This year’s European edition of DrupalCon will be held in the city of Lille in northern France (right up near the border with Belgium) from October 17 to 20, 2023. For the first time, Chapter Three will be making the jump across the pond for DrupalCon Europe to represent everything we’ve been working on of late.
On Monday, October 16 — the day before DrupalCon begins — I’ll be giving a talk about Next-Drupal at ComposableNOW, which, like DrupalCon itself, is being held at the Grand Palais in Lille. This half-day event will highlight the latest developments in all things decoupled, headless, open source, and composable, covering application development, deployment, and infrastructure options.
This DrupalCon will begin with the usual opening ceremony (this time featuring the Women in Drupal Award) and founder Dries Buytaert’s customary address, followed by four days of presentations. Not surprisingly given the emergence of generative AI in March of this year, artificial intelligence is a major theme of this DrupalCon. Among the AI-themed talks on the schedule are:
- How we integrated AI as a new colleague
- AI-assisted content editing with CKEditor5 & OpenAI in Drupal 10
- AI: friend or foe
- Mastering the AI Renaissance: Redefining Media Content Creation with Cutting-Edge Tools
Inclusivity and diversity (including neurodiversity) are also major themes of DrupalCon Lille, with sessions ranging from how to create more inclusive content to strategies for overcoming conditions like Tourette’s and ADHD in a work setting. Also on the theme of overcoming adversity is a session on how Drupal helped lift one presenter out of poverty as well as an update from war-torn Ukraine’s still-thriving Drupal community.
We also look forward to some decoupled-themed sessions on Day 2 of the event, including Headless CMS Showdown: Live Demo and Comparison of Sanity, Strapi, Directus, and Drupal, as well as Decoupling your search solution with Drupal Search API.
As always, we look forward to the opportunity to mingle and meet with colleagues from across the Drupal universe, and in this case meet people we’ve never met before in the European Drupal community. Europe in general has been faster to embrace the headless model than the United States thus far, and we anticipate some interesting discussions on decoupled solutions, including our gift to the community: Next-Drupal.
Lille itself promises to be a great host city. Founded in 1066, this nearly thousand-year-old city was named European Capital of Culture in 2004 and World Design Capital in 2020. Culturally and architecturally it’s closely tied to neighboring Belgium and it plays host to the largest flea market in Europe. It’s a major high-speed rail hub, with speedy connections to Paris, Brussels, and London via the Eurostar.
If you’re in Lille for DrupalCon and have questions about Next-Drupal or anything else that we do here at Chapter Three, we’d love to meet. We also encourage you to come early and take in ComposableNOW, which should feature some great discussions on the future of the composable web and all things headless and decoupled. See you there!
