December is here. In my part of the world, the most livable months are December to February. There will be a drop from the sun's scorching heat to the cooling embrace of misty mornings. We don't have snow. The only heavy snowfall that most of us see will be either in cinemas or in literature.
I have wished for such lovely mornings to last forever. But seasons change. People change. People and their technology contribute to large-scale climate change. Let us make a concerted effort to bring down ICT greenhouse gas emissions, taking a cue from Janne Kalliola's session in DrupalCon Lille, and pave the way for a better tomorrow.
As the year ends, many people have started taking stocks of their past year in retrospect. So do companies. In mid-October, during DrupalCon Lille, we witnessed Dries taking stock of the state of Drupal in his presentation. He placed Drupal against competing CMS offerings and evaluated their strengths and weaknesses. He explained the new marketing initiative and the Drupal Association's decision to partly sponsor the Web Summit Lisbon with the aid of four leading Drupal agencies. It happened in November. Drupal had a happening booth. Everybody was in a resurgent mood.
Anything good will not go uncontested. It shouldn't, either. A good adversary can be an indication of worth. In recent weeks, if you ask me what the most pertinent point of discussion among Drupalists was, I would say it was about a medium blog post by Maxime Topolov, CEO of Code.Store. It was a critique of Driesnote. Although he published the review by the end of October, it suddenly came into discussion through some recent LinkedIn posts. It is interesting to read counter-narratives.
Coming down to the week in retrospect, TheDropTimes (TDT) published the second part of the interview with Grzegorz Pietrzak. He talks about Droopler to Thomas Elias K. Catch the conversation here. We ran a featured story on the Calender View Module by Matthieu Scarset. Alka Elizabeth did the honors.
In a significant organization news, Mautic started offering live trials by collaborating with DropSolid. After Acquia incorporated Mautic into its offerings and returned it to the community, this was the first break for the open-source marketing automation platform.
Local and regional communities play a remarkable role in strengthening the Drupal ecosystem. The recently concluded DrupalCamp Costa Rica had more than 120 participants. Kazima Abbas gives us a glimpse into the successful DrupalCamp. The 3rd annual EvolveDrupal Ottawa summit has concluded successfully. Evolving Web has also raised a call for session submissions to their next summit in Atlanta, GA, in early 2024.
The next edition of DrupalCon Europe will be in Barcelona from September 24 to 27, 2024. Know the venue in advance. The Bay Area Drupal Camp is returning with a two-day hackathon in San Francisco, tentatively scheduled for April 13 to 15, 2024. You can submit sessions for Florida DrupalCamp 2024 until December 18. Drupal Developer Days 2024 will happen in Burgas, Bulgaria, from June 26 to 28, 2024. The camp needs sponsors. Acquia has announced a webinar on Crafting Human-Centric Digital Experiences: A Guide for Drupal Developers. It will happen on December 14.
We shared a few case studies last week. Read about Evolving Web's Successful Drupal Migration for INSPQ or Pantheon's support to WebMD. Srijan published a case study on Drupal site migration from version 8 to 10. Read how Acquia drives digital transformation for Nestlé.
Drew Webber has written about a security vulnerability in Drupal 7. Catch it here. Enterprise support for PHP 8.0 ended on November 26. It will be wise to upgrade your PHP installation. Starting from Drupal 10.2, developers can use PHP attributes instead of annotations for certain plugins. Goran Nikolovski writes about it. Incidentally, he has also written about a debugging experience in webforms in Drupal 10.
A Brazilian city offers 2,500 spots for free Distance Learning courses in technology. In a video tutorial by D4Drupal, Saranya Ashok Kumar demonstrates how to create custom pagination in a custom module for Drupal 10, 9, and 8. Oliver Davies offers a free 7-day email course dedicated to automated testing and test-driven development in Drupal. The 4th episode of the LocalGov Drupal tutorial series focuses on deploying websites to the cloud using platform.sh. Selwyn Polit invites open collaboration on GitHub for a ready reckoner on Drupaling.
Read about Hux, a tool for managing hooks in Drupal website development. Lee Rowlands writes about PreviousNext's journey toward Drupal frontend nirvana by leveraging Vite, Twig, and Storybook. Bluedrop, a French Drupal agency, advocates conducting a 5-day design sprint to finalize UI/UX design for a Drupal project. The process involves understanding, drawing, deciding, prototyping, and testing.
Luca Lusso writes about the state of modules maintained by SparkFabrik. Allan Chappell writes about the significance of Composer, a dependency manager for PHP. The article published by Four Kitchens contextualizes Drupal projects wherein developers navigate the complexities when dealing with modules that haven't fully transitioned to the next major version of the Drupal framework.
'Beyond Blocks' podcast by Oliver Davies is a comparatively new podcast series about Drupal. The previous episode of the podcast features Niklas Franke, Digital Marketing Manager at Factorial. In it, the guest shares his rich experience organizing Splash awards in Germany.
'Beyond the Build' interview series by Drupal Associaton features Sean Keating from The Michael J. Fox Foundation and Jim Barnthouse from Specbee. Kelly Delaney, the Director of Development at Drupal Association, and Nathan Roach, Marketing Director at Axelerant did the interview. Watch the 3rd episode here.
Talking Drupal podcast episode #426 interviews Stephen Mustgrave about the Needs Review Queue Initiative. Meanwhile, Agiledrop has published an interview about the Next-Drupal project with John Faber, Managing Partner of Chapter Three. Next-Drupal aims to integrate the Next.js frontend with the Drupal backend.
Matt Glaman has shared his talk from Midcamp this year about porting top projects to Drupal 10. The major challenge here is maintaining support for Drupal 9.5 while dealing with deprecated code removed from Drupal 10.
Last but not least, check out the benefits of Drupal LTS (long-term support) from Vimal Joseph's blog post on Zyxware.
There are more stories available out there. But the compulsion to limit the selection of stories is forcing us to put a hard break on further exploration—happy Drupaling folks.
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Thank you,
Sincerely
Sebin Abraham Jacob
Editor in Chief, TheDropTimes.