Authored by: Nadiia Nykolaichuk 

The administrative navigation toolbar is an essential piece in the puzzle of your website’s overall capability to boost website management tasks. It serves as the guiding compass for your team, leading them across the administrative sections quickly and confidently. To achieve this, the toolbar needs to be intuitive, visually clear, straightforward, logically organized, and well-positioned.

Create subsites with a different look and feel to the rest of your LocalGov Drupal website.

Every e-commerce platform is different and comes with its own unique and specific needs. Some can use simple ready-made tools, while others need special software made just for them. New trends like smart personalization, easy shopping on phones, and caring for the environment are also important for online shops.

To help businesses achieve personalized website goals, Drupal comes into the scene. It's like a toolbox that lets you build your online store just the way you want. Drupal commerce is great because it's flexible and lets you try out new ideas. But there’s more to it. 

Today, we'll learn more about what makes Drupal Commerce special, like its features and how it's built.

Welcome back to “Skills Upgrade” a Talking Drupal mini-series following the journey of a D7 developer learning D10. This is episode 4.

• Review Chad's goals for the previous week

  • Install Drush
  • Setup git repo
  • Examples module

• Review Chad's questions

  • .gitignore
  • Core file naming

• Tasks for the upcoming week

  • Reminder of the capstone goal: create MR for new automated test in contrib module.
  • Examples module: field_example. New RGB field type with formatter and widgets. Focus on stuff in field_example/src/Plugin/Field
    • Background info on Plugins: https://www.drupal.org/docs/drupal-apis/plugin-api
    • Focus on the following sections:
      • https://www.drupal.org/docs/drupal-apis/plugin-api/plugin-api-overview
      • https://www.drupal.org/docs/drupal-apis/plugin-api/why-plugins
      • https://www.drupal.org/docs/drupal-apis/plugin-api/annotations-based-plugins

Chad's Drupal 10 Learning Curriclum & Journal Chad's Drupal 10 Learning Notes

The Linux Foundation is offering a discount of 30% off e-learning courses, certifications and bundles with the code, all uppercase DRUPAL24 and that is good until June 5th https://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification-catalog/

AmyJune Hineline - @volkswagenchick

Chad Hester - chadkhester.com @chadkhest Mike Anello - DrupalEasy.com @ultimike

The story of how I came to present at Drupal Camp Florida 2024 began in the previous year, with what someone called my “Dharizza World Tour”! I attended Drupal events in six cities throughout 2023, and ended up being invited to several more as a result. 

At DrupalCon Lille in October 2023, I presented a session on how to improve the Layout Builder user experience. In the audience was Michael Herchel, a member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors and lead developer of Olivero. He and Amy June Hineline (a Drupal core mentor and A11yTalks organizer) invited me to bring my Layout Builder session to the next Florida DrupalCamp. 

That camp was last week, and the official start to Dharizza World Tour 2024! In this blog post, I’ll catch you up on the talks I attended as well as some fun experiences from the camp (featuring rockets and fake animals, oddly!). 

Friday, February 23

Presenting to a big crowd (and one unlikely guest)

The DrupalCamp kicked off at Florida Technical College with several training sessions, including one from Lisa Ridley on how to make designer-developer collaboration easier. She had some excellent advice on leveraging FIGMA features and plugins for effective design implementations. 

I spent the morning preparing for my upcoming session while my teammates Nikolay, Jesse, Josh and Robert set up our booth. That afternoon I presented to a packed room at Florida Technical College—including a skeleton at the back of the class! Luckily, the skeleton was the only attendee who wasn’t lively.

Everyone shared notes about how we’re using Layout Builder. We discussed its pros, cons, and alternatives. We also talked about how to configure modules to improve the user experience, including Layout Builder Browser and Layout Builder Restrictions. And we tried out Layout Builder operation links, save and edit, instant preview, and Gin. By the end of the session we focused on developing Layout Plugins, either with only updates to *.layouts.yml file or by creating classes for them. It was a great time!

With DrupalCamp wrapped up for the day, I joined my teammates at the unofficial after-party, which went from Bounce House to Lazy Moon and back to Bounce House again. We had a blast meeting new friends and seeing familiar faces. The night was made particularly special thanks to a huge, yellow, almost-full moon. We even found out there was going to be a rocket launch on Saturday.  

The night ended and we arrived at the house we were staying at—only to be greeted by an enormous taxidermy deer on the wall! I’m not sure if it was real, but it was definitely creepy. After the initial surprise wore off, we named him Luke and began to treat him as one of us. He even featured in our plans and goodbyes!

Saturday, February 23

Lessons about talent and opportunity

On Saturday we arrived early for a jam-packed day that kicked off with the Opening Session led by the camp’s organizers, Mike Herchel, Amy June Hineline and Adam Varn.

Next, I listened to Matt Glaman present on the opportunities of open source. He told the story of how he went from transporting beer to becoming a top Drupal contributor! Did you know he created Retrofit? It’s a project that you can use to run your Drupal 7 code in Drupal 10 while you fill the gaps and actually get them ported. (Matt ran a session on Retrofit the next day, where he explained how to contribute to the project). 

One of my favourite moments was when Matt said: “Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.” I think that’s a powerful message. There are lots of talented people out there that haven’t yet had the opportunity to shine. But open source can help with that: it empowers people to develop and show off their skills, helping them advance both their career and the open web. Matt highlighted the importance of lifting people up through mentorship and friendship.

Meanwhile, Rod Martin presented a session on Advanced Layout Builder for the Ambitious Site Builder. He created a starter site that anyone can spin up and test out to help them develop their Layout Builder skills. 

