Things I Learned at Drupalcamp Berlin 2024
(Yes, I Know, I'm Late to the Party)
On November 8th and 9th I went to Drupal Camp Berlin. I learned about Starshot, a bold initiative to make Drupal more user-friendly and accessible. Among the many talks I attended, I also went sessions about the open-source tracking tool Matomo and the Drupal Association's plan to overhaul documentation using the "Docs Like Code" approach. I learned a lot at Drupal Camp Berlin!
November 2024
The keynote presentation by Baddý Sonja Breidert. (Photo: Marin Balabanov)
I haven't been at a Drupal event for a while and was a bit out of the loop with any of the current developments. So I registered for Drupal Camp in Berlin with great enthusiasm and interest. Berlin! I love the city.
A long time had passed since 2011 when it was last held in Berlin. The world certainly looked different back then. This year's camp was held on November 8th and 9th in the venerable Alte Münze. I expected to go to sessions on site-building, best practices, and hear some classic discussions on Drupal's powerful (yet sometimes intimidating) capabilities. It turned out to be so much more.
I hopped over to Berlin and got lost in the wonderful anarchic Kreuzberg. To get some work done, I went to the strange but fabulous Skalitzer 33 coworking space, avoiding WeWork, that seems to still be a thing in Berlin. (I only much later saw that there is a location of TSH, The Social Hub, in Berlin, though I don't think they have a coworking space. I'd been using the TSH Vienna coworking for more than a year.) And finally, the first day of Drupal Camp arrived. I went to the bustling and vibrant Alexanderplatz, close to the event location to buy a woolly hat because it was getting cold. I was ready for Drupal Camp to start.
The Alte Münze-Building (Photo: Marin Balabanov)
Behind the stately, timeworn facade of the Alte Münze cobblestone pathways lead into the inner courtyard that looks like a secret garden of history and creativity. When you behold the rustic elegance you are invited to introspection and inspiration. When I arrived for Drupal Camp, the open sky overhead stretched like a painter’s canvas with a palette limited to drap gray and blue tomes depriving this former industrial space of much of its warmth.
In the evening, the courtyard illuminated with the soft glow of vintage lanterns. The enthusiasm of the developers and site builders at Drupal Camp spilled its vibrancy into space where laughter mingles with the distant hum of discussions. Fitting for a place where history and the future collide. I loved that.
The inner courtyard of the Alte Münze on a gray afternoon (Photo: Marin Balabanov)
Drupal Starshot CMS and Core
The first session of the day was the keynote by Baddý Sonja Breidert, co-founder of 1xINTERNET. I know that I am late to the party, but this was the first time I heard about Drupal Starshot. This is the visionary new initiative that aims to redefine Drupal, making it more accessible, user-friendly, and appealing to a broader audience.
Hearing about Starshot felt like a breath of fresh air. The initiative was introduced with a video by none other than Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal. (Apparently, he had already introduced Starshot during DrupalCon Portland 2024.) The ambitious goal is to release the first iteration by mid-January 2025. And apparently the Starshot's name will be finalized as Drupal CMS & Core. Not sure I like this rather conventional name that sounds like it was decided by a committee.
But what makes Drupal CMS & Core different, and why was I excited about it?
Making Drupal Accessible to Non-Developers
One of my biggest takeaways from the Drupal CMS & Core (Starshot) keynote was its focus on ease of use.
Traditionally, Drupal has been a bit of a developer-heavy platform. It is powerful but often daunting for beginners or non-coders. Starshot’s mission is to change that. Drupal should be a tool not just for tech experts but for anyone looking to create compelling websites without needing a deep technical background. To be fair, there are commercial Drupal platform providers like Pantheon that offer a ready-to-use Drupal environment with tools for development, testing, and deployment. While these platforms simplify the hosting and maintenance aspects of Drupal, they still require you to have a certain level of technical knowledge to build and customize their sites effectively if you want to get the most out of performance optimization, scalability, and security.
