Hamburg, March 15, 2017 - Members of the German Drupal community — contributors, service providers, end users — came together to celebrate their successes in 2016 with the world’s leading open source content management system and application platform at the 2017 German Splash Awards.
Compared to many other countries, Drupal is not especially well known here; the German CMS landscape has long been dominated by other players. The funny thing is that there is a lot of Drupal going on in Germany — great sites and projects made for pillar of the German economy, government bodies, and more — but until now, nobody has really talked about it much. People are pragmatic here and my best guess is that they figure good projects and results will speak for themselves. It’s time to change that and the German Splash Awards are a step in the right direction.
Adding “professional” to “community”
We talk about community a lot in Drupal and I have long contended our killer app is that we are tens of thousands of smart people who like to solve hard problems together. Drupal, and now Drupal 8, is a “Swiss Army Knife” of powerful open source tools for today’s web, but it is simply the byproduct of 15+ years of solving the web with code, community, and a large dash of idealism.
The values we talk about most in our community are things like transparency, openness, contribution, paying it forward, making a difference, and so on. I’d like to add another layer on top of our community thinking: professional community. Alongside all of our efforts and contributions, many (most?) of us make our livings with Drupal. We run companies, we work in professional departments in large organisations, we serve clients, we realise our vision for the world. And we’re the only community of professionals I’ve ever experienced that can cooperate (making Drupal) and compete (in business) so fiercely and remain trusted, respected friends all at the same time.
Organisations like the Dutch Professional Drupal Association, the German Drupal Agency Foundation (Stiftung Drupalagenturen), and events like the Splash Awards in Holland and Germany can help us have a vibrant, sustainable, professional side to our community activities. Let’s be just as proud and generous with our business success as we are with our code. The more people who hear about great Drupal projects, the more projects we’ll have to do (all of us) in the future.
2017 Splash Award Winners
Here are the winners in the nine awarded categories.
Engagement — making a difference in Drupal
publicplan, 1xInternet, reinblau for creating deGov, a Drupal 8 distribution tailor-made for government sites in Germany. Compliant, accessible, and ready for multiple public service use cases out-of-the-box.
Module — the best module of the year
commpress for the Nimbus Drupal 8 configuration-sharing module.
Architecture — what great sites have going on under the hood
UEBERBIT for the HeidelbergCement Global platform, encompassing more than 70 sites, training courses, and more.
Commerce — buy, sell, profit!
Bright Solutions for the MAINGAU Energie relaunch, incorporating multiple legacy back-end systems while allowing the MAINGAU Energie marketing department to independently optimise the site’s content and conversion workflows.
Social — networks, communities, sharing
1xInternet for Social Reykjavik, the city of Reykjavik’s intranet. City public servants use this Drupal platform for everything from improving their service and communications offerings for the public to organising social activities among employees.
Government — local, regional, and national government sites and applications
]init[ for the relaunch of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s bioökonomie.de website; a bilingual hub for communication and supporting innovation in and around sustainability, biological diversity, and organic products.
Education — the original purpose of the net and the best thing we can do for the Internet today: help people learn
UEBERBIT for the Duden Lernattack online LMS and tutoring platform for primary and secondary students across all of Germany’s regions and school systems.
Media/Publishing — publication platforms
undpaul for the (incredibly beautiful) online edition of the “Mein Schöner Garten” magazine, built for Acquia customer Hubert Burda Media using its Drupal 8 publishing industry distribution, Thunder.
Tools/Apps — making developers and clients days better
Bright Solutions for Drop Guard, a fully-automated update tool for keeping Drupal websites up-to-date and secure.
Thank you, organisers!
Without the time and energy you invested, the Splash Awards couldn’t have happened. Thank you for dong this for us! Bjarney Sonja Breidert, Anja Schirwinski, Michel van Velde, Nicole Diphoorn-Dyrda, and Sara Pistner — THANK YOU!
Thank you, Sponsors!
Without your sponsorship, community events like the Splash Awards would not be possible. Thank you, comm-press, Stiftung Drupalagenturen, freistilbox, Platform.sh, and Thunder CMS!
Thank you, jury!
Thanks to my fellow jury members for your thoughtful, independent, and insightful assessment of the submitted projects. Jury members who were associated with submitted projects strictly recused themselves from voting in the relevant categories.
- Meike Jung—Concept and Project Management, reinblau
- Rouven Volk—Solutions Architect, Acquia
- Marc Dinse—Drupal Developer, DerNetzjäger
- Robert Douglass—Vice President of Customer Satisfaction, Platform.sh
- Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire—Evangelist, Acquia (Jury Chair)
Your name here! Call for submissions: January 2018
Get coding and come show off what you’ve done with Drupal at next year’s awards ceremony, March 8, somewhere in Germany! All** Drupal projects — local, national, or international — built by companies based in Germany and launched in 2017 are eligible for submission to the 2018 Splash Awards.
** Subject to the rules and conditions as listed at the time of the call for submissions in January 2018.
