Building Drupal Gather

January 29th, 2026

As a previous organiser of PHP and Drupal meetups, I know how much work goes into running a meetup/user group.

Every event needs a venue, speakers, sponsors, food, drink, etc, as well as the ongoing responsibilities between events.

Running a website for a meetup group shouldn't be difficult.

Software as a solution platforms are expensive and suffer from feature bloat.

I don't want to see ads or promotions from random companies after registering for an event, or constant automated appeals to save a group that is soon to expire.

So, I'm building Drupal Gather - a distribution for meetup and user group websites.

Different to groups.drupal.org or PaaS solutions, this will be a distribution for a meetup organisers to manage their own group and events, and not a directory of multiple groups.

It will also be free and open source, and for any type of meetup - not just Drupal or PHP meetups.

This is in the very early stages of development, and I'm currently working in my own monorepo but will create separate projects and issue queues on Drupal.org for the example project, installation profile and recipes.

I intend to keep the amount of custom code to a minimum, and create a working MVP with basic features in the near future.

I'll be writing update posts as I develop it and may also live stream some of it if time allows.