As part of the London Tech Week, we hosted an event showcasing the DX8 platform with guests Julian Tedstone, from digital agency Coherence, and David Warren from Acquia.

Breaking onto the scene

This year we decided to host an event as part of the London Tech Week's community event programme, where organisations from all across the capital have a chance to demonstrate their contributions to the thriving technology sector.

Since 2014 London Tech Week has been championing the European capital of technology, a hub of innovation, passion and economic growth. Contributing £22.5billion to London's economy, as well as 240,000 jobs, the technology sector is booming in an otherwise grim global climate of business liquidations and market instability.

DX8 has been built from the ground up by an expert team of digital agency veterans and highly experienced developers to deliver an enterprise-grade site-building experience on top of the Drupal 8 CMS.

The technology behind DX8 that needed to be developed to achieve this goal was significant - Drupal is a complex, but hugely powerful, platform to work with and bringing DX8 to life was no mean feat.

Products like DX8, and many others that were debuted throughout the duration of the event, show what the London Tech Week is all about: taking a seemingly impossible idea, and using a combination of innovation, passion and considerable amounts of coffee (of tea depending on who you ask on the Cohesion team) to deliver above and beyond what your customers expect.

Event overview

For the event itself, we were pleased to welcome representatives from a diverse background of organisations, from top digital agencies, to specialist Drupal developers and inhouse teams.

We kicked things off with an introduction from Craig Hanna, who is our Head of Sales and Marketing, as he covered the state of the market of low-code solutions. Suffice to say that if you want a site up and running quickly with little power to hand over to the editors and enterprise options few and far between, you'll be set. If your requirements are for actual enterprise-grade websites, then you're pretty much out of luck. Back to the briefing room for you.

What we've managed to do with DX8 is bring a low-code site builder to Drupal 8 that you can actually build large, enterprise websites on. If you want, that is. There's a lot it can do, so be sure to check out the features while you're here.

We then saw our CEO, Drew Griffiths, take the stage for a run through of the DX8 platform, in the form of a spin-up to launch journey. We focused this particular talk on spinning up sites through Acquia® Cloud Site Factory and customizing them for the required brand.

DX8 lets you build and customize your site in many powerful ways, such as the Layout Canvas for building any layout you can imagine, and the Style Builder, where you can build CSS styles using a real-time visual builder. We have some handy videos to show how these, and more, work in practice over on our Page editor and Site builder pages, if you are curious.

We were also lucky to have with us David Warren, a Senior Solutions Architect from Acquia. David covered how the Acquia platform can integrate with DX8 to give you control over the complete site authoring experience, rivalling Sitecore and Adobe Experience Manager for performance, at a fraction of the cost, and being far easier to use as a technology stack.

Julian Tedstone then took the stage, telling us about his experience of using DX8 as the Managing Director of digital agency Coherence. Building DX8 has been a journey for us, as a company and as a team, and it's a great feeling to see it being used in the real world to the great benefit of the agency. 

Julian gave us a whirlwind tour of his experience so far, which you can see in full in the slides below, from how his design and UX team felt empowered by being able to get involved in the site building phase, to his clients who can now use a suite of editing tools that they would never have been able to access with any other solution (unless their project budgets were increased exponentially).