The Drupal website featuring the Drupal Starshot initiative (Screenshot)
Drupal Starshot (Drupal CMS & Core) aims to lower the barrier to entry for building and managing Drupal sites by enhancing the core platform’s usability with the following core features:
1. Recipes: Quick-Start Solutions
One of the more exciting ideas is the introduction of Recipes (love the name). These are pre-configured templates that provide solutions for common website functionalities like blogs, e-commerce stores, and event pages. Recipes could be described as ready-made starter kits. If you want to set up a blog, there is a Recipe for that. If you need an event calendar, then you can use the appropriate Recipe. You can bypass complex setups and straight up build their site.
I think it is fair to say that Drupal community members can be quite vocal. During lunch a couple of folks expressed some critical thoughts about Recipes. They said that in the pre-release version, some Recipes contradict each other when making changes to the frontend. Apparently, the last run Recipe just takes precedence over the others, even if the changes it introduces break the previous Recipes.
Sounds like something that can be streamlined.
2. Experience Builder: No-Code Design
The Experience Builder is perhaps even more exciting. It’s a no-code, browser-based interface that enables users to design layouts, create engaging pages, and customize their sites without needing any programming skills. This sounds like an interesting feature with a lot of promise without getting lost in the weeds of code.
I’ve dabbled with some no-code tools. I felt that they are great to get started off quickly and making the big sweeping initial changes. But they always fell a bit short because at some point you hit a brick wall and want to actually write code. I believe that you can always change code on a Drupal site. So once you've set up your initial functionalities using the Experience Builder, you can take the implementation to the next level by either changing the code yourself or getting someone else to do it.
3. Project Browser: Easily Discovering Module
If you’ve ever used Drupal, you know how extensive its module library is. That is a certainly a strength. But it can be a bit overwhelming to find exactly what you need. The Project Browser in Drupal CMS & Core simplifies this process by enabling you to discover and install modules directly through a streamlined interface. This means that you don't need to hunt down module lists or getting lost in forum recommendations. If the Project Browser delivers on its promises, everything you need should be just a few clicks away.
4. Automatic Updates: Keeping Your Site Updated
Lastly, there’s Automatic Updates that ensure sites stay secure and up-to-date without manual intervention. Managing updates can be nerve-wracking because you have to worry about breaking the site with an update. I think that the idea is that the updates are only released when they have been thoroughly tested in different standard Recipe configurations.
A Bright Future for Drupal
The more I heard about Drupal CMS & Core, the clearer it became: this isn’t just a collection of features. It sounds more like a transformative vision. The initiative formerly known as Starshot (TIFKAS... just kidding) aims to empower any type of user, from hobbyists to seasoned developers. And for someone like me, it’s incredibly motivating to see the community expanding the user base of the CMS.
I think that Drupal is not just evolving technologically but also philosophically. It can remain one of the most powerful and flexible CMS platforms out there, but with this new initiative it will be more accessible.
Happy to be back in Berlin and at Drupal Camp. (Selfie: Marin Balabanov)
Drupal Docs Like Code
The final presentation on the first day was held by Lenny Moskalyk from the Drupal Association. She gave us a sneak peek at the cool things planned by the Drupal Association for 2025.
She listed a lot of interessing things including how the Drupal Association supports local communities. She described how they plan to bring open source promotion to non-Drupal conferences in Europe to spread outreach. And the really nifty sounding Drupal programs in the OpenUniversity.
All of these things warrent their own attention and are amazing in their own right. But there was one initiative Lenny Moskalyk spoke of, that particularly piqued my interest.
She announced that the Drupal Association is planning a significant overhaul of its documentation to improve accessibility, consistency, and ease of contribution. And they'd do it according the Docs Like Code principles championed by Anne Gentle. I am a big fan of this.
Recognizing that the current documentation can be fragmented and challenging to navigate, the Drupal Association is moving towards a more streamlined approach that will better serve developers, content managers, and site builders alike. The goal is to provide clear, structured, and up-to-date resources to empower the community to use Drupal to its fullest.
