Welcome to Drutopia! We hope you are enjoying the features we have built. Everything you are using is open-source and free for good people like yourself to use.

We invite you to give your input on the project and contribute where you can by becoming a member of Drutopia. For as little as $10 a year you can become a member who votes for our leadership team, suggests features for our roadmap and is part of a community building tools for the grassroots.

Learn more about membership at drutopia.org

Blog posts can be a valuable way for a variety of authors to post reflections, experiences and opinions.

At a minimum every blog post should have an image (which will be associated with the blog and display in different sizes in different displays), a summary field and a text paragraph in the body field.

All Drutopia content types are built using the Paragraphs module which lets you add a variety of types of content and arrange them in the order you wish. When creating a blog post you can add standard text paragraphs in the body paragraph field, but also add images or files (such as a PDF).

You can define your own permissions for the Drupal permissions page (/admin/people/permissions in modern Drupal, Drupal 8, 9, 10, and beyond) and then add conditional options to your code to do different things based on the role of the user and the permissions configured by a site administrator.

Here's how.

Create a modulename.permissions.yml file

This simple file has the permission machine name (lower case with spaces) and a title (Sentence case) with an optional description.

For our module, which has a particularly long name, that file is drutopia_findit_site_management.permissions.yml and its contents are like so:

access meta tab:
  title: 'Access meta tab'
  description: 'Access meta information (author, creation date, boost information) in Meta vertical tab.'

You can repeat lines like these in the same file for as many permissions as you wish to define.

Check for that permission in your code

The process for checking permissions is simply to use a user object if that's handed into your code, or to load the current user if it's not, and use the hasPermission() method which returns TRUE if that user has permission and FALSE if not.

For example, in a form alter in our drutopia_findit_site_management.module file:

/**
 * Implements hook_form_BASE_FORM_ID_alter() for node_form.
 *
 * Completely hide the Meta vertical tab (field group) from people without permission.
 *
 */
function drutopia_findit_site_management_form_node_form_alter(&$form, FormStateInterface $form_state, $form_id) {
  // If the current user has the permission, do not hide the Meta vertical tab.
  if (\Drupal::currentUser()->hasPermission('access meta tab')) {
    return;
  }
  // Code to hide the meta tab goes here, and is only reached if the user lacks the permission. 
  // ...
}

See all this code in context in the Find It Site Management module.

To learn more about defining permissions in modern Drupal, including dynamic permissions, you can see the change record for when the new approach replaced hook_permission().

On November 13^th and 14^th in New York City, several hundred people gathered to talk about the problems of an online economy reliant on monopoly, extraction, and surveillance—and discuss how to build a "cooperative Internet, built of platforms owned and governed by the people who rely on them."

My experience at the Platform Cooperativism summit was Wow, everyone here really gets it and so many are doing awesome things; and then Hmm, there are still some really important differences to be worked out; and then We'll have to continue for months to figure out strategy for building fair platforms and we also need to restructure the whole economy.

Some definitions

In the sense technologists use it a platform is, like a physical platform, a technology that holds a lot of people up. It convenes people and gives them a chance to do something they wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Platforms can often be natural monopolies due to capturing the benefits of network effects (one person with a telephone is pointless, having nearly everyone available by telephone is incredibly valuable). Amazon and eBay are both platforms for sellers and buyers, Uber and Lyft for drivers and riders, Mechanical Turk and TaskRabbit for piece-workers and buyers of their work.

A cooperative is a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise formed by people voluntarily uniting to meet their common needs and aspirations. Agaric is a small worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon is a very large group of integrated worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives are businesses owned by their customers, credit unions are financial institutions owned by their members (with a one person, one vote governance), and producer cooperatives like CROPP Cooperative are formed by member businesses (which are not necessarily cooperatives themselves).

A platform cooperative, then, is a platform owned and controlled by the people directly affected by it. A company must be accountable, and as Omar Freilla put it, accountable means those impacted make the decisions.

The power to do harm

This summit was a follow-up to the Digital Labor summit held one year before which detailed myriad ways centralized online platforms extract value from dispersed workers who have few options or bargaining power. Control of online platforms by the representatives of capital has or will have negative effects on workers, similar to exploitation in global manufacturing (think electronic devices and clothing), and negative effects on customers (think the massive money grab by oligopolies of fossil fuel and telecommunications corporations).

