Visiting DrupalCon Prague 2022

First DrupalCon in what felt like forever

The last in-person DrupalCon Europe that we visited took place in Amsterdam in 2019. After the pandemic hit, both events of 2020 and 2021 were cancelled or took place as a virtual event. Back in the day, our colleague Kristiaan shared his experience about the DrupalCon 2020 in our blog. An absence of more than 2 years from any in person Drupal event due to the pandemic, led to us being very excited to be finally back at DrupalCon Europe 2022, this time in Prague. And we were obviously not alone as it was nice to hear how many times that particular sentence was rephrased during DrupalCon Prague numerous times. 

Prague as the location of choice for this year’s DrupalCon Europe turned out to be an ideal place for the event. There’s nothing else to say that the city is a modern European metropolis that offers everything you need for a central software developer event. Above all, stable WLAN down to the last tool shed. Despite the fact that the O2 Arena as the place of the Con was not exactly centrally located, it was ultra-modern and equipped with every imaginable comfort. A ticket for the public transport network was included in the DrupalCon ticket, so that you can take all the routes comfortably and without any effort.

Being a Platinum sponsor

As a Platinum sponsor of this year’s event, we partnered up with DrupalCon and had the chance to welcome everyone at our own expo booth. While enjoying a freshly brewed coffee, we had lots of great little talks with the community — which is an essential part of why we are attending evens like the DrupalCon in the first place. For our newest colleague, Joachim (on the right in the picture), it was also a great experience spending time with the team.

“It was also a good opportunity for me to get to know my Factorial mates better, with whom I have only been working for a few weeks. And I have to say that I feel very comfortable in their midst, which I think you can see in the photo above.”

Most interesting topics

During DrupalCon Prague, a couple of talks caught my interest more than others. Needless to say, the amount of sessions offered, had something in stall for pretty much everyone. But the following topics left me with excitement:

Drupal 10 Release

The focus of the events was of course the upcoming update to Drupal 10 in December. The new version comes with the promise of turning back to smaller users, whereas in recent years a lot has been about enterprise applications. And I’d say Acquia has done a lot to deliver on that promise.

Automatic updates

Automatic updates — sounds like a contradiction in the ears of drupalistas and drupalistos, but that should now be a thing of the past. Soon you can update core and modules via the backend. There is also a new package manager that not only shows locally installed modules, but also recommended modules that are not installed. Extensive information is available in the backend via modules, which greatly facilitates access to functionality.

CKEditor

Version 5 of the CKEditor is also coming up with extensive new features that make text editing really smart. It’s exciting to see where the journey goes in terms of automation, integrations of other tools and collaborative solutions. I feel like the user is given more and more handles for the driving seat.

Dries Note

It goes without saying that DrupalCon wouldn’t be DrupalCon without a Dries Note. Once again, the Dries Note at DrupalCon Prague included some exciting insights about community work and topics related to Drupal’s future.

My DrupalCon Prague takeaways

Despite the influence of COVID-19, DrupalCon Prague has been a blast. Another in-person event where we could reconnect with the community. In addition, a lot has changed during the pandemic — not only in the Drupal world but also at Factorial. It was quite exciting to present ourselves with everything we’ve been working on during the pandemic years at this DrupalCon. 

A special shoutout goes to our developer Salim who has turned out to be a really good contacter using the DrupalCon app. At the end of DrupalCon he was even honored with an award as the second best networker at DrupalCon. Hope to see you all at DrupalCon Lille in 2023!