DrupalSouth 2025 — session review

Overview

I had the pleasure of attending DrupalSouth 2025, as a presenter, volunteer (Splash Award Judge) and participant. Having attended a few DrupalSouth events over the past few years I had some benchmarks for comparison. The venue was fantastic, the presentations I attended were excellent and the vibe of community and sharing really really evident. I personally rate it as the best DrupalSouth I have attended.

The following expands on my thoughts and summary of key sessions I attended.

The venue

The choice of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) to host the venue was an inspired choice. With its location in Melbourne’s Federation Square, not only is it handy for transport, but because it has a spiritual sense of a wonderful gathering place both for now — with Fed Square being an acknowledged Melbourne centre for arts, culture and public events — and historically as a traditional land of the Kulin Nation, especially the Wurunderi Woi-wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples. ACMI, with two presenter auditoriums and one presenter conference room, as well as vendor booth space available for the conference, proved an excellent gathering place for the immediate with approximately 220 conference delegates in attendance.

The schedule

The main presentations were over two days with tracks for Drupal Development, People and Culture, User Experience and Content, Web Tools & Complementary Technologies and Keynotes. The presentations I attended were high quality. The keynotes were insightful and provocative. There was also a contribution code day the day before the formal presentations.

A highlight of day one of the presentations was the Splash Awards, which showcased the best Drupal website builds in a number of categories. Each category had a different emphasis but all were judged on the submissions' contribution efforts and conceptual impact. Salsa was honoured to be the winner of the Best Website in Government via our partnership with the Department of Social Services and the build of its new website, www.dss.gov.au.

The volunteers of DrupalSouth deserve huge credit for their efforts, including the organisation of networking drinks at the end of day one of presentations and also at the end of day two to conclude DrupalSouth 2025. All manner of digital practitioners were able to mingle, celebrate, collaborate, I personally made a number of new connections through the event as I’m sure many others did as well.

Below is a brief summary of notable presentations that I attended. If you’d like to dig deeper into any session, please reach out I’m more than happy to discuss. Also, as of the time of writing, the videos of sessions have not been released, however they shortly will be. The DrupalSouth page, or searching on YouTube should allow you to access entire sessions.

Presentations day one

Welcome to Country

A Welcome to Country was presented by Uncle Bill Nicholson Jr. Uncle Bill is Wurundjeri Woi wurrung Corporations Principal adult cross-cultural educator for the corporate, not-for-profit and university sectors.

I found this to be the most insightful Welcome to Country I had heard. Uncle Bill explained the connection to land and spirit, and the resonance of folk meeting for purpose (the DrupalSouth 2025 conference) and sharing at a level I had not understood previously. I personally thanked him for it. I hope others found it as inspiring as I did.

Keynote day 1: Humanising technology — Nicola Nye

Nicola, executive leadership coach with Blackmill Consulting, presented a thought-provoking keynote address that focused on ensuring the user is at the centre of any digital experience. Also contrasting this with the implications, including frustration, rejection, loss of trust etc., of not building digital experiences for the user.

How do we humanise technology? Nicola made a point that in some respects technology has taken us away from each other. In trying to balance fast, cheap and good (the traditional tech delivery priority triangle) we’ve sometimes focused on fast via automation but often at the expense of the experience. We’ve sometimes focused on cheap via application of technology, but when cheap is not better and many times we’ve just shifted the cost of the service.

Nicola, however, is optimistic we're on the verge of getting things right. Or having the opportunity to do so. We have the chance to move the priority knobs a bit and to be able to provide a focus on smooth processes, sustainable interactions, in particular if we don’t have an unhealthy fascination on scale. Key is to ask the right questions:

• Why are we doing this?
• How does it help us connect or communicate?
• Who wears the cost? Do they know?
• Who is it really helping?
• Is there a kinder way?

It was a great keynote. Nicola offered some humanising technology resources at the end of the presentation. I’ve not checked them out yet, however I plan to. If you’re interested see:

• “Tech Will Not Save Us” podcast
• Hopepunk, Alexandra Rowland
• 4 kinds of hope, Susan Kaye Quinn

Session: Varnish for Drupal developers — Thijs Feryn, Varnish

Thijs Feryn, a Technical Evangelist at Varnish Software presented a technical session regarding caching strategies based on Varnish. While Thijs, who had travelled from Belgium, presented technical detail on the application of Varnish, the talk also catered for non-technical users and delivery practitioners.

Thijs was in his element presenting his content. I had talked to Thijs at the dinner the previous night and he explained to me that he presents at many events — 370 presentations in 25 different countries.

Rather than myself trying to summarise any of the technical content, I’d encourage anyone to review the video when released, particularly if you want to dig deep into caching. Or have a look at his books, Getting Started with Varnish Cache and Varnish 6 by Example.

Session: How inclusive can your documents get? Adrian Redman, Department of Social Services

Adrian Redman gave an insightful presentation on the challenges of creating uber-accessible documents. Adrian used the recent DSS website delivery, of which Salsa was the delivery partner for DSS, to frame the importance of accessible documents and the strategies used in that delivery. To mention again, because we’re so proud of it, the DSS and Salsa team were awarded the Splash Award for Best Government Website for this build.