Agaric's Michele Metts told the Digital Labor summit organizers every chance she got that cooperatives and Free Software were the answer to exploited labor in the Internet economy, but something even more powerful than Micky's advocacy must have been at work: nearly every participant at Platform Cooperativism spoke of the need for workers to own the platforms that control their work, and people presenting on technology took for granted that source code and algorithms have to be open for democratic control to be meaningful. As Micky said on her panel, "You cannot build a platform for freedom on someone else's slavery."

The opening presentations made the case that platforms will exploit us unless we take control, and we moved on to discussing strategies for building platform businesses that are cooperatives of the people using the platforms. We also celebrated those already starting, like Loconomics, Fairmondo (in Germany), and Member's Media.

Building for shared power and uplift

The biggest unsolved, but acknowledged, problem is getting the resources to build platforms that can compete with venture capital-funded platforms. Dmytri Kleiner made the claim that profit requires centralization, and, moreover, that centralization requires organizing along the lines of a profit-taking venture. How can people get the resources to build without both having to give up control and having to exploit people using the platform? Robin Chase reminded us that it costs millions of dollars, at least, to build a viable platform. Her solution is to continue to seek venture capital and work for some environmental or community goals while compromising on control.

A more popular possible solution is to replace centralized systems with decentralized ones, even to the point of replacing specific software with protocols, so the cost of building and operating platforms can be more widely shared, along with the benefits. However, as Astra Taylor summed up the widely felt point, decentralization does not always mean distributed power. Therefore control of technology decisions, and so democratic control of platforms, is more important than technology itself.

The potential positive role for government regulation was often mentioned, as Sarah Ann Lewis summarized the sentiment in a tweet: Platforms are not special snowflakes that must be exempt from regulation. If you can only succeed by exploitation you deserve to melt. Indeed, the centralized and surveillance nature of most platforms would make it much easier to ensure non-discrimination and fair wages.

More excitement came from the mention that local government has long played a role and can play a stronger part in democratic ownership of physical spaces. Several speakers urged people to get involved in local government, where harmful policies may be more the result of a lack of knowledge than of embedded corruption. Government can also get involved in mandating an open API for ride hailing services, which would remove the monopoly power from centralizing companies.

On ownership and control

Hundreds of possible solutions faced lively questioning and debate, yet in all of this the titular solution, cooperative ownership, did not get the scrutiny it merits. Jessica Gordon Nembhard's Collective Courage has made me see that the connections and overlaps between worker cooperatives and other types of cooperatives are much more significant than I'd thought, but there are still differences. These differences, and the need to decide who exactly is democratically controlling a platform, were often not made clear by presenters, including some who are building platform cooperatives.

If Stocksy, for example, is owned by its photographers, can the workers who build the platform technology (rather than use it) play a part in democratic control? Co-founder and CEO Brianna Wettlaufer refers to it as a multi-stakeholder cooperative and it has been around since 2012 so they've surely worked it out, but this question is at the heart of how platform cooperatives must operate and it was hardly addressed at all.

The answer can be simple. The Black Star Coop brewery and restaurant in Austin, Texas, is owned by its customer-members while the workers manage it. The workers are internally a democracy, but there's no question they work for a businesses which is managed democratically by the customers. This makes even more sense for a quasi-monopoly platform: It's more important for, say, millions of people relying on a platform for livelihood or transportation or communication to own it than for the relatively small number of people who built it to own it.

This brings up another question that went largely unasked at the conference: does ownership mean anything when it's spread out among thousands or millions of people? Federated structures can mitigate this, but in general whoever controls communication among members effectively controls decisions. It may be possible to have horizontal mass communication by way of democratic moderation. At a small workshop I held at the conference, participants discussed ways collective control can be made real as democratic platforms scale—but that's a topic for another discussion.

The sense that displacing an app or website is easier than reconstructing global supply chains fueled a lot of the excitement at the conference. Notwithstanding, the need to restructure the rest of the economy so that it works to serve the needs of people, rather than sacrificing people's needs to the dictates of the economy, was never far from people's minds. Videos of most sessions are online and will certainly make you think about the opportunities for cooperative ownership of services and structures that define our lives, online and off.

