Lee Walker, a principal engineer at Code Journeyman and founder of the Chattanooga Drupal Users Group, along with Bo Shipley, a dedicated Drupal developer, dive into the vibrant world of Drupal user groups. They discuss the critical role of meetups in fostering community engagement and knowledge sharing. Topics include the challenges of organizing meetups, the rise of hybrid models, and the importance of simplicity to prevent organizer burnout. They also explore personal stories that highlight the impact of these gatherings on individual journeys in the Drupal ecosystem.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
From Meetup Sign-Up To Career Shift
Bo found the Chattanooga Drupal meetup on Meetup.com while studying computer science.
He attended, kept showing up, and that path led him into a decade-long Drupal career.
insights INSIGHT
Meetup.com Has Deteriorated For Organizers
Meetup.com has declined in organizer-friendly features and added costs under private equity ownership.
Organizers now rely more on drupal.org events or local channels to publicize meetups.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Meetups And Camps Led Directly To Work
Bo attended a meetup, then DrupalCamp LA, and secured a 90-day contract 30 days after the conference.
Meetup introductions directly led to his first paid Drupal work.
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In this episode of Talking Drupal, we dive into the world of Drupal user groups and meetups with guests Lee Walker, Bernardo Martinez, and Bo Shipley. Our guests share their experiences in organizing and participating in Drupal communities and the vital role these meetups play in fostering continuous learning and professional development. We also explore the newest features of Drupal Core 11.2 in the Module of the Week.
Single Directory Components (SDCs) have been a focus of excitement for Drupal’s front end developers since they were added to Drupal 10.1 as an experimental module, and merged into 10.3 as a stable feature. With Drupal 11.2, SDCs now have a concept of variants, to allow for different ways of presenting a component’s information. Some component frameworks like Storybook have a somewhat different concept of variants, which is really a set of property value presets that are useful for testing. Variants with Drupal SDCs strike me as being analogous to view modes for content types, in that you can have separate template files for each variant, or you can have conditional logic within a single template based on the variant in use.
Our own nicxvan, chx, and some others put some significant work into allowing preprocess hooks to be defined as OOP classes, which bring us a significant step closer to not needing .module files anymore. Hooks (and .module files) are Drupalisms, so removing the need for them is a big improvement for Developer Experience, and makes it easier for developers to get started with Drupal
In Drupal 11.2 the module installer has been updated to only rebuild the container after several modules have been installed, which significantly speeds up installing multiple modules at once.
Drupal 11.2 also brings us a Recipe Unpack composer extension, so when you composer require a recipe, the dependencies get automatically added to your site’s composer.json file, so you can apply and then remove the recipe and still have a fully functional site
Package Manager is now a hidden module in Drupal core, which is critical for initiative like Automatic Updates and Project Browser, that the community has been working on for years
Drupal core now also supports the next-generation AVIF format, with WEBP as a fallback with servers that don’t support generating them
Of course there are also a variety of dependency updates as well, for CKEDitor, Symfony, composer and more, as well as too many minor improvements and bugfixes to cover in detail here
Talking Drupal