When we started the Drupal Open University Initiative, my initial goal was to try and get more teachers to gather around one curriculum and start spreading "the word of Drupal" in universities around the world. I had been teaching a full 6-ETSC course at Reykjavik University for few years and I wanted to see if there were some more people interested in joining me.
And that bubble just bursted! Over 100 people are now actively in the initiative, working on all kinds of ideas, cleaning up the curriculum, writing the "Ultimate book on Drupal" and more.
One of the ideas that came out of the work at the initiative was: Can we take the curriculum and boil it down to a more condensed class? Maybe something that can be taught at a DrupalCon or DrupalCamp? Just a day's worth of material? And not to the "attendees" of the cons and camps, but to a fresh batch of people who are studying at the local colleges and universities?
And the "Drupal in a Day" idea was born. Of course I just jumped into the deep water and offered to teach this material at DrupalJam, 21st of May, 2025 in Utrecht, Holland. Over 30 people registered and just about 20 attended the course. It was totally free for the attendees, including lunch, coffees and dinner afterwards.
The material was based on Drupal CMS installation and we teamed up with DrupalForge to provide us with a SaaS solution to install and run the sites the students would be building, to keep the overhead of configuration to a minimum.
Since I am sitting in the Advisory board of the European DrupalCon organising committee, I suggested that we would offer the same course at DrupalCon Vienna. There were some logistics that needed to be cleared, we needed a room to present in, and that of course costs a bit of money, and also we needed to physically reach out to the local colleges and universities. And we were getting pretty close to October...
Well, I'm Icelandic, and we have this saying. "Þetta reddast". It will manage somehow. And it did. My company, Um að gera sponsored the presentation room and a community drive was created to fund the lunches and coffee breaks. Nico Grienauer from the Austrian Drupal community reached out to the schools, we added a signup sheet at the website and hoped for the best.
And suddenly, 105 people had signed up! We were secretly hoping for 30–40, so over 100 was quite a step up! The room we had planned for the event was way too small and now we needed even more food for everybody! We actually had to close the registration, since we were not prepared for such a big growth!
Kuoni Tumlare, our organising partner for DrupalCons in Europe stepped up and helped us get a bigger room and the community in whole stepped up and supported the lunch drive. Large donations came through companies like E-Sepia, Drunomics, amazee io and the Dutch Drupal Association and individuals also sponsored a lot and am I forever grateful for them to do that. Thank you each and every one for helping us making this real!
In one of the organizing meetings about the event, Martin Anderson-Clutz offered to take a part of the presentation with me and that's yet another hint of how our amazing community works. Having Martin with me on stage was a huge relief of stress, since we were able to play "tag" on the material, and switch back and forth between the two of us on stage.
On the Friday, October 17th, which also is the big contribution day at DrupalCon, 60 students showed up to learn "Drupal in a Day". And to mark how eager and interested they were, every single one stayed until the end! Another amazing statistic is that of the attendees, 40% were women! That made me even more happy and proud to present.
The material we presented in Vienna covered a whole range of subjects. We started on Installing Drupal CMS, went over the structure of Content types, Layouts (Manage Display), Media, Image styles, Modules in general and how you can install them via the Project Browser, Recipes, Composer, created some content types, and talked about Taxonomies and Views. The final parts then covered Users, Appearance, Pathauto module, Blocks, Multilingual sites and Security and Security updates. Quite a package for someone who, before showing up, hadn't even heard of Drupal before!
Both in the lunch break, coffee breaks and after the presentation, many students came to us, expressing how interested they were in the material and how they wanted to learn more. Which is a clear sign that a) We need to do this at every Con and Camp we have! and b) the bigger classes, like college and university classes need to be taught at more schools! A very happy crowd of students accepted their certification of attendance after the course, eager to start working on their next project, which we gave them idea on at the end of the presentation.
So where are we now? What are the next logical steps? Well, first of all, Drupal in a Day is on the schedule for DrupalCon Chicago 2026! Kwasi Afreh and his team of volunteers are planning the event right now, which will give them more time to focus and make the event even greater than ever before. Martin Anderson-Clutz will be presenting, hopefully with some help, but I will not be attending.
Which actually is my point of all this! This initiative and this event, Drupal in a Day, should not be built around one person or a small group of people. The whole idea is to have the material open source so that anyone that has the time and knowledge (and some teaching skills) can present it at their local Con or Camp. That's how we grow and foster a new batch of people to come into our community.
And the Drupal Association has started the development of "Study badges" into the drupal.org website. Hopefully early next year, the students can actually show their attendance at Drupal in a Day and some of the University courses taught around the world, making them more eligible for work. Thank you so much for the support, Tim Lehnen and Brendan Blaine for your work on making that real.