Thank you for requesting that Micky Metts speak at your event. She will respond as soon as she can and let you know if she is available, or if she has any questions.

Agaric Team

Learning online has become a necessity for schools and independent teachers and tutors. Agaric can provide a Learning Management System (LMS) to support your teaching skills and knowledge integrated with video chat and whiteboard features. Every component of our platform is 100% Free/Libre Software because we believe in protecting the privacy of our students!

Let us know what you need and we can set up a time to discuss your unique situation.

Here you will find the details of our online learning tools.

Learning Management System

The Canvas learning management platform allows you or your organization to build the digital learning environment that meets the unique challenges faced by your institution. Canvas LMS allows teachers to create courses and grade students. Developed in 2011, Canvas was designed to better engage people in teaching and learning processes. 

Canvas is integrated with video chat software called BigBlueButton and it works to seamlessly allow teachers and students, if given the permission, to create live conferences with many features for moderation and engagement for all participants. Both Canvas and BigBlueButton are free open source software because our mission includes  privacy for all and the ability to freely modify the software to suit your needs.

Canvas LMS Features:

• Practice Tests, or Quizzes – These are assignments, groups of questions, that can be used to challenge student understanding and assess comprehension.  Question types include multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blanks, multiple answers, matching, numerical answers, formulas, and long text (freeform/essay).
• Question Banks – Group quiz questions in question banks to create grade, topic, institutional, or departmental question repositories.
• Outcomes – Outcomes (also called standards or competencies) describe what a learner should be able to do and are used to measure knowledge and ability.
• Mastery Paths – This tool allows course content to automatically be released to a learner based on performance, providing differentiation to students.
• Canvas Data – Canvas Data allows instructors to parse Canvas-generated data quickly.
• Canvas Commons – Canvas Commons is a repository that lets users easily share content.
• Integrated Media Recorder – This tool allows users to record audio and video messages for the digital classroom.
• Web conferencing – Set a meeting time for the whole class or one-on-one synchronous online discussions.
• Mastery Gradebook – Helps instructors assess the Outcomes being used in Canvas courses and measure student learning for accreditation or standards-based grading.
• Canvas Parent – Canvas Parent allows parents to engage with their children’s education by reviewing upcoming or past assignments, checking grades and receiving course announcements.
• Canvas Polls – An app (available on iOS and Android) that gauges students’ comprehension of material without “clicker” devices.

Videochat and whiteboard

The BigBlueButton video and whiteboard software is integrated into the Canvas dashboard and allows teachers and students to meet in a live learning environment that brings interactivity to the forefront. BigBlueButton is a free open-source web conferencing system designed for online classes, workshops and lectures. BigBlueButton allows teachers to create breakout rooms for different levels of learning.

Big Blue Button Features:

• Accounts and Profile
  • Sign up / Login
  • Profile
• Conference Rooms
  •  Create New Conference Rooms
  •  Breakout Rooms
  •  Conference Settings
  •  Rename Conference
  •  Manage Access to Conferences
•  Record Conference
  •  View Recordings
  •  Manage Recordings
  •  Modify Recordings
  •  Sort and Search Recordings

Drupal content management platform

You can provide a simple website for your school by building on the Drupal platform, the Canvas learning management platform automatically has access to a large number of features that are built into Drupal.  We describe some important ones here, though there are many more.

Content editing with Drupal

• Build your website with basic pages, landing pages, news postings, and more.
• Create instructional guides and reference links to relevant information.
• Engage the students in making additions to the site and maintaining the content.
• Optionally, use a content moderation workflow in which a content editor can approve draft content.
• Restore deleted content (retrieve from trash), so student exercises involving creating content on the site are not lost.
• Administrators can set permissions on any content and allow access in a granular way.

What will you provide for your students?

Kathleen was an Agaric principal for the year of 2009, working especially on the Science Collaboration Framework project of Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, including its use in Parkinson's disease research in partnership with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.

A great communicator and team organizer, Kathleen is a prodigious learner and powers through any technical challenges that needs to be overcome. With a background in architecture, visual arts, and the history of art and architecture, her embrace of web technology polymath.

Six years before Drupal 8's configuration management, Kathleen developed the database scripts project to separate configuration settings in the database from content, and allow configuration from a development environment to be brought to production. These scripts, operating as they did primarily by sheer force of will, always worked best with Kathleen at the helm.

