Drupal User Group meetings during a global pandemic

Many major cities or regions in Europe, have their own Drupal user group. Everybody can join and participate in their regular physical meetings. Often, there are talks, sometimes, there are workshops, were you’ll always witness a lot of Drupal expertise. You can grab a beer or a cup of coffee and sit together with some old and new friends.

The global Corona pandemic changed this a lot. Physical meetings are not possible anymore. Most user groups skipped their late March,  and April 2020 meetings and discussions started on how to proceed. It was then the initiative of some Drupalistas in the German Drupal Association suggesting a regular Germany-wide online meeting. In May 2020 the initial meeting took place. All German Drupal user groups were invited to join and it worked out extremely well.

For the next eight months, or until January 2021 this monthly Germany-wide meeting repeated with great success. But German isn’t spoken only in Germany. Also, Austria and parts of Switzerland speak German and they have really strong Drupal communities as well. Maybe that’s what the Drupalistas from the Drupal Austria Association thought when they formed the idea of a first Drupal D-A-CH online meeting. All German, Austrian and Swiss Drupal communities were invited to join the first monthly Drupal D-A-CH Online meeting in February 2021 and it was a great success.

The Drupal community always finds a way 

We at 1xINTERNET are very happy about these events and how the Drupal community gathers together in difficult times. It’s always fun to take part, either by listening to great talks or providing talks and discussions ourselves. In February 2021, Norman, our full stack developer held a lightning talk about the new Drush deploy command which was released with Drush 10.3.0, and how it standardizes the order of Drush commands to be run during a deployment.

Also, in March 2021 Yannick and Norman were showcasing a new module they created: Link Allowed Hosts. With Link Allowed Hosts you are able to restrict Drupal link field links, to only link to a configurable list of allowed hosts. Already shortly after we started using the module in our projects and it has been  running smoothly in production.

Get involved

The organization of all the named Drupal events usually takes place at Drupalchat and you’ll find announcements for upcoming events either there, on Drupal Groups, Drupalcenter or by subscribing to the Drupal User Group Berlin Newsletter.