Panel discussion
Panel Chair: Emma Horrell
Panellists:
Liz McCarthy (University of Oxford)
Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson, Snr Drupal Developer. Adjunkt Professor (University of Iceland and Reykjavik University)
Patrick Ward (University of Salford)
John Jameson (Princeton University)
Our panellists will share their views and experiences on various topics including:
- Digital transformation with Drupal: upgrades, migration lessons (wins, failures, tips)
- Keeping Drupal current and secure: Balancing innovation with consistency, making the case to use Drupal instead of competitor CMS products
- Managing devolved services and multi-layered permissions
- Designing for end-user journeys not organisational structures
- Opportunities for sector-wide collaboration
Just annoying enough: the Editori11y ambient accessibility model
Speaker: John Jameson, Princeton University
Back in 2019 I had an idea: expand the Sa11y library into a real-time, open source accessibility checker that would annoy editors with inline alerts as they worked. My theory was that accessibility programs were struggling because they were exactly the wrong kind of annoying: emails, meetings, trainings, and reminders to log into dashboards. I wanted to bring back Clippy: “I see you’re writing unhelpful alt text. Can I help?”
We will take a tour of Editoria11y’s journey to be “just annoying enough:”
- Three generations of interface refinement
- 3.x’s ruleset expansion into annoying developers and designers too
- Custom rules to be more annoying, role-based configuration to be less
- Facing the question of what to do if we’re still not annoying enough
- How in the world this thing got so far on an education budget, and ideas for how we can work together to finish the dream: link checking, PDF checking, multi-site dashboards…
Nobody ever asked for a CMS
Speakers: Ulla Koho, Chief Commercial Officer, Mearra; Tomi Mikola, Head of Technology, Mearra; Kaisa Liukkonen, University of Helsinki
Organisations don't have a content shortage, they have a findability crisis. Nobody is asking for a CMS, they’re asking for their content to be found.
Building Helsinki UniHelp taught us that findability is an organisational problem before it's a technical one: who owns the content, how current it is, and what happens when the system gets it wrong. But making it actually work was a grind.
We tuned and tested, gathered real user feedback, added another layer of query understanding, then tuned and tested again. "Just add AI" is the easy part; the months of iteration behind a search box that finally surfaces the right answer are the real story.
Three voices - commercial, institutional, and the engineer who built it - bring the argument, the experience, and the proof to one stage.
Facilitated discussion groups
Facilitated discussion groups. Pick a topic. Pull up a chair. Talk. Move between tables, swap ideas, meet new faces - and feel free to move between tables and topics as you like, depending on your interests.
One Platform, Twelve Brands: Managing a Multi-Instance Drupal Ecosystem for Higher Education
Speaker: Kaelyn Lindquist, University of Toronto
Managing Drupal for a large, decentralized institution is complex enough. Managing twelve — each with distinct branding, audiences, and content requirements - demands a disciplined architecture and purpose-built workflows that can adapt and scale.
In this session, I'll walk through a decade of lessons managing 12 Drupal instances serving a higher education environment, covering everything from infrastructure to content pipelines to governance tooling.
Key topics include:
- Multi-site hosting on Pantheon - leveraging review/deploy pipelines, automated backups, and platform-native edge caching to ensure high responsiveness across all sites while maintaining independent, per-site branding
- Structured academic content - how courses, programs, and regulatory/policy documentation are modeled and displayed for diverse university stakeholders
- Curricular data integration - using Python to extract complex data from a Curriculum Management (CM) system, restructure it for readability, and import it into Drupal using Drupal Feeds.
- Admin-facing reporting - Views-based reports that empower non-technical staff without requiring developer involvement
- One-click archival - a streamlined process to generate a complete site archive as a Word document (exportable to PDF), built for accreditation, audits, and institutional records
Show and tell sessions
A series of short lightning talks from a range of institutions showcasing the best of Drupal development and innovation.
Billy Rosendale (University of Edinburgh) Profiles that work - Universities like ours are famous for people. Searches for our staff account for a large amount of website traffic. Through research and experimentation, we learned a lot about what our staff want from their profiles. In a demo you will see how the School of Engineering used different Drupal features to build a sustainable solution that made people findable on our website, and crucially, was easy for our staff to keep up-to-date to showcase their best achievements. The next step is to contribute this to the Drupal community, for all of us in Higher Education to make use of. Help us shape a universal solution!
Patrick Ward (University of Salford) From AI tools to production code - Sharing how our team has made practical uses of AI to turn vague conversations into deliverable work.
Aaron McHale (University of Edinburgh) Course pages, solved - Sharing how we used Drupal to build and manage content for 800+ degree programmes. Covering platform decisions, content modelling at scale, and the workflows and permissions that support hundreds of content editors while maintaining governance and quality.
Jenny Dumitrescu (University of Cambridge) and Gareth Alexander Next gen Drupal developers - Sharing how we hire junior Drupal devs, run internship programmes and brought Drupal in a Day to upskill more and more young people in Drupal.
Ideas jam
Ideas jam. Let’s surface common areas to solve. We’ll review what we learned from the Summit to take forward. What problems do we want to solve, what solutions do we want to collectively implement? What recipes could we build together - Staff profiles, publications, course, research sites, events, accessibility features)
Unconference-style discussion groups
Unconference-style discussion groups - round off the day with some time for informal discussions on a range of topics. A time to firm up contacts and future plans to keep the conversations and collaborations going.
