A year ago, Dries Buytaert set his sights on the stars — quite literally. Announcing the Starshot Initiative at DrupalCon Portland 2024, he likened the project to the historic Apollo 11 Moonshot, leaving the audience both awestruck and inspired.
It has been over two months since Drupal 7 reached end-of-life (EOL) on 5 January 2025. Official support and security updates have ceased, yet thousands of organizations, businesses, and government agencies continue to rely on Drupal 7 to power critical websites.
For many, the transition to a newer platform has been delayed due to budget constraints, resource limitations, or the complexity of migrating custom-built Drupal 7 applications. With no further security updates, the urgency to find a solution is growing.
The end of official Drupal 7 support means:
Organizations still running Drupal 7 have a few paths forward:
Migrating to Drupal 10 is the ideal long-term solution. However, for many organizations, this is a complex and time-intensive process that cannot happen overnight.
Some organizations attempt to reduce attack surfaces by limiting access to their Drupal 7 sites, disabling unnecessary features, or moving behind firewalls. However, this does not eliminate security risks, particularly for sites that remain publicly accessible.
For organizations that cannot migrate immediately but need continued security updates and compliance assurances, HeroDevs’ Drupal 7 Never-Ending Support (NES) provides an effective solution.
HeroDevs offers ongoing security updates for Drupal 7, ensuring that critical vulnerabilities are patched—even though official support has ended. With Drupal 7 NES, organizations can:
The EOL deadline has passed, and unsupported Drupal 7 sites face growing security and compliance risks. If your organization is still running Drupal 7, it is time to take action.
HeroDevs’ Drupal 7 NES provides a seamless, secure solution while you plan your migration. Don’t leave your site vulnerable—contact us today to learn how we can help.
Effective integration with cloud services can significantly enhance the success of your Drupal-based website. Drupal is a powerful content management system, particularly when it comes to leveraging cloud technology.
Our Golems team can confidently say that effective and competent integration with cloud services can bring colossal success to your Drupal-based website. This powerful platform has amazing capabilities for interacting with the most popular "clouds."
Introduction Accordions are a popular UI design pattern used in web and app interfaces to present content in an organized, user-friendly manner. They consist of collapsible sections that expand when clicked, allowing users to reveal relevant information without overwhelming the screen with too much content at once. Why are accordions useful in web design? Accordions help designers manage content efficiently, improving usability and readability by reducing clutter. They are particularly effective for structuring frequently accessed but secondary information, such as FAQs, product descriptions, and navigation menus. By keeping content hidden until needed, accordions enhance the user experience while making interfaces more intuitive and accessible.The Content First approach comes from content strategy and UX design. It means building websites around the content they need to deliver, not around a visual design.
Instead of starting with wireframes or templates, teams begin by identifying what content users need—then create structure, layout, and code that supports it.
This approach helps avoid misalignment between content and design. It also improves usability, because content is what users come for. The design exists to support that content, not to shape it in isolation.
But in practice, applying Content First often gets blocked by basic issues—like accessing and working with the actual content on a live page. That’s where the Content First module comes in.
Content First developed as a response to design-led processes that treated content as filler.
In traditional workflows, designers would build full layouts using placeholder text (like Lorem Ipsum). Content creators would then write copy to fit those templates. This created problems:
Content First flips this. The key…
Today we are talking about Our Favorite things and The Future of Drupal with guest Jared Ponchot & Dave Hansen-Lange.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/495
TopicsDave Hansen-Lange - linkedin.com dalin Jared Ponchot - lullabot.com jponch
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu Andrew Berry - lullabot.com deviantintegral
Now that the lanyards are packed and the Slack threads have cooled off, it's worth asking-what actually mattered at DrupalCon Atlanta?
From a layman's point of view, one of the most practical announcements was the launch of a new desktop installer for Drupal CMS. It quietly lowers the barrier for new users by removing the friction of local setup-something long overdue. The pre-beta of Experience Builder was another key moment, revealing Drupal's low-code future. While still in early shape, it signals a shift toward visual control and editor-friendly workflows. The power of AI Agents was also showcased once more-automating tasks like site building and content migration and hinting at where productivity could be headed.
From CKEditor 5 updates to Recipe-based site building, sessions focused on simplifying what's traditionally been complex. Governance in multi-site operations and documentation initiatives also got thoughtful attention-showing how Drupal is working to scale both technically and organizationally. The conversations weren't just about code; they were about coordination.