By adopting the "Docs Like Code" approach (they referred to it as "docs-as-code" in the presentation), documentation is written in a portable format that can be easily transformed (e.g. text with markdown), then it is managed and versioned just like code. This method allows contributors to collaborate on documentation within a Git-based workflow, ensuring version control and easy access to updates. Developers and users alike can then participate directly in improving and expanding documentation. And this approach aligns documentation with the agile development processes already familiar to many in the Drupal community.
I'm a big fan of treating Docs as code. It enables developers, writers, and contributors to work together as equals, sharing ownership when creating resources that serve the community. I think that this will bring more transparency and collaboration to Drupal’s knowledge base as well as increase its accessibility.
Lenny Moskalyk presenting some of the plans for 2025 (Photo: Marin Balabanov)
(In the evening of the first day, I had the great privilege of joining the other folks in the legendary C-Base social club. This is an event location that styles itself to look like a space station that crash-landed on Earth. It is also the place where the members of the demoscene in Berlin regularly meet. This was the intersection between fan culture, the open-source movement and my beloved demoscene. I was standing on hallowed ground! I also had much too much to drink and stayed much too long. The less said about this the better.)
Matomo and Consent-free User Tracking
My favorite presentation on the second day was by Joachim Nickel. He talked about the open-source web analytics platform Matomo and how it can be used to track user behaviour without legally requiring their consent.
Matomo is formerly known as Piwik. It designed to provide organizations with full control over their data. Matomo is often compared to Google Analytics. Though it sets itself apart by prioritizing user privacy and data ownership. Joachim Nickel described how Matomo allows organization to host Matomo on their own servers or through a cloud-hosted option. He showed us how the system offers in-depth analytics features, including visitor tracking, conversion tracking, SEO insights, and customizable reporting, all without compromising data privacy. Joachim Nickel gave an overview of the comprehensive feature set and strong focus on data protection that made Matomo popular at organizations, particularly those needing to comply with strict privacy regulations like GDPR.
I found Joachim Nickel's exploration of consent-free tracking particularly interesting. He emphasized that he is not a legal data privacy expert or a lawyer but that there are laws in Germany that allow media companies to tally the number of users who have accessed specific content anonymously without needing GDPR consent. This can be used to collect basic analytics data. By enabling certain settings, such as anonymizing IP addresses, Matomo can operate in a manner that meets privacy standards, minimizing the data collected and eliminating the need for intrusive cookie consent banners.
In a bit of a tangent, Joachim Nickel mentioned a tracking technology called Canvas Tracking (a.k.a. Canvas fingerprinting). This caught my attention because more than ten years ago, I worked for a digital fingerprinting subsidiary of Arvato Bertelsmann and one of the challenges was to identify unique devices. This seems to be possible using Canvas Tracking.
This is a type of browser fingerprinting technique where websites render hidden text or images on an HTML canvas element. They analyze subtle variations in the output. These variations, unique to each device due to differences in hardware, software, and graphics drivers, create a fingerprint that can be used to identify and track users without relying on cookies. Creepy stuff!
I don't think that I would have learned about technology if I hadn't gone to this talk.
Joachim Nickel during his presentation about Matomo in the wonderful main seminar room Moneta (Photo: Marin Balabanov)
Good-bye Berlin
I got a real kick out of attending a Drupal Camp. And I had a great time in Berlin despite the wind and the grayness of autumn. The camp was a vibrant mix of learning, collaboration, and inspiration. From cutting-edge workshops to insightful sessions. I feel that my feable skills were truly elevated. Beyond the technical growth, I was happy to connect with like-minded folks who share a passion for open-source development. Our conversations reinforced a shared vision of shaping a brighter, more innovative, better tomorrow.
(Okay, then I had to get up really early in the morning to catch my flight back. So maybe the better tomorrow actually starts the day after tomorrow.)
Making faces on Alexanderplatz (Selfie: Marin Balabanov)