A few take aways from Drupalcon - Day 2 and 3
The Keynote for day 2 was a panel discussion with Pfizer on how they work with large scale open source and Drupal applications and their internal infrastructure. Pfizer talked for example about the importance of making sure they can manage and keep their contrib modules up to date. They know they will face an upgrade sooner or later and so to continuously focus on keep contrib modules up to date and actively helping to maintain modules is therefore a high priority for them.
We at Digitalist do not have the same scale of infrastructure or websites as Pfizer does but we see the value of thinking this way around open source development and contributions. For example to evaluate contrib modules from the perspective, how well are they maintained and if not actively maintained, can we do it? This will create a future proof web implementation and will help us and our clients when upgrades will come. This is simply a good mindset.
A really interesting session was Stuart Clark’s session on Druxt.js, a fully decoupled Drupal framework using Nuxt.js (vue.js framework). As they say themselves Druxt.js is “A bridge between frameworks, Drupal in the back, Nuxt.js in the front”. This is a really cool initiative using the Json API and try to fix the connections between the decoupled frontend and Drupal backend to make use of all the goodness Drupal provides that can be missed in a decoupled solution.
Drupal.org update was also a very interesting session where people behind drupal.org went through what new features they've been working on and what the plan for the future is. One new feature is the Contributor role where you can set a role on your profile and also make credit to the company sponsoring you in that role. To find out what roles are available they have set up a really great page for finding roles and get information about how you can help out and contribute to Drupal. Read more at Drupal.org documentation.
The importance around contributions was also something that Dries, founder of Drupal, emphasised greatly in his keynote during wednesday. He also spoke, as usual, about the state of the Drupal core initiatives and mentioned that Drupal 10 is planned to be released already as early as during summer of 2022.
