DrupalCon Day 2 – #Driesnote and DevOps

Day two of the DrupalCon Barcelona started off early with everybody scrambling to get into the main room for #driesnote. Unfortunately we had to make do with a video link from the adjoining room.

Drupal UX vs WordPress UX

We heard Dries (the Drupal founder) talk about the the user experience for content editors using Drupal and how it compares with the relatively easy interface on WordPress, i.e. “Why isn’t there a new post button?” and “Why can’t I just drag it in?”

Drupal 8… still coming soon

The keynote, like a lot of this conference, focused heavily on the forthcoming Drupal 8 and it was announced that a release candidate will be shipped on October the 7th (this year, before you ask!) He’s keen to have it at 8.0 as soon as possible to mitigate the Osborne effect, where the number of new systems being built on Drupal 7 will start to fall due to the next version of the software being so close on the horizon.

Decoupling FTW

Dries also talked about the trend of decoupling the application to client side by using apps such as, nodejs, angular, etc, to take the rendering off the server. He also promoted a new scripting language called GraphQL, which is able to render pages based on a YML file. Sebastian Siemssen (@thefubhy) is the go-to person for more information on this.

Feature branch vs trunk-based

Drupal 8 will also see a change to the development process of core, with the core development team moving to a feature branch approach, which will allow time-based, 6 monthly updates.

This was further discussed in person when I, along with a few Cancer Research UK developers, met Angie Byron (@webchick) at an Acquia session – which left David a bit star struck!

Another smile was left on our faces when webchick hinted that Behat integration could be in a future version of Drupal 8. CRUK have been extensively writing tests using the Behat framework for some time now. The fact that Drupal 8.1 was mentioned also means that Drupal 8 won’t be the final version (a la Windows 10) – something which their MVP approach might have suggested.

Drupal DevOps

I attended a few interesting talks in the afternoon, mainly around the DevOps side of Drupal where David Numan from CivicActions discussed infrastructure as code with his new docker management tool called Bowline. I’ll be getting my hands dirty with that sometime very soon.

With Drupal 8 making use of YML-based configuration files there is the possibility to actually use the database only for content – which is what it was always supposed to be for really!!!

More from DrupalCon coming soon…