Event kick-off
The event started with mingling, drinks and nibbles for half an hour, before we moved to presentations.
A Drupal-inspired welcome
After a brief intro from Drupal Meetup lead Suchi Garg, Alfred took to the floor to talk about all things Drupal.
He started by looking at the origins of Drupal:
- Drupal was founded by Dries Buytaert in 2001 (when he was at the University of Antwerp) as a comms message board
- Its turning point was in 2003, when it was adopted by the US Democratic Party
Alfred compared that to current day:
“Now, Drupal is the world’s greatest enterprise-grade open source CMS.”
Alfred then spoke about the use of Drupal across many different Australian government jurisdictions before looking at Salsa’s journey with Drupal.
He talked about Salsa’s transition from ‘takers’ (using Drupal without giving much back) to ‘makers’ (becoming heavily involved in Drupal contributions and developing innovative, open source products based on Drupal).
Alfred then handed over to Alex Skrypnyk, just as the traditional Drupal Meetup pizzas arrived.
Technical overview of Drupal 10
Once everyone had a few slices of pizza in-hand, Alex took us through a quick technical analysis of Drupal 10. He described Drupal 10 as being Drupal 9.4 minus the deprecated APIs.
He also highlighted key tech changes, such as:
- Olivero default theme replaces Bartik
- Claro admin theme replaces Seven
- CK Editor 5 replaces CK Editor 4 — better authoring experience and better security
- Theme Starterkit tools for bespoke theme creation
- Modern JS components (removing jQuery)
- Symofony 6 (replacing Symfony 4) and PHP 8.1 (replacing PHP 7) — both required for security
He also compared Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 in terms of requirements.
Lastly, Alex looked at the top 10 Drupal modules to see if they were Drupal 10-ready. With a lot of work in the past two months, now only two aren’t Drupal 10 compatible — Webform (which has a patch) and Linkit (no patch at the moment).
Alex then handed over to Akhil Bhandari.
CivicTheme launch
Akhil officially launched with a very quick CivicTheme rundown. He started off looking at the why — repeated effort and therefore wasted money across design patterns, user research, and accessibility testing and remediation.
He then moved onto the benefits and features of CivicTheme, covering key areas such as:
- Government grade
- Visually stunning
- Quick and easy to assemble websites
- Simple to style (applying brand colours in the user interface)
- Accessible (WCAG 2.1 AA) out-of-the-box
CivicTheme represents Salsa’s biggest contribution to Drupal yet…and a significant amount of time (5,000+ hours) and money.
Akhil also showed the homepage of the out-of-the-box government profile CivicTheme and outlined how people could start with either the open source design files or the build files .
The Drupal 10 cakes
Next, it was time to cut the Drupal 10 launch cakes! The cakes looked pretty impressive and tasted amazing too. Chocolate mud or gluten-free white chocolate and raspberry — both were delicious!