This year, DrupalCamp Scotland was held on the 7th November, at the University of Edinburgh.
On the morning of the conference I made the quick walk from by bed and breakfast and arrived at 50 George Square to join in with around 60 attendees to a day of talks and chatting.
The morning coffee and a selection of pastries was set out in the corridor outside the main room of the conference. I'm sure a few of the tasty pastries were lost to passing students.
After getting settled in we had a quick introduction session by Stratos Filalthis before we started the day.
The first talk of the day was with Paul McCrodden and Laura Waldoch, with their talk Less Is More: Streamlining 500+ Diverse University Sites into One Central Platform. Paul and Laura both work at the University of Cambridge and the talk was a look at how the university is taking the 500+ websites that are dotted around and consolodating them into a single resource. That single resource is powered by Drupal 11 and the talk looked at how they were building a Drupal install profile that could handle the requirements that these different sites had.
The University already has a system that hosts a lot of sites in Drupal 7. Not only is Drupal 7 end of life now, but these older sites are too permissive and too diverse, which creates a problem when attempting to bring all of these sites into one profile. The first task was to look at all sites and see what functionality was requried. Using this information they then set out a plan that would start with a Drupal site that contained simple pages of content, which could then be expanded upon to introduce new features.
The plan to host 500 sites is a tricky one, but the team have embraced automation as much as possible to improve how they manage things. All migrations, updates, and event tests are automated so they don't have to worry about repeating the same task again and again for other sites. Having this automation in place has allowed them to steamline bringing on new sites and to spot problems on existing sites (usually before the users even notice).
What was interesting is that they even automated the role system so that every night all users are downgraded to a non-administrator status across all of the sites. This means that if a user doesn't have a designated email address (i.e. for the project administrators) then they don't get the permissions to do too much on the site, which would cause the site to "drift" away from the approved configuration. A really interesting approach to preventing both security problems and users tinkering with their sites too much.
So far, they have migrated about 100 sites into this new platform, which is actually about half way through the process as the foundation of the plan is complete. The next steps are to introduce new features, each of which will unlock additional sites being brought into the platform.
A really interesting talk and I look forward to chatting with Paul and Laura in the future to see how the project is going.
Next up was Everyone's rubbish: What bin collections taught me about Drupal with Dan Champion. This was a look at the bin collection module that Dan (from Rohallion) built for the LocalGov Drupal system. Bin collection, as it happens, is more complex than you might think.
This system was specifically build for Dumfries & Galloway Council to start with, but has since expanded to different councils across the UK. The first version looked at integrating with a SOAP service from a system called Whitespace. Dan realised that tight integration with one API would only cause problems, so he created a plugin system that would allow different providers to be integrated into the system.
This means that any council running LocalGov Drupal can write a few lines of code to integrate their own bin collection, and some councils have indeed done this. Through the efforts of different councils around the UK it is possible to integrate with a number of different systems, or even upload CSV or JSON files if integration isn't possible.
A nice technical talk with lots of interesting details around the Drupal plugin system and creating custom plugins. It was also refreshing to hear someone who hates working with SOAP in PHP as much as I do!
After a quick break we had How transforming a university website led to transforming an in-house and agency relationship with James South from Manifesto and Aaron McHale from the University of Edinburgh. This talk was a look at prospective students to the University would be processed and how the technology behind the solution had changed in recent years. This was specicially the https://study.ed.ac.uk/, which is where prospective studends can look at courses and start the admission process.
Aaron initially showed the solution that they started with, with was a large collection of separate systems (including a legacy ColdFusion service), surrounding a Drupal site that served the main admissions website. The aim of the project was to reduce the complexity and reduce the number of enquiries that the university received.
They clearly started with a complex system, and it took three years for them to update the main Drupal website to Drupal 11 and to reduce the complexity of the overall process. By the end of the presentation they showed how they had reduced that complexity (and removed ColdFusion). This resulted in a 57% reduction in the number of pages on the site, around 2.8 million site visits since March, and a significant reduction in the number of enquiries.
Interestingly some of the complexity was solved by simply moving that funcitonality into Drupal and then shutting down that external system. This has saved the University money, time, and resources in maintaining a platform that no one really understood well, and instead moving key features into the robust platform of Drupal that is well understood and can be maintained going fowards.
Straight after was Joey Gartin, talking about Object-Oriented UX in action: Building Renfrewshire.gov.uk with structured content in Drupal. Despite Joey's throat being a little horse from last night's kareoke activities, he showed us how Renfrewshire Council had redesigned their site.
Object-oriented UX is a way of structing content so that it makes sense from a human perspective, instead of structing content in a way that makes sense from an organiastional approach.
The key take home message was that far from structuring the content around the different departments in the council, the content was structure around the things that people were looking for. This meant that users didn't need to understand the internal structure of the council in order to find the information they were looking for. They just went to directly to the bin page to look at when bin collection times were. Previously, this section was within the environmental services section, and was difficult to find.
