DrupalCon Barcelona Wrap-Up: The Third and Final Day

As the third and final day of this year’s DrupalCon Barcelona arrived, Drupalers started flooding the rooms of the convention center once again. Multiple extremely interesting sessions were available throughout the day, before the traditional wrap-up ceremony where the next DrupalCon location would be revealed, and of course the trivia night.

Drupal + Modern JS without going headless

A pretty hot and interesting session for the day was the non-headless approach for combining the Drupal twig system with JSX templates to seamlessly integrate Drupal with React. As Benjamin Mullins, the man behind the idea, mentioned, the implementation is an attempt to bridge the gap between the way senior developers have learned to work using twigs and the modern way younger developers approach technology, leaning more and more towards modern JS frameworks such as React, VueJs etc. Of course, he mentioned that there are still a few bugs and limitations for the time being, but everyone in the room seemed to like the presentation a lot, and that interest can only mean that in the near future, many people will certainly be contributing to the project.

Network of European Drupal Associations (NEDA) , and local regions and associations

A very important BoF took place on the last day of DrupalCon Barcelona, where people from all around Europe - and outside - were gathering in an attempt to discuss the future works of NEDA and local regions and associations. Joi Garrett was there to present her work on the Local Associations initiatives project from the DA. She talked about the information gathered from meetings with local leaders in Asia, Europe and Australia. 

Along with Esmeralda Tijhoff, they identified five crucial and common areas where all local communities have needs, including how to get new volunteers and attendees, improvement of local marketing, issues for multilingual areas, better representation on Drupal.org and support for event organizers. All these topics were discussed in detail by the attendees working in groups and then presented to the whole group. An extremely fruitful discussion was lit up as each team started talking on its given topic, and a wide variety of ideas and proposals quickly piled up, setting the foundation for building up an important initiative to strongly enhance Drupal presence in local communities. 

NEDA and the DA got a wonderful list of issues to start with, with some of them being able to be tackled right away while others requiring a bit more work to get the details right. Nevertheless, the issue queue is already in the works! Everyone left the BoF with a smile on their face, and the rendezvous was renewed for DrupalCamp Berlin 2024 on 8-9 November, where NEDA aims to set up a hybrid session to further work on these issues.

Wrap-Up Ceremony Auditorium - DrupalCon 2025 City Announcement

The much-awaited wrap-up ceremony started on Thursday afternoon, seeing the auditorium filled to the bone. After a brief review of every exciting event that took place this DrupalCon and an overview of the upcoming Drupal events worldwide, this year’s mascot, the Salamander, found its new owner and the new one was revealed - A white horse! - hinting us for the next European DrupalCon destination.

All aboard for Vienna!

(Images are courtesy of the Author. Thanks E-Sepia)