Key takeaways from DrupalCamp Scotland 2025

Open-source events provide one of the most effective forums for knowledge sharing and collaboration between organisations and suppliers, fostering continuous improvement. 

By bringing together practitioners to exchange insights, showcase solutions, and discuss challenges, these gatherings create opportunities for collective learning, innovation and contributing to a culture of shared improvement.

DrupalCamp Scotland was no exception. Attendees gained practical insights, actionable strategies, and a renewed appreciation for community-driven development, showing that investing time in such events brings both immediate and long-term benefits for teams and projects. Here are some of our key takeaways.

Less is more: streamlining 500+ diverse university sites into one central platform

The migration of 500 sites to a new platform is an undertaking that would test even the most seasoned experts. Cambridge University is now at an advanced stage in this process and openly shared their experiences, including the challenges encountered, to help others benefit.

The status quo

At the outset Cambridge had a web estate based on Drupal 7 with an end of life long passed. Persisting the status quo would be a costly way to maintain a service that needed to showcase the University as a world-class institution. The easy option was not the right path. A major migration was needed.

User centred design is time consuming

Paul opened with a cautionary tale anyone approaching a large migration should hear. 2 years ago the university decided to rebuild the website from scratch. This work would be grounded in a user centred approach, leading to the discovery and definition of components that might be regarded as the ideal future site. This turned into a protracted process.

People’s perfectionism and contradictory advice was slowing things down. Differing opinions and the volume of feedback created delays, and it became clear that a full rebuild was impractical within the time available.

Time for a radical change in approach: value driven recovery

The Cambridge team regrouped and adopted a fresh approach to this extensive migration. They analysed each website’s requirements, identified common patterns, and prioritised delivering the simplest features first. This allowed them to pinpoint which features, if delivered, would unblock migration of the greatest number of sites.

Features were grouped into tracks. Sub tracks defined the varying levels of complexity. For example news simple listing, paginated listing and need for news component on home page. Illustrated below are the number of sites each feature unblocked.

A simple site was selected to minimise scope and pilot the methodology. More complex functionality was added later, allowing a gradual controlled migration of sites in ever increasing numbers as new capabilities became available.

The project restarted with solid agile foundations and the first pilot sites were delivered. All the way they embraced the following principles:

• Continuous improvement
• Solve for patterns
• Do what is required
• Remove the unnecessary
• Retro, rinse, repeat

This scaled up to 25 sites. Intentional breakpoints were incorporated to give the team time to build features, not merely focus on migrating. Remarkably the team are now able to complete a site migration in one sprint, minimising disruption to business as usual. With over 250 sites now migrated, there is a refined method in place and Cambridge can, with this value driven approach, see a time where focus can shift from migration to innovation. A huge success.

How transforming a university website led to transforming an in-house and agency relationship

The redevelopment of the study.ed.ack.uk, the University of Edinburgh’s primary platform for student recruitment presented complex requirements. The recruitment cycle spans 18 months. Content types involve hundreds of fields, extensive categorisation, and multiple courses and programmes span different years. This creates overlap between recruitment cycles within any two-year period.

Structured decision-making

Aaron explained that most productive decisions were reached when addressing this in a more structured way through the Lean Coffee methodology.

Lean Coffee provides a framework for meetings without a fixed agenda, allowing participants to collectively propose topics, prioritise them through voting, and allocate time for discussion on those of greatest relevance.

In particular, the choice between adopting a content operations workflow via GatherContent or managing everything directly within Drupal was significantly clarified through this approach.

High pace of transformation

Due to the work of improving the student recruitment journey, the amount of content required on peripheral sites has been reduced by 57% which has been a major benefit for teams across the University including the central IT team.

Migrating to modern Drupal has simplified technical architecture, content management and automating processes. Supported by Pantheon’s infrastructure, the new platform can handle traffic surges and has already served 2.8 million visitors since launch.

Aaron highlighted the significant impact of Pantheon’s platform in supporting the university’s digital transformation and fostering innovation, noting that seven releases have been completed since go-live - a pace that was previously unachievable with self-hosted solutions.

Object-oriented UX in action: building renfrewshire.gov.uk with structured content in Drupal

Renfrewshire council’s website serves around 2.1 million users per year. Feedback from user research on the previous website included comments such as:

• “I avoid the Renfrewshire website if I don’t have to use it.”
• “The information is there, but finding it takes a long time.”
• “Information can be very difficult to understand.”

However, this clearly leads to a poor user experience. Gartin noted that, while such feedback can be difficult to hear, it provides invaluable insight into where improvements are most needed and has played a key role in shaping the 2023–2028 Customer Strategy.

Adopting the system model: designing user-centred interfaces from core objects

To create an intuitive solution his team adopted the System Model methodology, focusing first on understanding the underlying objects before moving on to interface design. This sought to define: 

• Objects of the council
• Relationships between objects
• Attributes that make up the object
• Calls to action object offer users

The illustration below shows how appreciation of objects relates to attributes finally through to the user experience.