What was interesting as well is that Joey showed how Renfrewshire Council were using Storybook to build components in Drupal.
Lunch at the conference consisted of a lot of packed lunches, fruit, cakes and drinks, all really nice, and there was nothing left after.
After lunch was myself, with Using Storybook To Preview Single Directory Components.
This was basically a version of my article on using Storybook to preview Single Directory Components in Drupal 11, but with some extra bits of peices in there. I decided to jump into a (short) introduction to Single Directory Components to start with as the second part of the talk didn't make much sense without that initial context.
The talk went very well, and I had a few questions afterwards, which is always a good sign that people are engaged. Also, thanks to the people who approached me after the talk (and the conference) to say thanks for the talk and to chat about Storybook some more. I very much appreciated your comments!
Straight after me was Gareth Alexander and Tony Barker with Same Image, Different Story: Why Drupal Needs Contextual Media Architecture. The talk was a look at how media items in Drupal are organised, and how they get it wrong when context is needed.
As an example, they showed how a media item was created that contained a image of a building with people sat outside it. One one item of content they created a focal point on the building, which meant that the people were cropped out of the view. The caption was also worded to be about the building and not the people.
Then, on a second item of content they added the same media item, but this time they selected the people in front of the building as the focal point of the image. They also reworded the caption to talk about the people and not the building.
The side effect of this was that the first item of content also received those changes, which meant that both articles now had the same focal point and caption, despite the surrounding text being about different aspects of the media item.
There are some solutions in Drupal at the moment, and they guys looked at a couple of ways in which modules could be added to achieve content level context for media items. These solutions did require between 5 and 10 modules to get working, so they weren't ideal, but it is possible to get working if required.
There's clearly some work to be done in Drupal in this respect in order for this feature to be brought into Drupal core (and become part of Drupal CMS). Tony and Gareth pointed and a collection of issues in the Drupal issue queue that are of interest if you want to contribute to it.
After a short break we had the final three sessions of the day, which started with So, I thought I heard that we won't need junior devs now that we have generative AI? from Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson.
This session wasn't anything to do with AI, but a look at the Open University initiative that Hilmar started a few years ago at Reykjavík University. I heard about this initative at last year's DrupalCamp Scotland and at this year's DrupalCamp England, where Hilmar gave a similar talk.
Part of the initative is getting into universities to actually teach what companies are looking for in terms of skills. It is very rare that I meet a university graduate who knows PHP well, and even rarer that they have any experience of Drupal or any other CMS. A strange situation considering how many companies are crying out for decent PHP systems developers.
There are some amazing things going on with this iniative, including Hilmar running a "Drupal in a Day" session at the recent DrupalCon Vienna, which was attended by over 100 participants. Great work Hilmar!
Next up was Jochen Lillich from Freistlbox, who talked about GenEI over GenAI - The Human Side of Website Delivery.
The crux of Jochen's talk was that whilst it is easy to respond to clients using generative AI, it is usually very easy to spot. As such, clients can lose confidence quickly if they think that you are just responding to them automatically with chat bots. Sending boilerplate word salad to clients does not make them think that you care about them and they will quickly head elsewhere to companies that do care about them.
You can't automate trust.
Even if it takes longer, responding as a human, and using empathy, goes a long way towards establishing trust. Trust should be at the root of your business.
Last, but not least, we had Drupal CMS: What's New, What's Next (with Added UX) with Emma Horrel. Emma looked at some of the recent research done into UX that has come from the recent launch of Drupal CMS.
As we approach Drupal CMS 2.0 the community is looking at how we can improve the user experience of the platform. Some of these lessons will filter back to modules, but many of them will be used to improve Drupal itself.
One point of confusion in the questions after the session was about what Drupal CMS was; and I have had one or two concerns over the name as well. This was summed up in the room by saying that Drupal CMS is Drupal, with modules dn recipies to configure those modules. There's nothing "new" going into Drupal CMS that won't already be available for Drupal itself, Drupal certainly won't be left behind by the work done with Drupal CMS.
After the conference we departed to a local pub called The Pear Tree, where we had a celebratory drink (or two).
Thanks to Paul Johnson for taking some amazing pictures at the event, some of which I have used above. You can see the full collection of pictures from DrupalCamp Scotland here.
I had an amazing time at the conference. We were all very well looked after and the conference itself was perfectly timed and organised. Many, many thanks to Aaron, Stratos, and the rest of the team behind the conference. I look forward to seeing you next year!
As a side note, I stayed at this little bed and breakfast just outside of Edinburgh's city center called Tantallon. It was a great bed and breakfast that had some of the best breakfast I've eaten in quite some time, plus, the owners were very friendly and I felt almost like one of the family for a couple of days. Highly recommended if you want to stay in the area.
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