Innovation & The future

VLSuite is the content editing experience on top of Site Builder that ambitious site builders are waiting for. This session features the capabilities of the VLSuite, completely independent from any theme or distribution but providing an out of the box editing experience that takes Layout Builder to the next level.

In the Drupal community, we're contending with a rapidly changing near term and far future that have immense, even unsettling, implications for our ecosystem. This year's advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), including OpenAI's emerging integrations with Drupal, and the fast growth in voice and other conversational technologies, cast in stark relief the risks and rewards—and the dangers to our commitments to equity, inclusion, and an open web—of allowing machines to become more human. At the same time, advancements in immersive technologies like the putative metaverse raise pertinent and urgent questions about what happens when humans become more like machines. Things feel unbalanced, unhinged, and unstable. Over the course of this keynote, we'll touch on all of these areas: conversational, immersive, and generative—and we'll look at their possible impacts on the Drupal community and ecosystem as well as the potential damage they might inflict on our sense of humanity, our sense of justice, and our sense of self. We'll look closely at topics like avatars, anthropomorphism, and AI bias to explore how our imminent future encodes oppression into our interfaces as they become more like us and reflect our society, and to inspect why we must confront difficult questions in order to keep Drupal relevant, resonant, and reliable far into the future—for everyone.

Drupal Core currently provides a very rudimentary API for sending transactional emails. This applies to both, the way emails are constructed (markup rendered to plaintext) as well as the way they are delivered (using the very limited PHP mail function). A growing number of contrib projects are attempting to close this gap. However, to give site builders the tools they need to make their emails look good and work with modern email infrastructure, contrib projects must apply crude hacks to work around the limitations of the core mail API. This session is a very short introduction into core and contrib mail APIs followed by a (hopefully) long Q&A where the audience is encouraged to bring in their PoV regarding the future of transactional email. The results of this session will ideally lead to a clear and broadly accepted plan for the next step on how Drupal core transactional email is going to be modernized in upcoming releases.

CKEditor 5 has an internal data model that's distinct from both the stored data and the resulting HTML. It's a document editor rather than an HTML editor. That gives us scope to use it for things that we might otherwise have implemented using paragraphs. Can we improve our content editing experience that way?

To promote design systems as universal and agnostic corporate assets, we package them as WebAssembly microservices, interfaced by a Render API strongly and proudly inspired by Drupal. We discovered interesting mechanisms which could find their way to Drupal Core.

Looking for the next big thing in Drupal? Look no further than ChatGPT! In this talk, you'll discover how large language models like ChatGPT 4 can produce effective code, including YAML files for Drupal. The presenters will demonstrate a small module that uses ChatGPT to create views entirely from scratch, giving you the power to control much of the functionality that a site builder once did using natural language. Plus, they'll showcase a document library that uploads PDFs and enables a Chatbot to ask questions based on Drupal permissions. With all the advancements happening in this space, this talk is sure to be an exciting and dynamic one that you won't want to miss!

This conference session will explore the transformative potential of Generative AI in the context of Drupal. The session will explore how AI has evolved to generate human-like content, explore online information, conduct research, and connect with other services, profoundly influencing content creators and Drupal users. We will examine how AI can simplify content building and publishing, replace traditional search filters with semantic search, and offer coding assistance.

Why we moved the database drivers to their own module and what we want to do next. First thing is that we would like to use PHP Fibers to load data synchronously from the database. The second thing is that we would like to use MongoDB as a backend and store content entity data in a document format.

Dashboards is a new Drupal Core initiative which aims at providing a better and personalized experience when you log in into your Drupal site.

Drupal is an amazing tool to model and manage data. From eCommerce platform; to a food magazine website; to a social network; Drupal can do it all. In the past years we've made great strides in improving the developer experience and make it easier to improve Drupal by utilizing work done by others in our ecosystem. At the same rate, competition for Drupal is growing by moving user experiences outside of the browser and building SaaS and serverless alternatives for data management for those projects. Where can we go with Drupal to keep it relevant for these new user experiences and share its strengths with others?