Review: Thunder at the DrupalCon

About 1700 developers, users and project managers got together in Vienna to compare notes on the developments of the Drupal content management system. Thunder and the team behind it were right in the middle of this year’s Drupal Con. Here comes our review.

At the start of the week, a publishing summit with more than 50 participants from the industry took place. The event was organized by Drupal Austria and hosted by Julia Pradel, community manager of Thunder. Österreichischer Wirtschaftsverlag, a subsidiary of Süddeutscher Verlag, presented its plans to use Thunder to develop a platform comprising 25 websites (see the slides here). The Drupal agency undpaul, which has already implemented the websites mein-schoener-garten.de and daskochrezept.de, announced that it now uses Thunder in all its projects.

Christian Fritsch, senior developer in Thunder’s core team, presented new features of the system. The highlight was the Admin Theme, which was improved together with Burda’s editorial teams.

The Thunder Core Team was also present at the DrupalCon itself: Christian Fritsch represented Thunder at a panel discussion with representatives of the most important Drupal distributions - Adam Hoenich (Lightning), Daniel Wehner (Contenta CMS), and Ryan Aslett (Drupal Association). 

Together with Sean Blommaert and Adam Hoenich, Christian Fritsch also presented the results of the media initiative. Its aim is to enhance articles easily, adding pictures, videos and other multi-media content. Important progress concerning this initiative and others was made on Friday at the code sprints sponsored by Thunder.

At a panel discussion, Mladen Todorovic, senior developer in the Thunder Core Team, collected ideas and suggestions for a new module, which non-developers such as editors, marketing staff and SEO managers will be able to use to create and personalize a landing page very easily in the future. See the project page on drupal.org here.

Mladen Todorovic, senior developer in the Thunder Core Team, discussed ideas and suggestions for a new module for landing pages.

Mladen Todorovic, senior developer in the Thunder Core Team, discussed ideas and suggestions for a new module for landing pages.

Together with Julia Pradel, the Austrian daily „Kurier“ presented the way in which its site kurier.at was modernized: As the development team was able to draw on the extensive groundwork of Thunder’s core team, they had enough resources left for technical refinements, which will now be fed back into the system. Everyone using Thunder will benefit from this. The culture of sharing initiated by Thunder has already become reality.

What was most important for the team was that it received positive feedback from the community: More and more agencies are using Thunder and are contributing to extending and distributing the system. The Drupal community regards Burda as a role model for the industry’s collaboration with the open source community.

This became clear when Ingo Rübe, CTO of Burda Magazine Holding and initiator of Thunder, was invited to take part in this year’s board meeting of the Drupal Association. At this meeting prior to the conference, a small group discussed the strategy for Drupal in the next three years.

Ingo Rübe discussed the strategy for Drupal at this year’s board meeting of the Drupal Association.

Ingo Rübe discussed the strategy for Drupal at this year’s board meeting of the Drupal Association.

We were really stunned, when the community showed their respect for the work of Thunder’s developers, when more than 400 participants chanted "Thunder, Thunder" at the Trivia Night – one of our highlights. Thanks everybody for making this week so remarkable.