Dries Buytaert's keynote (the DriesNote) cut to the core of the issue: power is no longer enough-Drupal has to get easier to use. The message wasn't hand-wavy optimism but grounded in the need for better onboarding, cleaner UX, and broader accessibility. Drupal CMS 2.0 and Experience Builder 1.0 are both expected by DrupalCon Vienna in October 2025, setting a clear timeline for that next step forward.
Add to that the announcement of future DrupalCons-Asia in November 2025 at Nara Japan, and North America in March 2026 at Chicago, US-and it's clear the community is thinking ahead. The roadmap isn't just about features; it's about focus. Now it's on all of us to keep that momentum moving.
We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.
To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.
Thank you,
Sincerely
Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.
jeremy.chinquist
Mon, 07/08/2024 - 13:28
If you do not use a CI/CD pipeline, we highly recommend it. For the past several years our team has set up projects in a CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins or Github actions. The tools that we will present in this session have proven to be a good set of automated testing tools for several projects. Over time we have chosen to move away from previous solutions and to new testing frameworks. As part of our commitment to high standards of performance and quality, we are always on the lookout for the best tools available on the market.Three months ago, we launched Drupal CMS 1.0, our biggest step forward in years. Our goal is ambitious: to reimagine Drupal as both radically easier to use and a platform for faster innovation.
In my DrupalCon Atlanta keynote last week, I reflected on the journey so far, but mostly talked about the work ahead. If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below, or download my slides (56 MB).
If you want to try Drupal CMS, you can explore the trial experience, use the new desktop launcher, or install it with DDEV. If you're curious about what we're working on next, keep reading.
Some of the most common requests from Drupal users and digital agencies is a better page-building experience, simpler theming, and high-quality themes out of the box.
At DrupalCon Atlanta, I shared our progress on Experience Builder. The keynote recording includes two demos: one highlighting new site building features, and another showing how to create and design components directly in the browser.
I also demonstrated how Drupal's AI agents can generate Experience Builder components. While this was an early design experiment, it offered a glimpse into how AI could make site building faster and more intuitive. You can watch that demo in the keynote video as well.
We still have work to do, but we're aiming to release Experience Builder 1.0, the first stable version, by DrupalCon Vienna. In the meantime, try our demo release.
One of the biggest opportunities for Drupal CMS is making it faster and easier to launch a complete website. The introduction of Recipes was a big step forward. I covered Recipes in detail in my DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 keynote. But there is still more we can do.
Imagine quickly creating a campaign or fundraising site for a nonprofit, a departmental website for a university, a portfolio site for a creative agency, or even a travel-focused ecommerce site selling tours, like the one Sarah needed in the DrupalCon Barcelona demo.
This is why we are introducing Site Templates: ready-made starting points for common use cases. They help users go from a fresh install to a fully functional site with minimal setup or configuration.
Site Templates are made possible by Recipes and Experience Builder. Recipes provide higher-level building blocks, while Experience Builder introduces a new way to design and create themes. Site Templates will bring everything together into more complete, ready-to-use solutions.
If successful, Site Templates could replace Drupal distributions, a concept that has been part of Drupal for nearly 20 years. The key advantage is that Site Templates are much easier to build and maintain.
The first Site Templates may be included directly in Drupal CMS 2.0 itself. Over time, we hope to offer hundreds of site templates through a marketplace on Drupal.org.
At DrupalCon Atlanta, I announced that we'll be exploring a marketplace for Site Templates, including the option for Commercial Site Templates. We believe it's an idea worth evaluating because it could bring several benefits to the Drupal project:
You can watch the keynote recording to learn more. I also plan to publish a detailed blog post in the next few days. If you're interested, consider subscribing to my blog.
Drupal CMS has brought a lot of fresh momentum to the Drupal project, but we're not done yet! The rest of this year, we'll keep building on this foundation with a clear set of priorities:
If you have time and interest, please consider getting involved. Every contribution makes a difference. Not sure where to begin? Join us on Drupal Slack. We're always happy to welcome new faces. Key channels include #drupal-cms-development, #ai, #experience-builder, #drupal-cms-templates, and #drupal-cms-marketplace.
As I said in the keynote: We have all the pieces, now we just need to bring them together!