She loves web development and photography, both fusions of art and technology. Presently unable to work for sustained periods on a computer, she is plotting an epic science fiction novel and trying to increase the ways people with disabilities can be economically active.

Agaric proposes the creation of a new kind of workplace, essentially a Drupal commune, but really more like an open source free software idea & brainstorming commune, kind of along the same lines as an artist's or writer's colony.

Imagine a network of state-of-the-art green living spaces spread across the planet in the most beautiful locations that mother nature has to offer. Places filled with the best and the brightest drupalistas living and playing and growing together, and together developing Drupal and the various technologies that help it work. As an open source community, Drupal already possesses many of the cooperative qualities that would make this sort of commune possible. Just think of any Drupal meetup you've attended in the past. Some show up to demo their latest work, others to ask for help, others to give help... What if we had spaces where this sort of thing was constantly happening?

The Drupal commune would be open to whomever wanted to come join in for a period of time and help advance the cause. Every member of the community would provide a special skillset to the team, be it coding, theming, graphic design or documentation. Some people could be permanent residents at such places and others could come and go based on work available and projects being worked on. Of course at first, we think it would have to start as more of a couch-surfing type thing. People who have the space can offer it up, recruit and house a few drupalistas for the duration of a project, like contributed work, or payed client work. From there, teams could assemble all around the world, do the necessary work, and do it better than they could alone, all while being able to enjoy and explore the world. Then disband, these communes or colonies don't have to be permanent, although that is the eventual goal.

• The individual contributor gets a combination code sprint and couch surf experience.
• Drupal gets fantastic functionality or process improvements made in ideal productive circumstances.
• And everyone gets satisfaction of making something awesome and worthwhile, in community, while getting to see and explore planet Earth and do fun stuff.

This idea is nothing new and has recently been advocated by the brilliant physicist and surfer Garret Lisi. In his own words he says these places... "would essentially be large houses in beautiful locations where theorists could live and work." Citing his own experience living in Maui and the mountains of Tahoe and Colorado, Lisi says that for theoretical research it is good to have opportunities for hiking and things to do outside in attractive environments. Describing the idea more formally, Lisi says:

The physical requirements for conducting scholarly research have changed dramatically with the rise of the internet. It is now viable for researchers with laptop computers to work autonomously -- with access to current articles and communication channels on par with the resources available at large universities. These new circumstances motivate the creation of a new kind of research enterprise: a Science Hostel. By providing places to live and work with other researchers, in beautiful locations, a Science Hostel could increase creative productivity and overall quality of life for scholars in the internet age.

We believe the Drupal world currently developing before our eyes is especially well poised to embrace such an idea. We are a growing community of able, intelligent, free thinking, and like minded people. We all think Drupal has a lot to offer people, and we've all been making a living developing with Drupal, and we also all our own personalities and hobbies outside of work. We see a lot of people in this world showing up to "just a day job" or a "9 to 5". We don't like seeing Drupal applied to this model. We believe that satisfying work comes from truly embracing what you do and doing it to it's fullest. So it's not just your day job, but your lifestyle, something that is an essential part of your being. When focused on certain subjects with such passion, originality and creativity can flourish, sparks happen. Our proposition is that we really pursue this idea of combining our work lives with our personal ones, evolving things into a lifestyle of the future.

These communities could also include people who are interested in sustainable living, and/or off-the-grid living and promote these ideas as well. So not just Drupalers, but there could be specialists doing other things like growing food with aquaponics, creating mesh wireless networks, or harnessing solar and wind energy. Proving that people can create and shape their universe when they come together and cooperate.

The way we see it, this thing would be community managed and totally open, the way Drupal has always been, except now we'd really be starting to shape the material world using Drupal, creating a free culture. There are a lot of folks who are tirelessly spending nights and weekends coding masterpieces like CCK and Views and giving us the power to feed and clothe ourselves. We love seeing this happen, we love thinking about it. A person driven to create is a beautiful thing. We want to see more community forming around this stuff. Why should development be done in cooped up cubicle type spaces? Why have we let so many convince us that our time is best spent, and we are most useful and productive in offices and sitting in traffic? Would things evolve more organically, and would Drupal advance exponentially with the future of humanity if places like this existed? They don't even need to be permanent, we could organize and create them for certain collaborative projects and disband after the work is done and has been contributed back to the community.

