Finally Drupalcon Europe is here again. The conference is online like last year but this time we had the opportunity to meet at the Digitalist Stockholm office to enjoy the Drupal spirit together!
The first day had lots of fun moments, sessions and interesting takeaways. It was really interesting to see new features from PHP 8.1 in the session PHP 8.1 - What's New and Changed.
Enum or Enumerations is introduced into PHP 8.1, Enum already exists in many languages and finally it is PHP. So what is Enum? Enum is like a custom type with the possibility to add fixed number of possible values. One use case that the presentator highlighted was how Drupal core uses constants for comments like Open, Closed or Hidden. This can be made using an Enum instead and it will make error handling much nicer.
Another nice new feature in PHP 8.1 is Fiber. Fiber is like threads in a programming language. A fiber can be started, suspended, or terminated. It will make it possible to concurrent execution of code.
A short but good session that ended Drupalcon day 1 was the session “Paragraphs, Gutenberg, CKEditor, WYSIWYG or Layout Builder, or all of them?”
The sessions demonstrated how to create flexible and complex layouts using the Dropsolid Rocketship Distribution. There are lots of different solutions to the problem of letting site editors create and edit content in a flexible and user friendly way as the session title describes. Rocketship distribution is trying to solve this common problem that editors face by heavenly taking advantage of Drupal core layout builder. While the distribution is still in alpha it looks very promising and if you haven't checked it out we definitely believe it is something worth checking out.
Stay tuned for more Drupal Goodness! /Michael Axelsson & David Park
