Looking ahead to Drupalcamp London 2018

This year’s Drupalcamp London, a three-day knowledge-sharing conference devoted to all things Drupal, promises to be the biggest and best yet. Taking place at City University from 2nd to 4th March, it’s a must-visit event for anyone with more than a passing interest in the open-source CMS – developers, site builders, vendors, agencies and potential Drupal converts. Manifesto will be supporting through sponsorship and by running a couple of learning sessions.

A community-focused event

Drupalcamps are always friendly, inclusive events with a good mixture of activities to suit all types of Drupalist – whether you’re a hardcore contributor or simply looking for tips on how you can use Drupal more effectively in your organisation. This year’s event is no exception, with Drupal sprints, Birds of a Feather talks (informal discussions around a topic of interest), and some excellent keynote speakers nestled among the usual learning sessions.

There’s also plenty of opportunity for networking, with breakfast and lunch provided (Manifesto are sponsoring the breakfast on Saturday) and post-talk socialising.

While the main event takes place over the weekend, the Friday is CXO Day, aimed at business leaders who provide or make use of Drupal services. It’s a great opportunity to learn from the experiences of others about how to improve customer/user experiences with Drupal and add more value to your business. Manifesto will be maintaining a strong presence throughout the day so, if you’re in attendance, please do come and say ‘hi’.

Our talks: chatbots and APIs

I’ll be hosting two learning sessions at Drupalcamp London this year, both of which fall under the Coding and Development category.

Plugin API by examples

One of the cool new toys that comes with Drupal 8 is the Plugin system. But the new, rationalised system can be hard to get to grips with for people transitioning from older versions of Drupal and new users alike. Blocks are plugins, Views components are plugins, Fields are plugins – what’s the common denominator? Why and when should you use plugins? And how? In this session I’ll be demonstrating the use of the Plugin system through real-life examples, both common and rare, to help you make your project components fully pluggable and swappable.

“Hi User, I am Drupal, how can I help you?”

Our excitement about the new era of conversational interfaces made possible by chatbots and personal assistants, coupled with our commitment to helping grow and support the Drupal platform, last year prompted us to develop the Chatbot API module. In this session, I’ll be showing you how to use the new module, and its pluggable Intents, to build Alexa skills or Dialogflow agents that allow you to deliver content to users conversationally, without touching a line of code.

Find me with the sprinters

When I’m not delivering sessions, I’ll most likely be hanging out in the Sprint rooms, helping new and regular contributors build, fix and test new Drupal features. Do feel free to come and chat (I’m @gambry, in case you can’t find me). Other Manifestonians will also be milling around, keen to talk about Drupal, or any of your other digital challenges and opportunities. If you’d like to prearrange a chat, just drop us a line in the usual way.