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DrupalCamp England 2026

philipnorton42 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:57:11 +0000

The weekend of 28th February to the 1st March saw the second DrupalCamp England event with around 100 people attending the University of Salford, not far from Manchester, for the two day event.

I had submitted a talk and the camp organisers had accepted it and also decided to make me a featured speaker, which was an incredible honour. As such I was part of the communications being sent out in the weeks before the event.

Since this is more or less a local event for me I decided to travel in on both days rather than get a hotel or anything. The rain and wind of the previous week had abated and the Saturday morning saw some of the warmest (and driest) weather we had seen in the north west for a few months.

Saturday

The keynote on Saturday morning was The Augmented Future: Winning with AI with Dr. Phininder Balaghan, founder of Traversally. This was an look through the current state of AI, which Dr. Balaghan said changes every time he gives the talk.

Most companies these days have adopted an agile methodology, which has taken about 20 years to become widespread. Since the introduction of LLM AI systems a few years ago we have seen massive adoption across all industries.

Dr. Balaghan joked that we have reached the age of AI-gile, the new agile methodology.

At the moment we are using a collection of LLM agents that work together in a so-called "agentic" system to provide a coherent service. The next true advancement in AI systems will be thinking AI systems that are able to properly think about the input and respond. I think we are quite a long way from that yet and no amount of processing power or RAM is going to solve the problem that LLMs are just statistical word engines.

DrupalCamp Scotland 2025

philipnorton42 — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:33:20 +0000

This year, DrupalCamp Scotland was held on the 7th November, at the University of Edinburgh.

On the morning of the conference I made the quick walk from by bed and breakfast and arrived at 50 George Square to join in with around 60 attendees to a day of talks and chatting.

The morning coffee and a selection of pastries was set out in the corridor outside the main room of the conference. I'm sure a few of the tasty pastries were lost to passing students.

After getting settled in we had a quick introduction session by Stratos Filalthis before we started the day.

The first talk of the day was with Paul McCrodden and Laura Waldoch, with their talk Less Is More: Streamlining 500+ Diverse University Sites into One Central Platform. Paul and Laura both work at the University of Cambridge and the talk was a look at how the university is taking the 500+ websites that are dotted around and consolodating them into a single resource. That single resource is powered by Drupal 11 and the talk looked at how they were building a Drupal install profile that could handle the requirements that these different sites had.

LocalGov Drupal Camp 2025

philipnorton42 — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 18:38:55 +0000

LocalGov Drupal Camp 2025 was held in The Abbey Community Centre (near Westminster Abbey in London) on July 3rd 2025. I travelled down (despite the English rail network's attempts to the contrary) for the day as an attendee.

It was a hot day in London on the 3rd July, and thankfully the Abbey Community Centre had lots of doors and windows that we could open to let some air through. Including a few fans dotted around to try and keep the rooms cool.

After a small icebreaker, where people stood up if this was their first LocalGov Camp or what sort of role they have, we started the camp with an introductory session.

LocalGov Drupal is currently being used by 57 councils currently and has around 59 council websites (including a bunch of smaller council websites) being powered by the system. It's good to see the year on year increase in coverage of this project, which has reached a decent critical mass of interest and funding.

Lots of things have happened in the year since LocalGov Drupal Camp 2024 in Birmingham.

The Drupal 11 upgrade is nearly ready and lots of effort has been done on this recently. Technically, Drupal 10 is still supported until December 2026, when Drupal 12 is released, but we still want to keep things up to date as much as possible.

LocalGov Drupal Camp 2024

philipnorton42 — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 19:35:30 +0000

April 23rd, 2024 saw the first LocalGov Drupal Camp, held at the Birmingham Council buildings in Birmingham city center.

It's been ages since I attended an in person Drupal Camp in the UK, so when I saw that the LocalGov Drupal people were organising one just down the road for me I jumped at the chance to grab a ticket.

LocalGov Drupal is a distribution that combines Drupal, some configuration, some contributed modules, and some glue code with the aim of making it easier for councils to generate sites.

The initiative was started a few years ago where two councils (Brighton & Hove City Council & Croydon Council) decided to re-use some of their Drupal work and create a system that they could both benefit from. There are now 44 different councils around the UK who use the distribution in some capacity.

I work with a few of the councils in my day job and I have been really impressed by the power of the distribution. The fact that it is also backed up by a dedicated team of developers really helps with support and future development of the project.

Introductions

The day started with a few introductions and thank you messages, followed by a number of lightning talks from various members of the community.

DrupalCon Lille 2023

philipnorton42 — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 19:08:53 +0000

This year's DrupalCon Europe was hosted between the 17th and 20th of October, in the French city of Lille. My DrupalCon adventure began early on Monday morning when Chris Maiden picked me up to drive to France via the EuroStar train. We arrived in Lille a little after 4pm, which was really good going for a nearly 400+ mile trip.

DrupalCon Lillie was a first for me as I was there representing a company and so spent some time on the conference floor talking about services. Code Enigma, who I work for full time, had sponsored the event and organised a booth (well, a table). The booth wasn't so that we could sell anything, it was more more because we wanted to support Drupal and the sponsorship came with a booth. Driving to Lille allowed us to fill the car with 200 coffee cups, which we gave out at the event.

Once we had found a parking spot we wondered through Lillie, found our hotel, and met up with the rest of the Code Enigma group for a dinner of "Le Welsh"; a local favourite dish.

Tuesday

The first session I managed to attend on Tuesday was the Driesnote, where Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert, talked us through some of the headline initiatives being worked on in Drupal at the moment and why these are important. The presentation started with a very highly produced story, with some fantastic artwork depicting the "Drupal fairy" and the village of Drupal, as well as some surrounding villages like Rectopia and Contentville. This was an interesting way of showing how Drupal is different from other major players in the content management sphere in the form of an analogy.