Kevin Thull to Challenge Paragraph Field Use at Florida DrupalCamp 2026

The session, titled “It’s Past Time to Nuke Your Paragraph Fields,” is scheduled for Saturday, February 21, from 11:00 to 11:45 a.m. in Room 154. Targeted at intermediate site builders, the talk addresses a common pain point in Drupal architecture: the sluggish performance of feeds imports involving paragraph fields. Kevin will detail how updating 4000 nodes via XML feeds originally took nearly 27 hours due to paragraph usage, while a restructured approach using the Custom Field module reduced that to just ten minutes for nearly 2000 nodes in staging.

In addition to demonstrating the module’s capabilities, Kevin will walk through practical configuration and theming examples to show how Custom Field can replace paragraphs in scenarios that prioritize speed and maintainability. His decision to adopt the module was prompted by a mention on the Talking Drupal podcast and later confirmed through tangible improvements in a live project where he serves as sysadmin. He describes the switch as the most significant quality-of-life upgrade in his current workflow.

Kevin brings years of experience as a front-end developer with Blue Drop Shop and serves as a leader of the Drupal Recording Initiative, a community project aimed at increasing access to camp sessions. His session is one of several on Florida DrupalCamp’s 2026 schedule aimed at modernizing site building practices for Drupal 10 and beyond. Find more details about the event session here.