Key highlights of Adrian’s presentation were how the DSS team used the DTA’s Digital Experience Policy and other standards such as the Digital Service Standard as a baseline for their efforts. He also covered:

• The use of a testing service that was able to provide actual users benefiting from assistive technology to make research, recommendations and approaches real
• How to use WCAG 2.X accessibility standard as a spectrum rather than a binary construct

Adrian also presented his view on the future of accessibility and inclusivity, which was really insightful. A video of an avatar (generated persona) delivering an Auslan presentation from a textual script was a highlight.

I’d like to thank Adrian for this presentation, in particular Salsa’s opportunity to partner with DSS in making inclusivity and accessibility at the forefront of a major Federal Department’s user experience.

Session: Automated AI testing with Postman - Michelle Parker, Master Builders Association of NSW

Michelle provided her, and her team’s, experience in testing with Postman and using AI to augment the testing.

Postman has been used for years to build, test and document APIs. It has provided an automated way to validate APIs and ensure they’re able to be released to applications to consume their services. Salsa has built such APIs and tested with Postman a number of times.

Michelle took this a step further and explained how Technocrat’s CarbonAI product could further augment this process. The testing allowed AI to find the relevant documents to get their answers, in the full context of the source material to validate test results.

For those interested when the video of this session is released you can dive into topics such as:

• The use of Postman interceptor
• Creating Postman collections
• Coordinating script execution via Newman (CLI)

Session: Drupal and the open web in the Australian Government — 2025 edition, Sean Hamlin, amazee.io

Sean provided his latest edition of his scan of the Australian government landscape for the penetration of the various CMS options.

Sean has presented this analysis a number of times, at least the two prior DrupalSouth’s to my knowledge, and thus had some data to allow trends to be presented this time.

Sean uses a concept akin to the traditional web PageRank to rate the penetration/importance of government websites. Headline statistics for government sites include:

State sites

• 36% Drupal penetration in Victoria, 13% Squiz matrix
• 27% Drupal penetration in NSW, 12% Squiz matrix
• 3% Drupal penetration in South Australia, 38% Squiz matrix, 14% craft-cms
• 30% Drupal penetration in WA, 17% spark-cms
• 27% Squiz penetration in TAS, 22% wordpress
• 8% Drupal penetration in WA, 31% Squiz matrix
• 75% Drupal penetration in ACT
• 18% Drupal penetration in NT, 53% Squiz matrix

Federal sites

• 50% Drupal penetration, 5% Squiz matrix, 3% sitecore, 1% Adobe experience builder

As a couple of headlines from Sean:

• “Drupal powers 32% of all digital experiences that you use in the Australian government”. This is up 2.5% compared to 2024.
• “Squiz Matrix is the top contender with 14% and has a clear state-led mandate in 5 states/territories”. This is down 1.5% compared to 2024.

Presentations day two

Keynote day 2: Sustaining open source software — Justin Warren

Interesting keynote from Justin (who is the founder and principal of PivotNine a boutique consulting firm based in Melbourne) relating traditional economic theory to open source eco-systems.

How do we, can we, sustain open source software? He also explored the relationship between technology start-up costs and volume of product and how the margin curve can be used, or not used, to recover from fixed setup and initial investment costs.

Justin gave an interesting perspective of a system’s purpose is “what it does”, be that user-centric/beneficial at a point in time, or needing to be changed.

Insightful keynote and well worth investing 45 minutes to take a look at once the session recordings are released.

Session: Mindful connections: enhancing mental health awareness in a remote work culture — Angela Rako, Salsa Digital

Angela presented the importance of mindfulness and considering mental health and stress-coping strategies from the perspective of an employee, leader and employer. The importance of being empathetic and building strong connections is particularly important in virtual environments where there tends to be less informal support.

Angela presented thought-provoking pros and cons for the remote work model, and given many of us do work remotely, the heightened effects working remotely may have on mental health and how to recognise and cope.

Angela made a point of the obligation an organisation has to its staff and making support for mental health a priority.

We need to make employees feel supported, connected and valued. Angela’s session certainly put this front and centre for all session attendees.

Session: Forming an AI strategy for a digital agency — Kurt Foster, Salsa Digital

Kurt’s session made a real effort to dampen down the AI hype and give insight into how organisations may make the first steps, or align their current efforts, in a more considered approach to using AI.

The importance of evaluation of AI-readiness, selecting the right tools and fostering an innovation culture were presented as well as some of the more subtle, but important considerations such as ethical concerns, data sovereignty and governance challenges.

As an industry as a whole we’re all coming to grips with how fast AI is moving. Kurt’s contribution helps keep things real, providing a lived — and living — perspective and an opportunity to share aspects of a challenging and exciting journey we’re all on. AI is here to stay, let’s collectively prepare, plan, capitalise, share and benefit.

Session: Building digital experiences that align to Digital Service Standards — Paul Morriss, Salsa Digital

I also presented my own session. However it’s probably best for others to summarise the content. Otherwise, check out the session videos when they’re released.