DrupalCamp Scotland, a small event with huge appeal. Full report on what you missed!
After a break of 5 years DrupalCamp Scotland is back! A small event with huge appeal. By all measures there’s no doubt the community welcomed its return and are already asking about next year. So what did you miss?
Keynote: A 7 year journey from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 and what we learned migrating over 600 websites - Billy Wardrop
Our host Billy, Web Team Manager at The University of Edinburgh, kicked off proceedings telling the story of how the organisation is nearing the completion of what must be one of the largest Drupal migrations in modern times. 7 years in the making, on December 4th 2024 a major milestone for The University of Edinburgh will be reached. The retirement of the last and most important website remaining on Drupal 7 - the core UoE website.
A colossal task is nearing completion, one which has seen the migration of 1500 websites to a modern and forward looking Drupal 10 based platform, adopting the latest innovations and primed to accelerate innovation going forward. In doing so, the university will become one of the largest users of Drupal in higher education globally.
Time to go back to the drawing board
In 2017 whilst the Drupal 7 solution was still performing robustly, the monolithic architecture hampered flexibility. Approach to front and and content management varied, leading to technical complexity and inconsistency in user experience. The University backed the business case of going back to the drawing board.
Billy’s talk, a retrospective of strategies, technical approach and best practices employed to reach this goal is certainly essential for any large organisation embarking upon a similar digital transformation.
The right plan and the right team
With over 1500 website under*.ed.ac.uk, some over 10 years old, managed by 1500 editors Billy explained how essential it was firstly how the university assembled the right team to take the project on, what style of procurement they took, where to draw on external skills to augment internal capability.
Maintaining a fleet of high performance sites
Fast forward to today and the new platform, running from a common code base powered by Pantheon, enables the University to maintain a fleet of standards compliant sites where deployments can happen daily without interruption or service. Indeed 150+ sites were upgraded from Drupal 9 to 10 in less than an hour.
Shoulder to shoulder with respected global peers
Billy said one of the resounding benefits of Drupal is the opportunity to consult and share with peer organisations across the globe also using the platform.
“One of the resounding benefits of Drupal is the opportunity to consult and share with peer organisations across the globe also using the platform”.
Speaking directly with counterparts at Universities of Dundee, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford and Columbia was invaluable in shaping and validating our approach.
An update from The Drupal Association - Lenny Moskalyk
The DA expanding presence in Europe
Lenny Moskalyk from the Drupal Association (DA) shared that their 2025 strategy includes a strong focus on expanding their presence across Europe, especially through exhibiting and participating in European events outside the Drupal bubble. They’re keen to engage with sectors like Higher Education, Government, and Healthcare, and are open to suggestions on impactful events to consider. Feel free to reach out to Lenny with any ideas!
New Drupal CMS (Starshot) tracks
She also revealed that New Starshot tracks will be announced week commencing 28th October. Be the first to know by visiting the Starshot Hub.
Drupal Open University
With the camp hosted by a University, it was fitting for Lenny to champion the new Drupal Open university initiative, a community-driven project focused on bringing Drupal into the academic world.
The objective is to make available materials allowing academics to introduce students to the power of Drupal and foster the next generation of Drupal developers. By offering comprehensive, open-source-driven courses, the aim is to equip students, teachers and guest lecturers with the skills and knowledge to contribute to Drupal and the wider open-source ecosystem.
An Introduction To The Drupal Batch API - Phil Norton
The Batch API is a built-in feature of Drupal Core that allows you to split complex or time consuming tasks to be split into smaller parts.
We’ve all seen it in action but do we know how to use it?
Why does this matter?
Page performance is a component of user experience:
- Users get bored quickly.
- Studies show that a 5 second page load has a 0.6% conversion rate.
- Reducing this to 2 seconds doubles the conversion rate.
- This still means that after 2 seconds 98% of users assume the page is broken.
Batch API to the rescue
Phil gave a live demo of how Batch API can help to deliver feedback on progress. This gives a good user experience whilst waiting for the application to complex an operation. He’s even provided an introduction to Batch API so you can use it yourself.
Opening up Drupal’s terminology - Emma Horrell
The past few years has seen a welcome rise in the number of people active in the Drupal community outside the traditional coding circles. Emma Horrell is a shining example. User Experience Team Manager at the University of Edinburgh, she sees Drupal through a different lens.
On a quest to improve the naming conventions and terms used to aid usability, Emma described auditing the terms used in Drupal’s administration interface as “Opening Drupal’s Can of Worms”. Drupal is littered with confusing jargon that makes it difficult to understand. 'Node', 'Blocks', 'Structure', 'Entity', and 'Paragraphs' to name a few.
“Drupal is littered with confusing jargon that makes it difficult to understand”.
As we approach the inception of Drupal CMS (Starshot) her work could not be more timely. We can take a step back and get it right, off the bat. Testing with non-Drupal users is being completed, with the objective of giving a best first impression of Drupal, including voice and tone workshops to develop how we are going to talk about Drupal CMS.
