DrupalCon Atlanta pics, tidbits, & takeaways

DrupalCon Atlanta was one of my favorite ‘Cons in a long while. There’s a palpable energy in the air walking through the halls and into the sessions. In this blog post, I’m going to skip the appetizers and go right to the “meat and potatoes”.

Energy

As said earlier, there was a real energy running through the halls. People were talking about new and exciting things that are going to have a real effect on how we work. Best practices are being created, modified, and evolved within the contribution rooms. Exciting!

Image

Sessions

This was one of the first DrupalCons in a very long time, where there were sessions that I HAD to attend. Special shoutout to Pierre Dureau’s session on Design Systems and UI Suite, which got me really excited about the work he is doing.

Image

Best reviews

Speaking of which, Pierre gives the absolute best reviews. This morning I was reading his review on on a new “statistics” component for Olivero in Drupal CMS, and I learned about the Twig source() function. Check out the review at https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal_cms/issues/3515766#comment-16048182

Drupal site templates

If you haven’t seen the DriesNote yet, watch it now. In it, Dries announces “Site templates”, which are basically a theme bundled with a recipe. Although it sounds logical, this is groundbreaking! A site template will enable a non-technical user to build out a complete Drupal site in hours instead of months! This is absolutely huge, and will enable Drupal to compete in down-market environments against WordPress (don’t tell Josh K!).

Marketplace

In the DriesNote, he talks about the need for a Drupal “Marketplace”. Done right, this could both lower the total cost of ownership for Drupal, fund maintainers, and fund the Drupal Association.

One of the biggest questions is should the marketplace be commercial (e.g. sell themes/site templates). He had a BoF question & answer session, and the temp was decidedly pro-commercial.

Some of the concerns in the room were makers/takers, equity for module developers, and execution. There’s a new #drupal-cms-marketplace Slack channel, if you want to get in on the discussion.

Image

My presentation

I lucked out this DrupalCon and got the very first slot on the first day (even before the DriesNote). This is ideal, because that means I can be over and done with, and relax afterwards.

Prior to this session, I was actually nervous as hell. I worried that I didn’t have enough relevant content, and that things (Experience Builder) were changing too fast for me to talk about it.

But it all worked out! The room was packed with people lining out into the hallway. My timing was on point (phew!). There were lots of questions at the end, and I received a ton of positive feedback throughout the ‘Con!

Image

My session was on The Future of Drupal Theming: AI, Experience Builder, and Beyond, and I updated the session description with a link to the slides. You can watch my session now!

Parties

No DrupalCon would be complete (at least for me) without having some beers with old and new friends! I left Gainesville Sunday around 10am, and was day-drinking and talking Drupal by 2pm! I love that! I was smart enough to turn in early that night – correctly deducing in my inebriated state that nothing more good was going to happen that day.

Image

I went to the Acquia party Tuesday night followed by karaoke. It was so much fun, although the queue was too long for me to be able to sing (you all are lucky)!

Image

I went to both the Civic Actions party and Pantheon party Wednesday night. The Pantheon party was special as it was at a spectacular rooftop location. I had tons of great conversations with friends there too. This was probably my favorite night of the ‘Con

Image

Matt Glaman + Me == Front-end Bug Destroyers!

Every time Matt Glaman and I get in the same room, great things happen. This could be lots of great conversations, beer, or even adding the new UI for disabling Twig caching! Thursday, Matt (with some help) solved a pain of an issue within Drupal core that affected front-end developers who use Single Directory Components.

The root of the issue is that SDC was loading the CSS files in the incorrect place. It was loading SDC's CSS *before* the theme loads its base and layout CSS. The bug causes the base general styles to be loaded *after* component's CSS, which causes the base styles to take precedence.

The workaround is easy, but annoying and fugly. I typically append a [class] attribute to the selector. So it'd look like .card__button[class]. This, in my opinion, is a pretty serious #DrupalWTF. There is even a contrib module to fix this!

So when I saw Matt the morning of DrupalCon Atlanta, I knew I was going to bug the crap out of him to fix this. We talked over the problem in the contrib room, and he went to work and had a draft MR after a few hours of work, and then I bugged the shit out of Lauri until he committed it!

Image

Once again, all front-end devs owe Matt a beer. This man should not have to pay for a drink EVER at a Drupal event!

Wrap up

Next year’s North American ‘Con will be in Chicago! See ya’ll there!