There is a lot more that can be written about this, and all the details still need to be worked out. But we're confident that the community could organize enough to essentially allow for these "corporate retreats on acid" or "software development communes" to happen. Drupalistas could apply for internship type positions and get voted in, most likely through the Drupal Association or similar organizations. Teams of independent contractors could come together, share projects, split up the work, and live the good life. We could become the renaissance men and women of the future and break free of all the old, tired, hierarchical, institutionalized ways of being productive that have been shoved down our throats in the past. We can create community, developing our ideas, doing the work we love to do, and seeing and shaping the world into something better during our time here.

Sure it's not for everybody, but we have a feeling their might be other Drupal nomads out there...

There are plenty of ways—all right, too many ways—to create links when using modern Drupal (Drupal 8 and above, so including so far Drupal 9, Drupal 10, and Drupal 11).  We will share some of those ways in this regularly-updated post.  (Latest update: 2025 September 22)

The easiest way to create internal links is using Link::createFromRoute

And it is used like this:

use Drupal\Core\Link;
  $link = Link::createFromRoute(t('This is a link'), 'entity.node.canonical', ['node' => 1]);

Using the Url object gives you more flexibility to create links, for instance, we can do the same as Link::createFromRoute method using the Url object like this:

  use Drupal\Core\Link;
  use Drupal\Core\Url;
  $link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromRoute('entity.node.canonical', ['node' => 1]));

And actually Link::fromTextAndUrl is what Drupal recommends instead of using the deprecated l() method.  Note that as before, the text portion of the link should already be translated, so wrap it in t() or, for object-oriented code, $this->t().  Passing the Url object to the link object gives you great flexibility to create links, here are some examples:

Internal links which have no routes:

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUri('base:robots.txt'));

External links:

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUri('http://www.google.com'));

links with only the fragment (without url) :

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUri('internal:#fragment'));

Using the data provided by a user:

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUserInput('/node/1');

The param passed to fromUserInput must start with /,#,? or it will throw an exception.

Linking entities.

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUri('entity:node/1'));

Entities are a special case, and there are more ways to link them:

$node = Node::load(1);
$link = $node->toLink();
$link->setText(t('This is a link'));

And even using the route:

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromRoute('entity.node.canonical', ['node' => 1]));

Drupal usually expects a render array if you are going to print the link, so the Link object has a method for that:

$link->toRenderable();

which will return an array.

To get the absolute URL (that is, the one that likely starts with "https" and your domain name) for a piece of content (node) or other entity, you can do:

$absolute_url = $node->toUrl('canonical', ['absolute' => TRUE]);

Linking files.

Files are entities also in Drupal but a special kind.  You usually do not want to link to the entity but directly to the uploaded file.  To do that, do not use $file->getFileUri() but rather instead use createFileUrl() which will directly give you a complete string version of the URI:

$url = $file->createFileUrl();

This URL can then be used in making a link with regular HTML or the External links approach covered above.

Credit to godotislate in Drupal Slack support channel for this tip.

Final tips:

Searching a route using Drupal Console

The easiest way to find the route of a specific path is using Drupal Console, with the following command.

$ drupal router:debug | grep -i "\/node"

That will return something like:

entity.node.canonical                                 /node/{node}
 entity.node.delete_form                               /node/{node}/delete
 entity.node.edit_form                                 /node/{node}/edit
 entity.node.preview                                   /node/preview/{node_preview}/{view_mode_id}
 entity.node.revision                                  /node/{node}/revisions/{node_revision}/view
 entity.node.version_history                           /node/{node}/revisions
 node.add                                              /node/add/{node_type}
 node.add_page                                         /node/add
 node.multiple_delete_confirm                          /admin/content/node/delete
 node.revision_delete_confirm                          /node/{node}/revisions/{node_revision}/delete
 node.revision_revert_confirm                          /node/{node}/revisions/{node_revision}/revert
 node.revision_revert_translation_confirm              /node/{node}/revisions/{node_revision}/revert/{langcode}
 search.help_node_search                               /search/node/help
 search.view_node_search                               /search/node
 view.frontpage.page_1                                 /node

