Last week was the fourth edition of the Drupal Mountain Camp, where Drupal enthousiasts meet for a long week end to share about Drupal, its future, its community, and everything around.
This year again, MD Systems was especially invested in the events organization, and we are proud that the event was such a blast.
To read more about the previous editions, check this out!
Thursday
The MD-Systems team met up on Thursday morning. Two of us had already met at the office and traveled together to the main train station, where the rest of the team was already waiting for them on the train.
Shortly after our arrival, the conference started, with first, an afternoon of workshops.
The first workshop was about how to integrate an AI chatbot into your website. The workshop was great, as we were not only presented with the advantages but also the risks of a chatbot and, we could in just an hour install a website with a working chatbot.
We had long breaks after each presentation to be able to process the new information and exchange ideas with our colleagues and meet other Drupal enthousiasts from other companies that we meet too rarely.
In the second workshop, we were presented with a new way to edit content, using a decoupled approach that allowed for a more intuitive and fluent editing experience. By the end of the workshop, we could be able to navigate the Drupal backend and create our own visual landing pages using this new user interface.
After the workshop, the event team had organized a pub quiz. Miro, who was part of the winning team, even came home with a new hat and jacket from Davos Hockey Club!
Afterwards, we met up at a nearby restaurant and spent a cozy evening.
Friday
The Drupal Mountain Camp didn't start until 9:30am, so our team had plenty of time to have breakfast and get ready for the day. We started with a 15min opening session followed by a presentation by Jutta Horstmann on how to achieve a sustainable open source ecosystem. Money is scarce in the open source world but the speaker was hopeful with finding new solutions.
Today we had slightly shorter breaks, but therefore more exciting presentations to attend.
The second presentation of the day was the first by one of our team members, Sascha Grossenbacher. The presentation was about issue queue processes, automated testing with GitlabCI, release management and other useful information about working with drupal.org for maintainers and contributors. He demonstrated how to set up a basic workflow, test it with different Drupal/PHP versions and extended it with custom services, dependencies and recommendations for branches, tags and tools to create releases.
After Sascha's presentation, we all went out together and took a group photo. Meanwhile, the lunch buffet was set up and when we came back we were able to help ourselves.
Shortly after lunch, Preston So introduced us to the development of content management systems (CMS). In this talk we looked at the recent history of the concept of headless CMS, how headless CMS is no longer really as "headless" as it seems, and why we need a new name for the emerging CMS category that is more of a hybrid of pure headless and monolithic CMS, which he calls Universal CMS.
In the afternoon there were more interesting talks about Drupal on smartwatches, DevOps, AI, decoupling and more!
The evening event that the team came up with for us was a super nice fondue evening that virtually all conference attendees participated in - we were able to rent sleds and sled down the mountain with the cheese weight after a hearty fondue at the top of the mountain!
Saturday
Almost not exhausted from the previous 2 days, we all bravely got up, just in time for the first keynote of the day. Tearyne Almendariz spoke to us about a topic that is too often left out of tech conferences: Expectations, mental health, attrition, staying healthy and everything in between. Raising awareness of these issues can only lead to good things in the community.
Ivica then introduced the popular Paragraphs module that we maintain and develop. The module is very modular and customizable, but the documentation is poor and many people can't use it to its full potential - we hope this presentation will help them get the most out of Paragraphs!
Primoz followed with a presentation on entity browsers, which are much more powerful than just browsing entities on the website: He showed three cases where the entity browser is used to browse external content: a custom external CMS, the icon manager Font Awesome, and the free media platform Pexels. You don't have to browse these platforms, then download assets and then upload them back to the website, it's all there already!
Mathilde was the next to talk about a not-so-new method of automatically tagging content. Nowadays, the trend is to use AI for a range of applications on websites, including automatic content tagging. She argued that in many cases these tools are unnecessary and cumbersome, and presented a lighter solution.
Finally, Miro closed the strike of MD Systems' presentations with a talk on the Translation Management (TMGMT) framework, which made great strides when it was first introduced about 10 years ago, but has seen slower growth in recent years. He considered why this is and what steps are needed to take the module into its next phase of growth, especially with the advent of AI-based translation tools.
After the closing session where we all reviewed the good times we had over the last three days, and Dan's usual feat of making a video about the conference during the conference, all the speakers got together for a speaker's dinner where we all enjoyed good food, good drinks and good conversations with interesting people we don't see often enough :)
We thank the organizing team (including Miro!) and the sponsors (including MD Systems :D) for making sure we had such a good time, and we hope to see everyone again soon at the next edition!
