From Pinball Machines to Serverless: A Recap of DrupalCon 2023

One of the best parts of attending DrupalCon is the opportunity to connect face-to-face with developers, our customers and partners, and the continuous knowledge sharing. DrupalCon is special in this sense. We participate in a lot of conferences and they are all valuable for different reasons, but sometimes conferences can get fairly abstract and overly focused on product pitches. We consider DrupalCon to be unique for a number of reasons, including the manner in which members collaborate, their core values – especially “prioritizing impact” and “striving for excellence”, and the fact that the community is all about practicing, improving, mentoring and teaching each other, and of course, the open-source aspect of publicly sharing tools and knowledge that helps drive projects forward with real impact.

Whenever I attend DrupalCon, I know that I’ll learn something concrete and useful in every discussion — my favorite example of this was one conversation in the booth where I learned that a major university is just now starting down the path of modernizing their site search experience, and also that the best selling pinball machine of all time was the Addams Family pinball machine, released in 1992, of which over 20,000 units were built and sold. Like I said, only at DrupalCon! 

Similarly, when talking site search at our booth or mingling over a game of pinball at the game station, in true DrupalCon fashion, there were ample opportunities to engage and learn. Through these connections, our team observed attendee, industry and technology trends. A few of our favorites included: 

• Industry Focus 
  • We met with a large number of attendees at our booth who worked in higher education or government. On the first day, the SearchStax team chatted with over 15 universities! This was an awesome opportunity for us to discuss higher education’s needs in transforming the digital experience, and much of the discussions revolved around SearchStax Studio, our site search solution that has delivered value to higher education and government, as featured in our City of Nashville and Australian Catholic University case studies.

• Federated Search 
  • You want crawlers? That’s our specialty. We had great discussions about the consolidated search use case, which was of high interest in the majority of universities and government agencies that we spoke with because they have the mammoth responsibility of managing a large number of different websites for various divisions, schools, etc. within a singular system.

• Headless: 
  • Headless is becoming a more common approach, and we had many interactions in the booth focused on headless and composable architectures. First note, developers are typically using React and Next.js for a headless approach along with the JSON API module for Drupal. Second, headless usually means minimal tagging and formatting of content within Drupal – instead the theme, styles, and other visual elements are handled by the front end. We’re intrigued and it will be interesting to watch the continuing evolution of the headless approach.

• Dynamic Developers: 
  • Another trend that impressed our team was the amount of knowledge and creativity that Drupal developers radiate. We learned that it is typically a lean team of Drupal developers supporting large organizations. Cheers to all the mighty Drupal developers! Our team enjoyed discussing the challenges and scenarios that you’ve managed and how you went about innovating and overcoming them. We also loved hearing the positive feedback on SearchStax Cloud from current users. They raved about how it alleviates pain points in managing Solr and assists with those challenges. We couldn’t help but agree wholeheartedly!

One final point to close out our observations about market trends — we were surprised this year at how much interest there is in search from the Drupal community. What this highlighted for us is that from a market perspective, even though many web teams are using the Drupal search module, there is a need to do more — especially across the more distributed sites that are so common now in higher education, state and local government, and use cases that are specific to non-profits.