Listing all the possible routes with that word, we can choose one and do:

drupal router:debug entity.node.canonical

And that will display more information about a specific route:

 Route             entity.node.canonical
 Path              /node/{node}
 Defaults
  _controller      \Drupal\node\Controller\NodeViewController::view
  _title_callback  \Drupal\node\Controller\NodeViewController::title
 Requirements
  node             \d+
  _entity_access   node.view
  _method          GET|POST
 Options
  compiler_class   \Drupal\Core\Routing\RouteCompiler
  parameters       node:
                     type: 'entity:node'
                     converter: paramconverter.entity

  _route_filters   method_filter
                   content_type_header_matcher

  _route_enhancers route_enhancer.param_conversion

  _access_checks   access_check.entity

So in this way we can search the route without the needing to search in all the *.routing.yml files and in this example the route is entity.node.canonical and the param expected is node.

Print links directly within a twig template

It is also possible to print links directly on the twig template with the following syntax:

<a href="{{url('entity.node.canonical', {'node': node.id( ) }}"> {{ 'This is a link'|t }} </a>

Add links inside a t() method.

If you want to add a link inside the t() you can do what Drupal suggests on Dynamic or static links and HTML in translatable strings:

use Drupal\Core\Url;
$url = Url::fromRoute('entity.node.canonical', ['node' => 1]);
$this->t('You can click this <a href=":link">Link</a>', [':link' => $url->toString()]);

Or, from a node object:

$markup = $this->t('You found this node: <a href=":url">@title</a>', [
  ':url' => $node->toUrl('canonical'),
  '@title' => $node->label(),
]);

Articles and talks that engage in broad themes from Micky's talk

• There is no halfway in the fight against injustice
• GNU Philosophy
• Love and Money by Audrey Eschright
• Free Software and the shifting landscape of online cooperation by Benjamin Mako Hill
• How Drupal as a Service can save us all by Benjamin Melançon
• Platform Cooperativism by Trebor Scholz

Whole books:

• Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard
• Ours to Hack and to Own
• Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi
• Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

We are Agaric Technology Collective, a worker-owned cooperative. We build websites and online tools that respect your freedom. We provide training and consultation to meet your goals.

We build websites that matter

From digital collaboration spaces for health and science communities to publishing platforms to opportunity finders for city residents, we love to do the hard work that supports people doing the harder work of making the world better.  Some of our best work is done when we just ensure that the world can see the great work done by an organization.

We go deep

From our founding in 2006, our approach has been to deeply engage with the needs of our clients and collaborate with free/libre open source software communities to craft solid, sustainable solutions.

We raise you up

At every opportunity, we provide training and build our clients' capacity to take more control over their web presence. By building on software that belongs to everyone and has large communities, we ensure organizations we work with have options and room to grow. By eagerly and expertly teaching whatever people are willing to learn, from basic organizational security to migrating data to software development to content strategy, we stay true to our purpose of giving people and organizations more power to do good.

Please learn more about our skills and services and contact Agaric!

Web platforms we develop include the Find It program locator to help people find opportunities in their cities and online science and health communities.

Agaric is a worker-owned cooperative and the online tools we build respect your freedom and increase your power to do good. Our trainings range from one-on-one capacity building to day-long group workshops such as our sought-after Migration to Drupal trainings.

Ask Agaric to help you gain power over your online technology today.

2017 was an amazing year for me. I met so many people, attended lots of events, presented a good amount of sessions and trainings, and traveled like never before. I got to interact with the Drupal community in many ways. And I learned so much, both technical and life lessons. Let me share a summary of my year.

To make the text compact I will use some abbreviations in the text. DC for DrupalCamp and GTD for Global Training Days. Meetups refers to local user groups meetings.

Events per month

• January: No event.
• February: Boston meetup, New Jersey, Florida DC, and Northern Lights DC.
• March: DC London, GTD Managua, NERD Summit, DevDays Seville, and MidCamp.
• April: Boston meetup and DrupalCon Baltimore.
• May: Managua meetup and WordCamp Managua.
• June: Texas DC, Boston meetup, GTD Managua, ECWD, and Twin Cities DC.
• July: No event.
• August: DC Costa Rica and Managua meetup.
• September: Synergy Camp, DC Antwerp, GTD Frankfurt, GTD Managua, and DrupalCon Vienna.
• October: Madrid meetup, London meetup, and BADCamp.
• November: Managua meetup and Lakes and Volcanoes DC.
• December: GTD Leon, GTD Managua, and Managua meetup.

