DrupalCamp England 2025

Those of us in the UK had a great opportunity this last weekend to get together at the new DrupalCamp England event, held at Cambridge University. Protecting my work-life balance means I don't usually get to many in-person events, but I made it to this one. It was lovely to finally put some names to faces and build better understanding together. So thank you to the organisers and sponsors who put on a great day! A couple of us from our Coventry team went along, read on as I reflect on my own experience...

I was impressed that Baddý Sonja Breidert was doing the opening session - especially when we got to share her birthday cake! She demonstrated some fun use of an AI chatbot within a Drupal site; which looked like the kind of thing our clients could use to help visitors find what information they want. Rather than interacting with websites in the traditional point-and-click manner, browsing around pages to hunt down details, we need to watch out for how users are increasingly expecting to use the internet. Younger people aren't just typing keywords into a Google search and then gathering information like a researcher might. Instead, they're increasingly using voice or chat-based experiences, expecting the information to be brought to them, often via summaries from an AI. Including this in a Drupal website keeps users engaged directly, controlling the feel of interacting with a brand, and without surrendering the journey to external agencies.

Jamie Abrahams gave a talk a bit later about combining AI 'agents' to complete all sorts of tasks. This combined the theory of this design pattern with some clear practical examples, to leverage LLMs' strengths in a controlled and understandable way. He also announced a new service for using AI with Drupal which would manage AI configuration (including API keys), to allow site builders to use it much more easily. At the moment they have to do hard work just to be able to ask AI to then do less complex tasks! My favourite part of the day followed immediately after when I joined my former colleague James Silver in conversation with Jamie's colleague Andrew Belcher out in the lobby. Andrew took us through a much deeper look at vector search and how these agents can be orchestrated together (as a 'swarm') within the Drupal UI, without writing any code! I challenged him on how this still needs the skills of a developer - as it requires architecting a solution, breaking work down into parts, etc - even if no code has to be written. I suppose coders and architects could be different personas; the term 'developer' might just describe the overlap. Now I wonder: could we treat each more helpfully, according to their strengths and interests?

Before long, even Baddý joined our table chat - she wanted to show off her team's efforts with AI and collaborate on using AI with Drupal. It was ace to see the authentic desire from these community figureheads to work together without egos, and to find myself actively participating in bouncing dreams together of what the internet might look like before long! Why invest in web pages when an AI can provide our content, or even build designs for us? How can we influence the window that people look through to our online presence? Going beyond well-structured content, could we provide structured brand metadata to shape how it is presented by AIs? For me, these conversations were the most valuable part of the day - putting our brains together as a community as we inspire and challenge each other. (Thanks to everyone for letting me chat with you!)

Thankfully the day wasn't entirely dominated by AI ;-) I learnt plenty from Emma Horrell's session on incorporating UX Design expertise into the way we build with Drupal. It provoked me to thinking how we facilitate individual achievement, and wide collaboration between developers, but it's not so easy to build cross-disciplinary work. Core changes are reviewed by experts in specialist fields but it's not so common to incorporate that elsewhere, and early enough in plans. I'll remember her point that the challenge to think of other users’ experiences is what can make us grow. Gareth Alexander's dive into how Drupal CMS uses Recipes gave me a list to investigate this week (e.g. easy_email_express, Simple Add More and the Recipe generator 👀).

We finished the day off at BrewDog Cambridge over burgers and drinks - meeting plenty more great people (I even got to practise my Portuguese! 💚❤️) and comparing notes on life, the Drupalverse and everything. I look forward to the next DrupalCamp England!