At 11am it was time for our own Jesse Dyck to present ‘What Non-Developers Should Know About Content Migration’. Jesse spoke to a full room on how to develop a migration plan, common migration challenges, how to ask your team the right questions, and how to anticipate and fix issues. 

At the same time, Matthew Ramir gave insight into his personal story in ‘Code, Cerebral Palsy, and Compassion: My Journey into Tech’. He spoke about his history, struggles, and triumphs, and even shared some of his poetry! We learned about the importance of opportunities, diversity, acceptance and self-acceptance. It was a truly inspiring talk. 

After lunch at Gringos Locos (our DrupalCamp Florida tradition), it was time for our own Nikolay Volodin to share the case study of a custom CKEditor 5 plugin that he developed at Evolving Web. He dissected the plugin for the audience to identify its parts and explain how they behave and interact. 

Meanwhile, Aubrey Sambor, Florida Drupal Camp Featured Speaker, took to the auditorium stage to talk about Color in CSS—including using new spaces, functions and techniques to make your site shine. Ana Laura Coto and Carlos Ospina led a session about Building the IXP Fellowship, a new initiative for onboarding inexperienced developers.

Next, it was our Robert Ngo’s turn to present. He delivered a session to a packed room about building a component library with single directory components (SDCs). But it wasn't the usual “how to” format. Instead, he explored the strategy behind the way we structure SDCs, how to define conventions with development and design teams, how to evolve a component library, and how to test it.

We wrapped up the day with a few lightning talks, as well as a session from Ofer Shaal on how to quickly create web components for reuse across React, Angular, Vue, Drupal and other CMSs.

Evening brought the camp’s official after party. It was fantastic to spend more time with our Drupal friends, both new and old. Sadly the rocket launch was delayed. We were also hoping to see some ‘gators, but all we found was a huge fake one with a sign that said “Swampies”! We decided that was good enough—and certainly a less dangerous photo opportunity.

Sunday, February 24

Wrapping up the weekend with a different kind of launch

Time passes fast when you’re having fun and that’s how Sunday found us. We packed our luggage and waved goodbye to Luke the taxidermy deer, before heading back to Florida Technical College for a last day of sessions and contributions events. 

First up were Matt Glaman and Darren Oh from the Retrofit project, who troubleshooted and live coded to show how to run D7 code in D10. At the same time, Kyle Einecker cleared up the meaning of coupled and decoupled Drupal. 

A contrib learning extravaganza happened at 11am in the auditorium, where Amy June and Mike Anello showed people how to contribute through code, documentation, project managing, and everything Drupal related. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to stay for the afternoon due to allergies. But my team members enjoyed the contrib afternoon—and even got to witness the rocket launch!

Thanks to everyone who made DrupalCamp 2024 possible. If you didn’t make it to the camp, I hope this article gives you some insight and inspires you to attend the next one. The “Swampies” and I will see you there!

Looking for more events that focus on open source innovation? Check out the EvolveDrupal summit! 

Ensure your Drupal websites run smoothly. Gander documentation walks you through setting up and using the performance testing framework.

Today we are talking about Violinist.io, Managing Composer Dependencies, and automation with guest Eirik Morland. We’ll also cover Composer Patches as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/443 Topics

• What is Violinist.io
• How does it work
• How much technical knowledge do you need
• Is this a security risk
• How much does it cost
• Patron question: Peter: Difference between violinist and dependabot
• What are the major differences in plans
• Who is the ideal user
• Can you self host
• Can this help with Drupal 11 readiness
• Complementary tools
• Notable users
• Why did you start this
• What is it like using Drupal for a SAAS
• Is it open source
• Pros and cons of open source for a SAAS
• How can the community support
• What is on the roadmap

Resources

• Violinist.io
• Violinist on D.o

Guests

    Eirik Morland - violinist.io eiriksm

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu Anna Mykhailova - kalamuna.com amykhailova

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

• Brief description:
• Have you ever wanted a simple way to manage patches to Drupal core and your contrib projects? There’s a composer plugin for that
• Module name/project name:
• https://github.com/cweagans/composer-patches
• Composer Patches
• Brief history
• How old:created in Apr 2015 by Cameron Weagans
• Versions available: 1.7.3 and 2.0.0-beta2
• Maintainership
• Actively maintained, beta2 release was a little over a month ago
• Test coverage
• Has a documentation site, as well as a COMMANDS markdown file in the repo to help you get started
• Number of open issues: 10, 2 of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
• It’s been installed over 42 million times and it’s approaching 43 thousand installs per day, according to a recent blog post
• Module features and usage
• Using the plugin is simple, you require cweagans/composer-patches the same way you would a Drupal contrib project. The important difference is that composer will ask you if you trust composer-patches to make changes to your codebase. Once you grant that, the plugin is ready to start applying patches
• You can specify what patches you want applied by adding a patches section to the extra section of your project’s composer.json file, or by adding a patches.json file
• Each patch can be specified using a URL or a path relative to the JSON file
• In theory it’s possible to have composer patches pulled directly from the diff in a merge request, but this is a significant security risk and should always be avoided
• The first beta release for the 2.0 branch actually dropped support for dependency patch resolution, noting that it had become the source of most support requests. In the end the community made it clear that they would resist upgrading without this capability, so the most recent beta2 release adds it back in.
•     Finally, on his website cweagans.net Cameron mentions that he’s currently looking for full-time employment. So if your organization relies heavily on composer in general or composer-patches specifically, consider reaching out to him