What do we know about jazz?
True, jazz is composed of parts like introduction, exposition, development section, recapitulation and coda, but... c’mon, it’s all about improvisation! It’s when art and feelings are above science and logic. That’s New Orleans, a city that can not be explained — you just have to feel it.
City of music and joy, torn by a hurricane but not broken. City of smiles, from people who take it easy in Big Easy. City of ‘16 DrupalCon. Let’s catch the jazz vibe and listen to the DrupalCon song. Oh yeah, that was the introduction.
Exposition
We have a prominent guide to give us the idea of where Drupal is now and what’s on the horizon. Ladies and gentlemen, Dries Buytaert! Based on a global survey, Dries’ keynote this year outlined multiple Initiatives which were based on Audience Experiences. Here is a brief structure:
Initiatives of Editorial Experience:
- Media Initiative (drag-n-drop media and asset handling)
- Workflow Initiative (easy-to-use tools to share, review, approve and collaborate on content before it goes live)
- Migration tools (migrating content and porting modules between different Drupal versions)
- Block and layout management (tools to build pages, change layouts, add blocks, etc.)
- Data modeling tools (creating content with option to pull related entities)
Initiatives of Developer Experience:
- API-first (multiple integrations with other systems)
- Theme component library (converting complex combination of templates and huge render arrays into a simple tree of reusable components)
Initiatives of Customer Experience:
- Cross Channel (a website is not the only Drupal implementation. Drupal can be displayed on lots of forms and gadgets)
- Orchestration (not only the content itself should be personified. It’s also about personification of content delivery methods, e.g. an email instead of a push message if you are asleep)
For a full coverage, you may analyze the whole presentation. Right now, the Community is concentrated on migrating the functionality that Drupal 8 is to inherit from Drupal 7. That’s what the majority of code sprints have been and will be devoted to.
Development Section
The dominating motives of New Orleans DrupalCon song kept the tendency of the recent years: Drupal 8 and Front-End.
Actually, there was something in the air about the next big thing for Drupal architecture. Today, front-end frameworks run the web development game. Site owners care about how fast their product is — an almost immediate interaction of users with the website is a must. Will Drupal be able to face the industry competition? Seems like PHP is reaching its maximum performance capabilities in Drupal 8. Lots of high load projects use a helping hand from Node.js, React.js, etc. There were thirteen accepted Front End sessions vs ten PHP (thirteen vs seven during Barca DrupalCon) — there is definitely something in the air about JavaScript.
And do we need to mention that a chance to meet the authors of technologies / services / solutions is a lifetime opportunity? Guys, this is DrupalCon! You should seize the moment (try to freeze it and own it, squeeze it and hold it) [AK1] and have conversations with those mentors whose profiles you may see only on social media or drupal.org!
Recapitulation
Keynotes and Contribution Sprints, Summits and Exhibit Hall, Trainings and BOFs, Parties and Aaron Winborn Award (congrats, Gabor!). Those were held by you: developers and web designers, project managers and marketing guys, freelancers and CxOs! To see all the colors of New Orleans DrupalCon, check out the official Flickr group:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/drupalconneworleans2016/.
You, the Community, created a vibe of a DrupalCon song. And even Thursday’s cloud-burst added notes of improvisation to it.
Thank you Big Easy for singing along with us! Baltimore, it’s your turn!
Coda
