CKEditor at DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014 Recap
DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014 has come and gone giving the Drupal community yet another amazing event loaded with surprises and memorable moments.
CKEditor had a strong presence at the conference, more so than in previous years, and rightfully so: this year’s event was centered around Drupal 8 where CKEditor is the default rich text editor!
Here’s a rundown of what transpired while the CKSource team was in attendance representing CKEditor.
# Thuesday:
The first CKEditor maintainers to arrive in Amsterdam were CKSource CTO, Wiktor Walc, and Robert Mikolajuk (PHP Developer). Tuesday started out with both developers attending Dries Buytaert’s Keynote, which focused on how to keep communities up to speed with the growing complexity of Open Source projects.
Later that day, both core developers gave a session entitled CKEditor in Drupal 8 - The New Possibilities. You can check out the slides used in the session here and view a video of the presentation below:
The session focused on how powerful CKEditor’s Advanced Content Filter (ACF) is inside Drupal 8, how useful and customizable the new Widgets are, how plugins are structured, and on the overall benefits of having a default WYSIWYG editor in Drupal.
# Wednesday:
On Wednesday, CKEditor Project Lead, Frederico Knabben, and Piotr Koszulinski (Lead JavaScript Developer) arrived in Amsterdam. All four members of the CKEditor core development team had dinner with Drupalists Wim Leers, Angela Byron (webchick), Bojhan Somers, Yves Chedemois, Théodore Biadala, to name a few.
CKEditor team members discussed with Yves the widget he's working on for the Scald module in Drupal. The module should improve media handling in Drupal 7. The team also discussed with Wim Leers which steps CKEditor should take to perfect integration in Drupal 8 before the official release.
At the conference the team talked with Kevin Oleary (Drupal UX Designer) about the future of editing and on how CKEditor could collaborate with Drupal to enhance its user experience in CKEditor 5.
That very same day, Drupal 8 Beta was officially released with CKEditor as the default WYSIWYG editor!
# Thursday:
On Thursday CKEditor representatives attended a few sessions. Frederico had a meeting with Don Page of the Drupal Association. Page loved CKEditor’s history of contributions in Drupal and felt that the project is a perfect match for the Drupal Association’s supporters program.
# Friday:
On Friday Frederico Knabben and Piotr Koszulinski participated in various sprints. They also met countless Drupal community members, exchanging ideas and getting the community’s feedback on CKEditor’s integration in Drupal 8.
The resounding impression is that CKEditor is quite stable in Drupal 8, which means its development team will be able to focus their attention on other things, instead of worrying about getting CKEditor working right.
Lastly, Frederico had a meeting with a representative of the Dutch Government over an amazing project they are working on that will make their entire websites network accessible. CKSource is happy to contribute in this massive endeavor.
# Overall Impressions:
In general the CKSource team got a lot of positive feedback. Everyone was again amazed by the event’s extremely professional organization considering the number of attendees (around 2300). DrupalCon is always a great place to make contacts and find a new direction for future projects. In CKEditor’s case, the team spent their free time talking about CKEditor 5 and shaping some of its basic concepts. Most amazing was that the WI-Fi never failed, considering the amount of internet-dependent visitors in attendance!
You can see pictures from the event on our Facebook page. You can also follow us on Twitter and leave comments below!