Here's what I've been working on for my Drupal contributions this week. Thanks to Code Enigma for sponsoring the time to work on these.

Are you ready for 11?

Even though you may have just upgraded your current site to Drupal 10, there’s a new version that’s already here! Do you need to upgrade? If so, when?

Let's take a quick look at what 11.0 has to offer.

Do It This Week! 

Twin Cities Drupal Camp 2024 kicks off on September 12th-13th, on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. The deadline for Session Submission is only a week away on August 15th. You still have time to send in your session proposals to help create this event. 

We have received many great new sessions for Twin Cities Drupal Camp 2024. Read our the Blog post “Send Us Your Session” to find a sampler of accepted sessions and ideas from last year's camp.

Submitting Your Session is Easy 

Simply fill out the submission form with your session title, description, and any additional details you’d like to provide. 

Our session review team will go through all submissions in order to select a diverse and engaging lineup of sessions for Twin Cities Drupal Camp 2024. Sessions will be accepted on a rolling basis. This means you are more likely to get your session accepted if you send it in today! 

Submit a Session

A few weeks ago, we introduced the concept of "tracks" as the next step in progressing the Drupal Starshot project. Tracks are smaller, focused parts of the project that allow for targeted development and contributions.

At the same time, we put out a call for Starshot track leads, and were overwhelmed by the response. We received nearly 65 submissions, showcasing a wide range of expertise and ambitious vision that made for a difficult review process.

Announcing new track leads

We are proud to announce the newest track leads, who bring to the Starshot team an impressive depth of experience both in Drupal and in their respective track space:

• Laurens Van Damme from Dropsolid will be leading the Blog recipe track
• Jürgen Haas from LakeDrops will lead the Privacy track
• Christian López Espínola and Matthew Tift from Lullabot will lead the Dashboard track
• Jim Birch from Kanopi and John Doyle from Digital Polygon will lead the Sitewide SEO recipe track
• Jamie Abrahams from FreelyGive will lead the AI track
• Tony Barker from Annertech will lead the Media management track
• Baddy Sonja and the team at 1xinternet will lead the Advanced search track
• Gareth Alexander from Zoocha will lead the Accessibility tools track
• Dharizza Espinach and the team at Evolving Web will lead the Analytics track
• Pavlos Daniel from Acquia will lead the Multilingual content track

Although we announced the concurrent editing track, this is an aspirational feature that we would love to see but have postponed because it will depend heavily on Experience Builder.

Further opportunities with tracks

If you've read the Starshot strategy that Dries shared, you may have noticed that there are capabilities listed that do not yet have a track. We will be creating more tracks ongoing, to align with this strategy as the need arises (and as our capacity allows!).

There are also three existing tracks that we have not yet assigned a lead:

• Starshot documentation
• Contact form
• Content publishing workflows

If you are interested in leading one of these, make sure to review the issues for information about what we are aiming for, as well as the track lead role description. Your vision for the track, which need only be a short summary of how you plan to approach it, should take these into account when you submit an application. 

Next steps for tracks

For most tracks, the initial work will be to put together a proposal, which may require research to define the key requirements for our target persona and determine what feature parity with market leaders looks like. The proposals will be shared with the community for consultation.

We also expect track leads to provide regular progress updates, with the format and frequency still to be determined.

If you want to contribute to one of the tracks, or just follow along, keep an eye on the meta issues in the Starshot queue or post a comment to put your hand up.

There's no doubt that the ECA module is changing the way Drupal sites are built  - at least for those of us that use it regularly. I recently used it to pre-populate a form field on a node add page and it turned out to be easier than I figured it would be.

The task was to pass the value I wanted to pre-populate into the form via a query string variable. Something like:

https://mysite.ddev.site/node/add/article?myvalue=1

On the node add page, there exists an entity reference field whose value I'd like to pre populate with a value of 1 (myvalue). 

Modules required

Modules used in the following solution are:

• Token
• BPMN.iO for ECA
• ECA BPMN (part of ECA module)
• ECA Form (part of ECA module)
• ECA UI (part of ECA module)
• ECA Core (part of ECA module)

The Token module is required because the ECA model will access the myvalue query string value via a token. 

ECA components

The ECA Form module (a sub-module of ECA) provides the necessary components to achieve the goal. 

The Build Form event and the Form Field: Set Default Value task components are all that are needed. Configuration as follows:

Build Form event

• Restrict by form id: node-article-form
• Restrict by entity type ID: node
• Restrict by entity bundle: article

Form Field: Set Default Value task 

• Field name: field_linked_content
• Value: [current-page:query:myvalue]
   

Once the model is created and saved, enjoy the fruits of your labor!

Other potential solutions

Was ECA the only way to complete this task? Certainly not. A small custom module could be written to achieve the same goal. In addition, there's the Pre-populate and Entity prepopulate modules.

Why use an ECA-based solution then? If you're already using ECA on the project for something else, then I'd recommend this type of ECA solution in order to avoid adding an additional contrib module just for your pre-populating needs.
 

Here's what I've been working on for my LocalGov Drupal contributions this week. Thanks to Big Blue Door for sponsoring the time to work on these.

Drupal and AEM are two popular content management systems used by many companies. They offer advanced features for creating, editing, and publishing content but differ in many ways. In this article, we will compare Drupal to AEM to help you find the right CMS for your needs.

Next week I'm headed to DrupalGovCon 2024 to present on a brand new technique I created for hosting fast and reliable preview/test environments using DDEV and GitHub Actions.

DDEV supports what they call "Casual Hosting". With the right config tweaks, you can run multiple DDEV sites on a server for hosting sites on the internet.