Attending DrupalCon 2024 in Portland

This year DrupalCon 2024 is once again back in Portland, Oregon. We will be in attendance and will bring back all of the relevant information as it relates to Drupal’s use, development and content strategies. From May 6-9, it will cover everything from migrations and AI and how you can leverage them to enhance the experience provided by your Drupal site.

Here are some of the sessions we’re looking at along with a copious amount of time spent in the exhibitor’s hall.

Monday, May 6, 2024

Save time Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 using Retrofit. (9:00am in room A106)
With the many iterations of upgrading Drupal 7 sites out there, we thought it was appropriate to start here and see how other folks have taken to the challenge of migrating from Drupal 7 to 10. We’re thinking this session  may provide some useful insights into the world of getting your custom Drupal 7 modules to work in Drupal 10 via a compatibility layer (think how Rosetta is the Macintosh Native). There doesn’t seem to be much mention of content in this space, so we’ll see how that shakes out. Looking forward to this one.

DriesNote (10:30am-11:45am)

The 30-Minute Content Strategist: From Concept to Plan. (1:30pm in room B110-112)
The creation of content is something that has become a big part of FlyingFlip in the last two years and we’re looking to elevate that not only here but on our sister sites BagOfPucks.com and SkateTrack.com (Coming June 2024) so this session looks to provide some good (albeit quick!) information about the content strategy that can be employed for ourselves and our customers.

AI+Atomic Content: Managing Personalized, Omni-channel Content at Scale (3:00pm in room B110-B112)
As we work to get SkateTrack down the home stretch, the concept of personalized content is very important as we’re looking to present a streamlined and easy-to-use application as possible. This should be interesting attending given that part of its tennents seem to be reusable content which is something I am pretty skeptical of when it comes to AI and building user trust within your site.

Navigating Tomorrow: The Future of Websites in the Age of AI and Content Proliferation (4:00pm in room B110-B112)
On the surface, this session seems a little existential. In reality it looks to educate about the ways in which AI can be used to proliferate information. AI seems to be here at least for a while, so it is wise, as content creators, to embrace the advantages that AI provides while not being so lazy as to let it do our jobs for us. This is the AI session I am most looking forward to in all of DrupalCon.

Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Drupal 11 deep dive: what’s new, how to prepare. (11:30am in room B113-B114)
This session seems to be a bit of a no-brainier as to attend with what will likely be every other convention goer attending as well, I am putting my money on this session to be the most well attended. I will let you know the results of this experiment when I get back! Of course we want to know what is coming in Drupal 11. It helps us to best come up with code and content strategies and to also see what kinds of system requirements will be needed to power it. Given it is expected to require PHP 8.3, it should be interesting to see if that upgrade is as significant as 8.0 to 8.1 or 8.2.

Automate, Integrate, Innovate: AI-powered GitLab CI for Drupal module development (1:50 in room A104)
Another AI session I am looking forward to be educated on. A lot of people I have worked with have been telling me about the benefits of systems like CoPilot for GitHub as well as ChatGPT for GitLab. In this session, they’ll explore that for the purposes of bug detection and also managing coding standards. I am especially interested in the AI can be programmed to not allow merge requests to be merged if they are not up to best practices. That would save developers and team-leads a like a lot of time in code review.

DAM Straight! Why AI is a Clarion Call for Centralized Digital Asset & Content Management (3:00pm in room B110-B112)
This seems like a bit of a legal/philosophical conversation around AI, it’s purpose and uses now and now it may change down the road with consideration to Copyright issues. Their key focus will be around leveraging the new and upcoming technological advancements while still steering clear of any legal entanglements.

Revolutionizing Drupal with Automated Performance Testing: Deep Dive into Gander, the new Framework (4:10pm in room B117-B119)
This will be a deep dive with a demonstration of Gander a test framework cooperation between Tag1 and Google’s Chrome team. I do not know much about this tool, having only just learned about it as part of this session, but the technology seems extremely intriguing for Drupal developers. As per Tag1’s web site:

The introduction of Gander represents a paradigm shift in the way Drupal approaches performance testing. Traditionally a manual and reactive process, performance testing now becomes proactive and automated with Gander, benefiting Drupal core maintainers and, ultimately, the end-users of Drupal.

Furthermore, Gander sets a precedent for integrating performance optimization tools in the open-source CMS community as a whole. WordPress is also implementing an automated performance testing framework in collaboration with the Google Chrome team, and we hope that our experience with Gander can help accelerate their work.

Conclusion

DrupalCon doesn’t disappoint when it comes to subject matter chosen, areas of interested, and things that are just plain relevant for the Drupal Community. We look forward to reporting on all of these sessions and the exposition hall when we get back and maybe some while we’re there.