Drupical - find Drupal Events with ease!

Drupal Events are already listed on some places:

• d.o drupal.org/community/events - a site/service which was build in ~2020
• g.d.o the Drupal community hub, groups.drupal.org/events - this site is still D6 and the events section from d.o is the successor and the groups site will get deprecated at some point

…but it can be a chore to find events in your local area, or at your holiday or business-trip destination :)

First, the ical feed from g.d.o is aggregated and the events are manually enriched with structured, semantic data:

• Location (Geodata Latitude and Longitude)
• Logo
• Link
• Twitter hashtag and username

Then the events are presented - using different colored markers that indicate the event type - both on a map and in a chronological list. You can filter by event type, continent, and country.

We built this using responsive web design (it was 2012 when we build it), to make it easy to use on all devices, from phones to tablets to your regular old laptop! We also experimented with an native app, but skipped it because a browser is enought :)

It all happened in the heady, Drupally atmosphere at the Drupal Business Days Vienna 2012 … yes, 2012 ;)

First, the name Drupical (a mashup of Drupal and tropical) came into Nico Grienauer’s mind (Nico was at this time co-founder of ausgetrock.net - Mediadesign and Webservices) along with a logo concept:
"Drupal is like having holidays" … what do we do with this?

Nico registered the domain and sent Michael Klobutschar (co-founder of his former company) an enthusiastic email with the name, slogan and logo idea.

Michael had been in charge for the events section on the Drupal Austria website, so he was familiar with the challenges of finding Drupal events. He answered "Great! - but let’s make it a Drupal calendar! Isn’t that what you meant with Drup-iCal?”.

Michael and Nico rolled up their sleeves, liberally applied elbow grease and created drupical.com as a "community giveback" project!

Since then we got great feedback.

Achievements

• We had an infobooth at Drupalcons and Drupal Capmps all over Europe.
• Build DIY Drupical Islands giveaways.
• Designed postcards and custom lasered stands.
• Created a Infographic/visualisation of "one year of Drupal events".
• Did remote presentations for Meetups.
• Got mentioned at lots of closing sessions.
• …even at WordCamp Europe it was presented from a kindly stranger :)
• From 2012 to July 2018 Michael manually imported 9240 events, created 3021 venues and added 843 images.
• We (especially Nika Matzenauer who did the manual imports since 2019) won the first price at the "Open Minds - the Austrian Open Source Award" in the category "CMS Drupal" with drupical.

In 2018 we took over the project from Michael and currently Nika is constantly updating the events and in charge of the running system and Nico always has an open ear for feedback or suggestions.

in 2020 we recreated the whole system from scratch!
We build a Drupal 9 Backend with new editor features.
The frontend was a complete rewrite from David in Vue.js with Nuxt.js
Due to the Covid19 pandemic we finally managed to display also virtual meetings "on the map".

Please add missing events over at Drupal Community Events. this should be the single source of truth :)

Before Dezember 2020, we aggregated content from g.d.o Events but with the new Drupical 2.0, we switched to the new event listing.

If there are events missing, please let us know!

We plan to provide all the enriched event data in multiple formats (RSS, JSON, etc.) so others may access and use the data. For example, local community websites could aggregate events in their geographical region.

More planned features, tasks, and bugs to fix can be found in the issue queue.

We do know there are some improvements for the g.d.o events page in the pipeline.

You can read about it in our issue queue https://www.drupal.org/project/drupical/issues/3055398

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