DrupalCamp London and competing on the important stuff

DrupalCamp London was last week, and was a lot of fun.

I went to the business day, which was splendidly interesting. Here's the first summary of some of the highlights for me.

MTV, NOAH and Drupal Services

Paul Reeves from MTV UK was great. He spoke about MTV's history with Drupal (they've been working with Drupal since their experimental user-generated content based TV MTV Flux project in Drupal 4) and gave some insight into where they are now.

Excitingly, MTV UK use Drupal and the Services module to overlay data on TV screens during broadcast. So, when you're watching, say, a Bryan Adams music video, the Drupal content management system serves up factoids and interesting tidbits which are displayed on a range of MTV's international channels. In what became a bit of a theme for MTV's usage of Drupal, the factoids don't don't need to be time-consumingly pre-assembled by teams of editors – they're produced on-the-fly. It's very smart to focus on using Drupal to do the heavy-lifting and spend time upfront on optimising workflows.

We were particularly interested to hear about Drupal being used as CMS for this kind of information because of our work with ITV's Signed Stories project in which we built a CMS for a popular iOS application, again using Drupal's Services module.

MTV and Responsive

Paul also shared some information about MTV Style, their first responsive site. It's probably not new information to hear that so much of MTV traffic comes from mobile devices (our clients and analytics are telling us very similar), but to aim for 'everything must now be available on all platforms' is still a fairly audacious goal for many organisations.

(Actually, it seemed that MTV Style goes beyond responsive and strays into weirder, more adaptive gradient chart territory – the business rules for media display across national boundaries and on different devices is bewildering! )

NOAH and the 'Zero Developers' target

Perhaps the most interesting part of the presentation was NOAH. Which stands for Node Object Affinity Hub.

NOAH is MTV UK's answer to a thorny issue for a whole range of organisations. How do you enable a team of content producers to publish a huge amount of stuff across a range of platforms without having to ask a developer every time they want a new site, a new feature or even a new page layout?

MTV UK have a central deployment hub which allows content producers to create new microsites (using custom Drupal distributions, site installation profiles and hierarchy of parent/child themes), new layouts (using Panels' drag and drop ability) and new content (platform-agnostic and distributed via RESTful services).

In terms that the business crowd clearly understood, Paul explained that this means content producers work in a sandbox and then publish across the platform:

For that process you need zero developers.

That's worth repeating, I think. MTV UK's developers work very hard to make sure they're not needed. Paul said, perhaps overly modestly, that this is because he finds the simple stuff 'boring'. But, whatever the reason, this is pretty much the essence of the Open Source ethos for me.

Compete on the important stuff

MTV UK's approach is something I can see a lot of organisations benefiting from. They've agreed to standardise on Drupal and standardise the way the work with Drupal, so they can concentrate on their real business – which is being MTV. It's great to hear from developers with such a keen eye for technology strategy as business strategy. As he put it:

Agree on technology. Compete on content.

We <3 DrupalCamp

Deeson Online's big cheese,Tim Deeson, spoke to City University London beforehand as one of the organisers:

Since the last major Drupal event in the UK - DrupalCon London - in 2011, there has been on-going demand for a follow-up event and it's been great to be able to satisfy that. Over 300 attendees are travelling from all over the UK and Europe, often to collaborate in person on projects that they may have worked together on remotely for months or years. Some sections of the community are working on Drupal 8, the next version of Drupal and often these events are used to make key technical decisions in person. Friday's Business Day will be used to introduce around 100 organisations to what Drupal is and what it can do for them. Alongside this, there is a training event for web developers interested in getting up to speed with Drupal. Both are designed to ensure that Drupal keeps growing fast! The weekend includes nearly 50 talks on a huge range of Drupal topics aimed at beginners right through to some of the latest developments globally. This rapid knowledge sharing and collaboration is what attracts many people to Drupal.

And that turned out to be about right. Which is nice.