This translates to:

• 18 conferences
• 9 meetups
• 12 DrupalCamps
• 2 DrupalCons
• 1 Drupal DevDays
• 12 sessions presented
• 4 trainings presented
• 6 GTD workshop presented

Highlights this year

• Made it into MAINTAINERS.txt as part of the Core mentoring coordinators team.
• Served as part of the Global Training Days community working group.
• Presented a session at DrupalCon.
• Was invited to be a DrupalCon track chair.
• People I mentored at DrupalCon got their patches committed. Thanks to Jess (xjm), Ted Bowman, and other contributors for following up.

Thank you all

Thanks to my colleagues at Agaric for their support during my Drupal tour.

Thanks to all the event organizers who gave me the opportunity to speak at their events. And thanks to all the people who gave feedback of my sessions, trainings, and workshops.

Thanks to Baddý Breidert, Hilmar Hallbjörnsson, and all the team who organized Northern Lights DrupalCamp. They went above and beyond to pull out an event against unfavorable conditions. The night before the sessions fell a record breaking amount of snow. The organizers went to pick people up from around Reykjavik and accommodated the schedule nicely. I was trapped in a bus stops, with snow above my knees, when Hilmar and Christoph Breidert picked me up saved me and took me to the venue. On top of everything, the organizers took everyone on free tours around beautiful Iceland. It was amazing!

Thanks to all the people and organizations who set up different events where I could present during my European tour. Cristina Chumillas (Barcelona), Baddý and Christoph of 1xINTERNET (Frankfurt), Valery Lourie and the SynergyCamp team (Sofia), Sven Decabooter and the DC Antwerp team (Antwerp), Ignacio Sánchez (Madrid), and Chandeep Khosa and Gabriele (gambry) (London).

Thanks to those who hosted me during my European tour. Baddý and Christoph of 1xINTERNET in Frankfurt, my colleague Stefan Freudenberg in Hamburg, and Rodrigo Aguilera in Barcelona. They opened the doors to their homes and their families during my stay. I will always be grateful.

Thanks to Anna Mykhailova for co-presenting a training with me at BADCamp.

Thanks to the awesome organizing team of Lakes and Volcanoes DC. In particular to Lucas Hedding who has helped the Nicaraguan Drupal community in countless ways.

Thanks to the Boston Drupal user group for making me feel at home every time I visit.

Thanks to ALL the people I talked to during the 2017 Drupal tour. The Drupal community is super friendly and welcoming. It is so great to be part of it.

Trivia

Zsófi Major sent a t-shirt to Christian López. In its way from DC London to Drupal DevDays Seville, the t-shirt stopped by 9 airports.

V Spagnolo sent a present to Lucas Hedding. In its way from DrupalCon Vienna to Nicaragua, the parcel stopped by 10 airports.

The GTD in Frankfurt was super interesting. I installed Drupal in German. Not knowing the language, I had no idea how to pronounce the text on the screen. The audience was very kind in helping me. By the end of the workshop I was pronouncing some words almost right. ;)

What's next for 2018?

As my fellow drupaler Eduardo (enzo) García says in his end of year recap, travelling takes a lot of energy. I have plans to attend some events in 2018, but not as much as I did in 2017. While staying at home, I will be able to accomplish things that would be difficult otherwise.

I will kickstart my Drupal learning project: understanddrupal.com My goal is to teach Drupal in multiple languages and multiple formats. To start I will produce content in English, Spanish, and French in text and video formats.

I will learn new languages. On the human side, I will start with French and I might give German a try. On the computer side, I will start with JavaScript and then move to Python. At Agaric we serve clients in multiple countries and with different application stacks. Learning new human and computer languages will help me serve better the clients and projects I participate in.

I want to learn new things. Software testing in general and creating applications in React are my first targets. Expect blog posts about my learnings next year.

I want to participate more actively in the free software communities in my country. Drupal, WordPress, JavaScript, and others. I would like to learn from them and share what I have learned in my travels.

Thanks for a fantastic 2017! See you in 2018! :D

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