Networking, Discussion and Drupal's Future: A Report of the October 2024 DrupalACT Meetup

Margery Tongway

Senior Drupal Developer at the Australian Government Department of Finance

A small group of Canberra Drupal users gathered at Hide and Seek Digital for the last DrupalACT meetup of the year.

While the attendance in person was lower than normal—about 15 people in the end—we had around 5 people join in online for the evening as well.

Networking was done before the event, with Hide and Seek providing food and drinks for everyone before the evening got underway.

I opened the evening with Drupal community updates including:

Although Brendan T was scheduled to open the presentations this evening, he wasn’t able to attend.

I quickly put together a session about some current challenges I was having with my Drupal work, then opened up a discussion for other people at the event to share back with others—What’s the most difficult challenges they’re facing as a Drupal developer in Canberra at the moment?

Whilst older technology that hadn’t been updated was a hot topic (Cake PHP2.0, Drupal on IIS, and so on), a strong theme of this discussion was a frustration with non-technical managers not understanding the pressures on developers.

Moving on from the past, the second session from Mel Stubbings was looking to the future with Drupal Starshot: Reaching for the Stars, Building the Future

Mel’s session covered all the new and exciting things Drupal will be releasing now and into the near future.

It looks like a bright and successful future ahead for Drupal, as long as you don’t let too many people configure your website!

Margery Tongway Senior Drupal Developer (Tech lead) at the Department of Finance in The Australian Government | D .

Image Attribution Disclaimer: At The Drop Times (TDT), we are committed to properly crediting photographers whose images appear in our content. Many of the images we use come from event organizers, interviewees, or publicly shared galleries under CC BY-SA licenses. However, some images may come from personal collections where metadata is lost, making proper attribution challenging.

Our purpose in using these images is to highlight Drupal, its events, and its contributors—not for commercial gain. If you recognize an image on our platform that is uncredited or incorrectly attributed, we encourage you to reach out to us at #thedroptimes channel on Drupal Slack.

We value the work of visual storytellers and appreciate your help in ensuring fair attribution. Thank you for supporting open-source collaboration!

Meet up

Drupal Meetup

Drupal Event

Event

Drupal Planet

Note: The vision of this web portal is to help promote news and stories around the Drupal community and promote and celebrate the people and organizations in the community. We strive to create and distribute our content based on these content policy. If you see any omission/variation on this please reach out to us at #thedroptimes channel on Drupal Slack and we will try to address the issue as best we can.