You can help too:
- Emma is currently leading a community quiz as part of research informing about the Drupal user interface which will lead to improvements.
- Join the conversation on Drupal Slack #drupalisms-working-group
Building better with Drupal: practical tools for accessible websites - Maria Young
No matter how much you know enough about accessibility, there’s always more to learn. Web accessibility specialist Maria Young’s session did not disappoint. With the European Accessibility Act coming into effect next June, now is the time to pay close attention.
“A lot of accessibility cannot be tested with a true or false. A11Y is a journey, it is never done”.
Alternative text is a must have
Naturally it is a required field in Drupal. As a project we help our users do things right. Despite this, across the internet missing alternative text for images is the biggest accessibility fail. However, that’s only part of the issue.
Alternative text needs to be informative. Maria explained “alt text” must describe the intent of the image - the reason you added it. For each use of an image the context of how it is being used will be different. Make sure your alternative text reflects this. Therefore, for each placement the alternative text should be different.
Decorative images
These are images that add no value but eye candy. It is good practice in accessibility to hide these from assistive technologies, so we tone down the amount of information you provide to those relying on screen readers.
Maria recommended using CSS or Drupal’s Decorative image widget which allows you to make an image as decorative, thus allowing you to legitimately bypass Alternative text.
Instant feedback to editors
Maria recommended Editoria11y Accessibility Checker module to help editors get immediate feedback about content as they are creating it. You can see it for yourself via our Try Drupal demo.
Editoria11y also provides an administration report allowing editors to review the health of accessibility across a site in one place.
Assessing content readability
It is a lesser known fact that content readability is a factor in accessibility. Fortunately, as Maria highlighted, Drupal’s Content Readability module provides editors with an easy way to assess the complexity of the text (education level) using the Flesch–Kincaid grade level which is an industry standard.
User preferences
We learnt the importance of allowing users to make their own decisions on what an accessible interface is. Fluid is an open, collaborative project to improve the user experience and inclusiveness of open source software. That includes Drupal.
The Fluid UI module lets you modify a page's font size, line height, font style, contrast, and link style, and generate a table of contents. The changes are retained using cookies and the module integrates the Fluid library into Drupal's non-admin pages.
AI with Drupal - How to build useful applications for your clients - Christoph Breidert
AI is a fast moving topic. Bringing a revised version of his session from DrupalCon Barcelona to Edinburgh, the most amusing part of the session was when Christoph tested AI by asking “Is Billy Wardrop attractive”. As you can see from the photo above, it has some way to go before it convinces this crowd!
With a little live training and refinement of the AI ChatBot by Christoph, it got the right answer to the question. If you want to find out the answer, you will have to try the AI chatbot for yourself.
Scaling Drupal in the Real World: Practical Insights for Large Organisations - Rouven Volk
Reflecting on 16 years of experience working with Drupal at enterprise level, Rouven observed that when organisations maximise open source participation and minimise custom code they lower maintenance costs, quality is higher and faster time to market is realised.
By focusing on creating hundreds of sites from a single codebase, our hosts The University of Edinburgh (UoE) have benefitted from Drupal and this enterprise approach. When looking to meet business needs, custom code should be the last port of call.
In all cases UoE evaluates existing available approaches from Drupal Core and the contributed module ecosystem ahead of bespoke development. This leads to:
- Economies of Scale
- Smart Deployments and Hosting
- Compliance Made Easy
- Sustainable Solutions
Rouven explained that if you think from the outset about solutions where you can reuse code and content across sites, this inheritance model helps you to build a reusable codebase for all your websites.
He emphasised the importance that you should fit the solution to the organisation, not force the organisation to fit the solution. Drupal is so perfect for this. When compared to SAAS or proprietary software, the freedom to tailor a solution to fit is far greater.
“Fit the solution to the organisation, not force the organisation to fit the solution. Drupal is so perfect for this”.
He observed how repeatedly those organisations who both leverage and contribute to open source are the ones who attract the best talent. In doing so they establish themselves as centres of excellence.
After hours - Unofficial Drupal CMS strategy meeting
Whilst relatively small, DrupalCamp Scotland attracted an impressive crowd. 5 members of the leadership of Drupal CMS were in attendance. Gareth Alexander (Accessibility), Lenny Moskalyk (Documentation), Emma Horrell (Advisory Council UX), Tony Barker (Media), Christoph Breidert (Advanced Search) seized the opportunity to reach consensus and resolve some issues face to face after hours.
A revival of UK Drupal camps in 2025
The success of DrupalCamp Scotland further validated the demand for DrupalCamps in the UK is high. Liam Hiscock, Phil Norton and Will Huggins continued conversations about the strong likelihood of a DrupalCamp England in Spring 2025. Plans are in the pipeline and 1xINTERNET will be actively participating to ensure any event is a success.
Thank you to team DrupalCamp Scotland, proud to be sponsors, we look forward to next year!
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