Three years after the release of version 9.0.0, the start of the transition to version 10 of the CMS software Drupal was probably the most challenging task for the community experts at crowd-creation. In order to literally set a good example here, the crowd-creation website and the open social community platform Social-Box were converted shortly after the roll-out. At the same time, the crowd-creation team continuously supports customers with their update projects. These include those that have migrated from Drupal 7, a task that is urgently recommended due to the imminent end of official manufacturer support. Even though it was announced this year that the end-of-life of Drupal 7 has been postponed to January 2025, there is still a lot of work waiting for community operators and, thus, for crowd-creation in 2024.
Crowd-creation was also able to impress with its many years of expertise in new projects at the end of the year. In cooperation with KANTAR, one of the world's leading companies for marketing data and analysis, for example, the feedback community " Bowl whisper, "the largest specialist retail chain for pet food and accessories in Europe, Feeding Bowl was created based on Drupal 9.
True to the goal of continuously improving the convenience and benefits of community platforms based on Drupal and Open Social, crowd-creation continued to work with and on modules for Drupal in 2023. For six years now, crowd-creation has been exploring the potential of code extensions in the form of associated functional extensions. This has already resulted in modules such as "Automatic Alternative Text", which uses artificial intelligence to analyze and rewrite image content in order to automatically generate alternative texts that support the barrier-free design of websites. Once again, this year, Drupal users have been provided with new modules that are primarily intended to support community managers in their daily work. The possible uses of artificial intelligence also play a central role here, for example, in the area of sentiment analysis, which records moods in a community in the background and thus enables rapid, targeted intervention.
For crowd-creation, 2023 was also characterized by the idea of community - both online and offline. As a sponsor of the Morning Break Tournament, a 9-hole and 18-hole golf tournament with a total of 53 participants at Attighof in Waldsolms in July 2023, crowd-creation proved to be a partner with strong coordination skills, mental strength, focus and drive. Following the very positive response, a new event is already planned for May 12, 2024.
In addition, the further expansion of the Social Box to Drupal 10 is on the agenda for the coming year, 2024. Among other things, the focus will be on the chat and video chat functionalities already implemented in the previous versions in response to the growing demand in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Particular attention will be paid to the data protection-compliant European video conferencing and learning platform BigBlueButton.
Crowd creation is also continuing to devote more attention to the topic of artificial intelligence. With new modules, communities, their operators and moderators should be able to benefit optimally from the new technological possibilities and integrate them into their everyday lives as a significant relief.
