Drupal Developer Days 2022 is happening as an in-person event at last after a gap of 2 years following the Covid-19 pandemic. The event started today Monday, April 4^th and will end on the 8^th, Friday. While virtual Drupal events were conducted, nothing could replace the joy de Vivre and camaraderie that in-person events bring along!

Here is a look at some of the major sessions happening there in Ghent, Belgium. 

Progressive decoupling: A how-to with an example from WHO

This session will be presented by Kate Marshalkina (Tech Lead) and Rodrigo Aguilera (Senior Developer).

Progressive decoupling for Drupal was mentioned back in 2016 DriesNote and has come a long way since then. Although there are still downsides and tradeoffs to be made with a decoupled site, through progressive decoupling (rather than full decoupling), there is, even more, to be gained.

• The benefits seen from using progressive decoupling for EQUIP for reactivity, interactivity, and server load reduction.
• How to create and configure JavaScript widgets using React to create flexible applications for improved user experience.
• How development efforts were set up using distributed delivery for multi-dev projects.
• The best tech stack found for progressively decoupled sites.
• How to set up metadata and stakeholder-ready catalog for your progressively decoupled site.
• How to manage production-ready dependencies for your site.

Open Source Enterprise Integration hub with Drupal and n8n

Speakers, Wouters_f, wesleydv will talk about the possibility of code free system integrations between Drupal and other systems like CRM, ERP. Social media etc- with minimal effort on the development side.

The webhooks module allows Drupal to connect every imaginable event to external systems.
Enterprise integration systems like N8N and zapier can really open up the power of drupal that way - without one letter of code.

In this talk you’ll learn how to link Drupal with n8n to disable the site when the temperature rises.

Monday Keynote- Fantastic functions and where to find them

The Speaker, Freek Van der Herten is a developer and partner at Spatie. The session promises to be an entertaining one while taking a look at a couple of surprising ways to use PHP. The session will also cover  Tailwind and Phoenix, two interesting open-source PHP projects.

State of Drupal 10

Speaker, Gábor Hojtsy will talk about the present state of Drupal 10 readiness. The session covers the timeline getting to the Drupal 10 release as well as the present state and what kind of changes you can expect. It will be most valuable for developers but businesses can also get a summary about the value of Drupal 10.

I just became team lead, now what

The speaker vanbrabantf will give a few tips on how to keep your team motivated and inspired and some do’s and don’ts of talking to customers.

Open Personalization with Apache Unomi in the GDPR era

Speaker Nick_vh talks about personalization.: Go or No? In the era of consent, privacy and GDPR it may no longer seem acceptable to do behavioral personalization. Personalization doesn’t have to be an Evil Big Brother.

Personalization is proven an effective way of increasing engagement. As a visitor, you feel understood. It leads to better user experience and higher conversion, as long as it’s done in all trust and consent. In recent years many software companies were created to deliver these highly contextualized experiences but none of them really delivered the necessary trust so that you could use the technology in the same way you are using Drupal.

Drupal is yours to take. It is your responsibility to use it wisely. Apache Solr is also yours to take. In combination with Drupal it’s highly powerful, and yet - at all times, all your customer data remains in your hands only. Welcome Apache Unomi, the new kid in town of customer data management and personalization.

Nick will explain how Drupal, Mautic and Apache Unomi can be seen as a Digital Experience Platform without lock-in, without handing over your data to an external software vendor.
The session includes a technical deep dive into Apache Unomi, how it can be used to deliver highly personalized experiences, compliant with the GDPR regulations and with respect to users trust.

Decoupling 101- Why Decouple, when not to, progressive decoupling and success stories in decoupling.

In this talk, speaker sheddt12 will explore the basics of decoupling, and how you can identify whether decoupling is appropriate for your site using drupal as a case study. Progressive decoupling as a migration strategy will also be covered, as well as a  series of success stories from teams and individuals that have used a decoupled architecture for their applications in production.

Tuesday Keynote: Drupal Initiative leads

Speaker Gábor Hojtsy, will talk about Drupal’s initiatives,  work on key improvements for the platform that will make it easier to build and maintain sites as well as create the software itself. In this keynote, various initiative leads will take turns to highlight new capabilities, challenges they faced on the way and other stories from core development.

Progressive Web Apps in a Drupal World

Speaker marcvangend talks about how  Progressive Web App (PWA) offers some appealing features, such as offline available content, push notifications and installable apps without the hassle of creating an app. In this session, marcvangend will start getting everyone up to speed with what a PWA is and how the basic concepts work. After that, marcvangend will dive into the implementation of the PWA module, looking at its default features and ways to tweak the behavior to your own needs.

The first part of the session should be comprehensible to a wide audience, including project owners, sales people and other non-developer roles. The second part will be most interesting for intermediate to advanced developers.

Wednesday Keynote: Baddy Sonja

Baddy Sonja co-founder of 1xINTERNET will talk about the importance of contributions within a business context and how it helps not only the broader community but also the financial baseline of a company, the net profits.

Drupal.org GitLab Acceleration Update

Speaker drumm will review the way the Drupal community collaborates, and talk about how that is informing integration of GitLab into the Drupal community’s workflow. Since GitLab is increasingly-widely used, and rapidly adding features, there is an opportunity to integrate additional tools and workflows, to help increase the velocity of Drupal.

At the end of this talk, there will be time for an open feedback session where questions will be answered and your suggestions will be taken for further enhancements of the tools.

Thursday Keynote: Bram Duvigneau & Roel Van Gils

In this talk, the speakers will answer two questions:

1. How can we make sure that content editors have all the tools at their disposal to create and manage accessible content?
2. We’ll also look at strategies and examples to set up a complex Drupal back-end so that content editors with a disability can manage a website with ease.

About the speakers
Bram Duvigneau: Bram is a Digital Accessibility consultant and researcher. Before that, he was a back-end developer, sneaking accessibility fixes in the front-end code of the projects he worked on. His advice is based on both WCAG and his experience as a blind user and developer.
Bram is the co-founder of Firm Ground, a digital accessibility agency in The Netherlands.

Roel Van Gils: Roel is an IAAP recognized consultant and trainer. In this role, Roel works with European institutions, tech startups and public sector bodies in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Roel is co-owner at Eleven Ways, a Ghent-based agency that helps organizations reach their digital accessibility goals — from strategy to WCAG compliance.

Friday is fully contributions day! For those who can’t make it to the event, you can still watch the sessions you want live over the internet, as long as you buy the tickets.