me chat with you!)
Emma Horrell: All aboard the UX express – how we can all apply user-centred ideas to make a Drupal to be proud of
Thankfully the day wasn't entirely dominated by AI ;-) I learnt plenty from Emma Horrell's session on incorporating UX Design expertise into the way we build with Drupal. It provoked me to thinking how we facilitate individual achievement, and wide collaboration between developers, but it's not so easy to build cross-disciplinary work. Core changes are reviewed by experts in specialist fields but it's not so common to incorporate that elsewhere, and early enough in plans. I'll remember her point that the challenge to think of other users’ experiences is what can make us grow. Gareth Alexander's dive into how Drupal CMS uses Recipes gave me a list to investigate this week (e.g. easy_email_express, Simple Add More and the Recipe generator 👀).
We finished the day off at BrewDog Cambridge over burgers and drinks - meeting plenty more great people (I even got to practise my Portuguese! 💚❤️) and comparing notes on life, the Drupalverse and everything. I look forward to the next DrupalCamp England!
As part of our preparation to migrate issues from Drupal.org to GitLab on git.drupalcode.org, we are simplifying the access control for who can grant issue credit.
All maintainers of a project now have permission to grant issue credit. In the past, maintainers needed to have the “Write to VCS” or “Maintain issues” role on their project in order to have permission to assign credit on their issues.
Since issues are moving to GitLab, we will no longer have the “Maintain issues” project role managed by Drupal.
We will also be simplifying credit so that is granted for all “closed” states where maintainers can grant credit, not just “fixed” and “closed (fixed)” issue states. Follow #3427961: Grant credit for all closed issues, not just fixed issues for updates on this change. This provides more options for maintainers, but they are not obligated to credit all closed, not-fixed issues. That is up to each maintainer. We encourage giving credit to issue contributions which have impact.
This change is partly motivated by adapting our credit model to prepare for the GitLab issue migration. GitLab does not have a specific “fixed” state for issues; issues are only open or closed, and can have additional labels that may vary for each project. See #3254602: Using GitLab labels for issues on Drupal projects for more information about labels in the GitLab issue migration.
More broadly, you can expect to see three key work areas in our final phase of the GitLab migration:
For further updates, you can join asynchronous initiative meetings every other week on Wednesdays starting at 19:00 UTC in the #gitlab channel on Drupal Slack.
We're excited to introduce https://addons.ddev.com, a central hub where the community can explore, contribute to, and enhance the collection of DDEV add-ons.
The source code is available and your contributions are encouraged at https://github.com/ddev/addon-registry.
Need to find a specific add-on? Use the search field, and watch results update in real-time as you type.
Click on a column title to organize the entries based on that field. A second click will reverse the sort order, and a third click resets it back.
Add-ons fall into two categories: Official add-ons, which are supported by the DDEV team, and Contrib add-ons, which are supported by the community.
Want to share your thoughts or feedback on an add-on? Scroll to the bottom of an add-on's page and click "Sign in with GitHub". We use giscus to manage comments, making it easy to join the conversation by authorizing your GitHub account. You can also react to other comments or add your own insights.
The DDEV Add-on Registry is a living project, and we're eager to involve the community in its future. If you have suggestions or want to contribute, head over to https://github.com/ddev/addon-registry. We look forward to your feedback and collaboration!
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Today we are talking about OpenY, a distribution for YMCAs, why it was created, and how it’s used today with guests Avi Schwab and Brent Wilker. We’ll also cover AI Media Image as our module of the week.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/491
TopicsBrent Wilker - ImageX.co brent.wilker
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Avi Schwab - froboy.org froboy
MOTW CorrespondentMartin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Managing many products on a website can be difficult and time-consuming, especially when data changes frequently, and business partners need quick access to up-to-date information. Drupal offers solutions that significantly simplify these processes. In the following blog post, I’ll show how to prepare a convenient admin panel in this system for editing multiple products simultaneously. I encourage you to read the article or watch an episode of the “Nowoczesny Drupal” series.
DrupalCamp England was held at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, on March 1. The organizers have expressed their immense satisfaction with the event, which turned out to be a grand success. All tickets were sold out for this much-anticipated gathering, held after a five-year break. Seeing the vibrant photos, the Drupal community shares in the excitement of a major community event making a strong comeback.
This revival is part of a broader wave of resurgent events worldwide, as community members work to rekindle the Drupal spirit by reorganizing meetups and gatherings that had gone into hibernation. It is fair to say that DrupalCamp England has set an optimistic precedent, demonstrating the community’s enthusiasm for such comebacks.
To all the event organizers out there—you do a tremendous job. Your efforts do not go unnoticed or unappreciated. You are the lifeblood that keeps the community energized. At The Drop Times, we are committed to highlighting the remarkable work of event organizers and bringing their contributions to the forefront. We hope to see even more success stories this year, just like this one.
With that, let’s move on to the key stories of the week.
We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we close the list here.
To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.
Thank you,
Sincerely
Thomas Alias K
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.
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.