DrupalCon Barcelona 2015 – Personal summary from Philip

This year DrupalCon was in Barcelona and my first DrupalCon. Therefore i attented the First Time Attendee Social on Monday afternoon. This event was for all people that had never attended to a Drupalcon before. The goal of the event was to meet other ''Newbies''. For reaching this goal there was a Bingo-Game with a lot of tasks like:
 - meet someone who has met Dries Buytaert
 - meet a freelancer
 - meet someone who will attend the Sprints on friday
 - meet someone from Barcelona
 - meet someone from the Spanish Drupal Association
and much more.

A lot of interesting sessions were hold from monday till thursday. On friday were the sprints where everybody had the option to resolve the last open issues for Drupal 8 (Release Candidate 1 was published on October, 7th 2015 :) ). On friday morning was a 2 hour First Time Sprinter Workshop for all the people who never contributed to Drupal 8 before.

There were too much interesting sessions for this blog post so i want to summarize some of them.

Let´s build it on Drupal 8 (hold by mon_franco):

In this session Montaña Franco talked about some new features of Drupal 8 like the new block layout and the reusability of blocks or the new module tours which brings detailed informations about Drupal modules.

Furthermore she talked about the following topics:

• Drupal 8 is now fully responsive

• Drupal 8´s better mulitingual behavior

• The new import/export of configurations between 2 or more Drupal instances

• New core modules like views and quickedit

Caring about quality as a team (hold by rodrigoaguilera and pcambra)

Rodrigo Aquilera and Pedro Cambra talked in this session about things like the importance of code reviews in software projects. They mentioned that a software team should review everything and during the review each member is equal.

They talked also about drupal´s coding standards, tests (manual and automated), continous integration (e.g. jenkins) and the PMD mess detector. At the end of the session they presented some helpful tools like patches, pull requests, gerrit and redmine.

Symfony2: The journey from the request to the response (hold by saro0h)

In this session Sarah Khalil gave a short introduction into the philosophy of Symfony2, depency injection in Drupal and templating. She also explained how HTTPRequests in Symfony are handled with all the different layers.

Behat+Mink+PhantomJS = Test ALL THE THINGS! (hold by michellesanver)

Michelle Sanver gave an overview about tools for automated testing. She explained what BDD (Behavior Driven Development) and Gherkin (and the hooks, scenarios and steps) is. She talked about how easy it is to write automated tests and which of the tools should be used.

Michelle also presented the PHP VCR Tool, a HTTP Recorder for phpunit tests and other tools. Two of the main features of the PHP VCR are that the recorded tests run faster and can be used in an offline-mode.

Entity Storage, the Drupal 8 way (hold by plach)

In this session talked Francesco Placella about the changes with entities and fields between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. He pointed out that one of the most important changes is that fields can no longer be reused (shared) between different content types. He also talked about the new entity query API.

Conclusion

My first DrupalCon is over. I learned a lot of new things and a lot about the new Drupal Version 8. It´s now time to apply all the new knowledge about drupal, symfony and the other stuff. And maybe there will be my next DrupalCon in the next year in Dublin. We´ll see.