Drupal has always been an amazingly flexible, programmable, adaptable platform. The aspect-oriented hook system has been a great ally to developers on some of the biggest websites in the world, allowing for enormous flexibility.

But, Drupal has always done things it's own way - in some cases, to the exclusion of best practices elsewhere. Drupal 8 broke this pattern, and began to leverage code from outside its borders.

Drupal 8 integrates much code from outside its ecosystem. Most notable of all, of course, is the replacement of Drupal's core HTTP routing component with Symfony's HTTP Foundation classes, but there are many more: Doctrine, Guzzle, Twig, Assetic, EasyRDF, and more - all bound together with leading technologies from the PHP community, PSR-0 and Composer.

Drupal's enormous talent pool has been made even larger - and we are contributing back to other projects. We've truly become members of the wider PHP community.

Join Alex Pott, the newest Drupal core maintainer, to hear the story of how this shift was made, its pain points, and to examine the opportunity it presents.