DrupalCon Nara 2025 in Japan - Attendee Recap

Back home from DrupalCon Nara and I had a blast there. My love for Japan and the Japanese culture means that I rarely miss an opportunity to visit whenever I can, so this is not my first time in Japan, nor in Nara. I first visited Nara in 2014 when I spoke at DrupalCamp Kyoto. I spoke again in Japan for DrupalCamp Tokyo in 2017.

DrupalCon in Asia is smaller than in the USA or Europe, but the energy is the same. It is a chance for various communities with different perspectives, cultures and languages to meet, learn and discover around Drupal. Asia being very diverse, there were a lot of cultural exchanges and this was for many their first DrupalCon, even for some their first time outside their country!

I was in charge of the Community booth, so my role has been to find volunteers, schedule and organize leaders in their own Drupal communities to represent different countries at the booth. I was also representing the Philippines, for which I organize events. I am very thankful to the 7 other volunteers who helped make the booth such a lively corner at the conference! Communities represented were: Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Taiwan. Great job from volunteers: Chris, SJ, Julia, Yuriko, Akmal, Abhisek and Suryanto.

The Treasure Hunt

A special event was organized ahead of the conference, and it blew my mind. The treasure hunt had more than 100 challenges to complete over Nara. So you would walk into a place full of deer in total freedom, and try to complete your challenges near a temple, hiking a mountain or eating ice cream! I made a team with long-term friends Alvin and Kentaro. I haven't seen Alvin, who lives in Osaka, in around ten years so it was a perfect excuse to reconnect. Alvin is doing marathons and Kentaro has a knee injury, you can consider my walking speed was somewhere in the middle of them! We finished 5th out of around 20 teams. Congrats to Lauri Timmanee and Pamela Barone for winning, you did great!

On a side note, if you like treasure hunts, watch the documentary (yes, I am crazy about documentaries) "Finding The Golden Owl" (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/findingthegoldenowl), a real-life treasure hunt that lasted ... 31 years in France. Now let's talk about the sessions.

Welcome address from the mayor of Nara, Japan

It was impressive seeing for the first time at a DrupalCon the mayor of the city hosting the conference saying publicly his support for Drupal and Open Source. Drupal has a long history and countless success stories working with governmental projects and public agencies. I experienced it myself working for the European Commission, a UK public agency or cities in the USA. It was great to see a mayor publicly speaking about Drupal. Remember that Drupal is recognized as a Digital Public Good (https://dri.es/drupal-recognized-as-a-digital-public-good).

Dries Q&A

Instead of the usual keynote, Dries held a thoughtful Q&A session. He emphasized that Drupal AI represents a major opportunity. With the new Drupal Canvas system, for example, building a complex page can take up to 400 clicks and AI can dramatically simplify these editorial workflows down to a hundred of clicks for example, and help address Drupal’s weaknesses, improving adoption.

Dries highlighted how open source is uniquely aligned with digital sovereignty, mentioning government RFPs that require full code transfer after a few years. He also compared France’s AI landscape to Airbus: although created as alternatives to U.S. dominance, projects like Mistral AI remain heavily dependent on American hardware and resources. Open source avoids this limitation because you fully own the software.

Finally, he noted that while AI is changing how sites are built and used, websites are not going away. They remain essential for conveying brand identity and emotional “feel.” Agencies should embrace AI, adapt, and guide clients. Guiding clients with design, best practices, and strategy rather than simply building, ship sites and more to the next one. This last part makes a lot of sense to me, long term guidance based on trust and strategy consulting are keys for web agencies these days.

The idea for web agencies to be an extension of the client's team, rather than just buiding a one-time solution, is also an idea emphsized by the company SHARP in their keynote (see more below about SHARP's presentation).  

Selected sessions at DrupalCon Nara

"Drupal Commerce's Starshot Roadmap" by Jakub Piasecki

Jakub, who also helped with photography at the event presented a good sessions on Commerce plans for Drupal CMS. I agree with his statement that many users, specially with e-commerce, like to start with something ready out of the box. Like its competitors, Drupal Commerce Starshot aims to provide a solution out of the box, but still completely open source and customizable. Having a strong solution, open source with Drupal, and functionnal out of the box is great asset for the Drupal eco-system in my opinion.

Drupal Commerce Kickstart install profile is being converted from distribution to Drupal recipes, it made the solution much smaller and more reusable. It also aims to support Drupal Canvas for product and order pages.

Keynote "Enterprise at Scale by SHARP"

Now this was one of the best client showcase I have seen as a presentation. Sharp makes a large variety of products including phones which are 95% sold in JP. SHARP’s presence and wide range of products made it one of the main requirements for their public website to be multilingual, communicate in different markets, cost efficient … and open source with Drupal. They partnered with 1xInternet and it has been a successful collaboration.

They also use Drupal for their Europe dealer market website. It’s important to have the right partner, someone you can treat as an extension of your team to make the right decisions. I thought it was a great keynote. It perfectly showcased a vision for corporate open source solutions and guidance from an agency.

"Further Empowering Drupal with Single Directory Components using UI Suite" by Azmat Shah

This session showcased how you can leverage the UI of Drupal to do theming, making Drupal theming less complex. This is very much using the Drupal design system UI Suite, check out Pierre Dureau's recent presentation at DrupalCon Vienna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCdnFXE-Yik

Azmat used the "no markup module" (https://www.drupal.org/project/nomarkup) from Pedro Cambra. It makes the markup pretty much empty to start with. Then you can edit your node using the UI and add attributes to style it, adding your classes ... etc. You can set automated setup for your attributes in the component’s .yml file, using Single Directory Components it is pretty straightforward.

An interesting vision of Drupal theming that I enjoyed watching. The speaker will re-do this presentation at a future online Philippines Drupal meetup. Thanks to him for that!

"That's Not a Theme, It's a Template" by Elliott Mower

Elliott described how they created the theme for Drupal CMS, Mercury. They picked up a couple of use cases (higher ed, government ... etc), then put a design for each. They realized the bigger picture: creating one versatile theme instead of many. He called it accidental design. Mercury, the starter kit for Drupal CMS, is highly opinionated and still evolving. Mercury is using Tailwind. He shared DaisyUI, an open-source component library for Tailwind CSS that provides pre-built, semantic class names.

"Don’t Write Code, Start Prompting! AI Orchestration of Digital Experiences" from Yas Naoi

First, Yas is not your standard Drupal dev. He is more like a scientist who happens to be passionate about Drupal. He basically submitted a patent using the tech of this presentation. He presented a technology-agnostic workflow, readable, that goes into a RAG datastore and uses LLM to retrieve relevant rules and instantly determine and execute the next approver. His work is fascinating, check out his module "Cloud Orchestrator", it is a distribution for cloud administrators and operators, and can manage resources from cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Kubernetes and OpenStack: https://www.drupal.org/project/cloud_orchestrator

 

The conference ended with a meeting at Cafe Etranger (Foreigner's cafe in French) and a chance to have a chat with everyone before leaving Japan.

After the conference, I was able to give a recap of the conference at the Drupal Meetup in Manila (Philippines). I shared some Japanese delicacies (thanks to Koji) and gave some freebies. I also shared the plans in progress for the Philippines Drupal Meetup in 2026 with the community, we will continue to have monthly events, sometimes on-site hosted by different companies and sometimes online.

 

Huge thanks to Mike Richardson and the steering committee of DrupalCon Asia. Putting an event like this together is a lot of work and they did that successfully two years in a row. Also thanks to the volunteers, the speakers and sponsors of this event.

See you soon Japan!

 

Cover photo by Joey Huang.