By utilising the System Model and maintaining strong links between UX and underlying technology, the team delivered an intuitive user experience while remaining aligned with the systems architecture, resulting in markedly improved outcomes for site visitors.

So, I thought I heard that we won't need junior devs now that we have generative AI?

Hilmar is one of the founders and driving forces behind Drupal Open University, an initiative all about creating the next generation of Drupal users. 

He explained that demand for open source by governments and organizations is rising, yet there is a shortage of new Drupal talent. Students have limited exposure to PHP and open source in the curriculum and get almost no hands-on experience developing with existing code.

To address this the initiative team are leading the creation of standard training material allowing anyone to deliver “Drupal in a Day” sessions which were a runaway success at DrupalCon Vienna.

But this is just the beginning. Hilmar's session focussed on the need to scale this programme globally and that he could not do it alone.

Strategies they are using to raise awareness about Drupal include:

• Leveraging collaboration with a globally active community, ensuring consistent training content delivery whether in Edinburgh, Reykjavik, or elsewhere.
• Adopting a “teach the teacher” approach, enabling scalability beyond a single instructor.
• Driving industry recognition through credits on Drupal.org and certification.
• Highlighting how easy Drupal is to use as a platform.
• Positioning Drupal as the go-to platform for launching websites, blogs, or portfolios while at school.
• Providing access to a Slack channel containing a wealth of community-driven resources.
• Implementing a badge system via Drupal Association to certify attendance at Drupal in a Day training sessions.

He addressed the rhetorical question of why Drupal Open University exists when there are well established services like Drupalize.me and Drupal at your fingertips by explaining: 

• People learn differently
• There will always be a pool of students who need structured material in a school
• Just diving interns into Drupalize.me without any context is hard, it is great material but students need guidance and support
• Need students to collaborate with and tutors to ask.

We encourage you to get involved with the project by contacting the team on Drupal Slack #open-university-initiative or joining bi-weekly meetings, Fridays @4pm CET.

Same image, different story: why Drupal needs contextual media architecture

Gareth and Tony are leaders in the Drupal CMS development team. Their work has led them to a challenge at the intersection of media management, accessibility and AI. Their session was a public problem statement and call to action with desire to solve one of the toughest challenges in content management. 

Many organisations struggle with managing digital media effectively. Poor alt text can undermine accessibility, while cumbersome editorial workflows frustrate content creators. Duplicate image uploads to meet the needs of various aspect ratios and crops reduce storage efficiency, and cluttered media libraries make it difficult to find and manage assets.

Ensuring relevant alt text and captions that align with the context of an image is a complex challenge, even before considering AI. The same image can be used to tell different stories depending on context, which often leads to multiple versions of the same image being uploaded to the media library to accommodate different alt texts.

The session was about raising awareness of the need and focussed efforts to come up with a solution. Improving this process requires an iterative approach; it cannot be fully defined upfront. Image sizing and cropping are additional challenges that must be addressed. 

To find a practical solution, it is necessary to consider the broader picture and examine how other tools handle similar issues. For example, the Wix editor currently has some advantages over Drupal in this area.

They explained that potential solutions under exploration include:

• AI Context Control Centre (CCC): This tool allows control over the tone and voice of alt text, providing more consistency across content.
   
• Automated object and face detection in Drupal AI: When an image is uploaded, the system can automatically set the focal point. By combining this with the AI CCC, it could detect objects, such as a red brick building, and then crop the image automatically to focus on the relevant object, aligned with the alt text.

Tony and Gareth aim to raise awareness of the problem space in order to engage collaborators from multiple disciplines, both to gain a comprehensive understanding of user requirements and to leverage this collective insight in developing an effective solution.

Gen AI and empathy in client relationships

Jochen explained that while empathy is central to design and UX, it is equally crucial in client support. Every interaction is an opportunity to demonstrate that clients feel heard. AI cannot detect the subtle cues of urgency or panic, such as a client emailing at 2 a.m. about a website issue.

Understanding that downtime can affect a client’s reputation is essential. Clients are investing in peace of mind. He explained the importance of positioning yourself as an extension of the client team, observing what they are working on, understanding their challenges, and connecting these to services and infrastructure you deliver.

The Gen AI paradox

While AI can support operations, the human element remains indispensable for client communication and business strategy. Clients quickly recognise when messages are generic or boilerplate; genuine understanding and tailored responses cannot be replaced.

Jochen explained that there is a technical reason why LLMs can only generate average results. They have a limited amount of training data. It is the average of everything it digested. It cannot differentiate great from rubbish posts. The average is actually mediocre.

If you’ve made it this far, well done! We hope we have demonstrated events such as DrupalCamp Scotland are just packed with valuable information. It’s not long before DrupalCamp England in Salford, taking place on 28 February and 1 March at the University of Salford. Several members of our team are contributing to the organisation of this event. Stay tuned for updates on how to get your tickets. See you there?