A lively discussion at DrupalCon Lille 2023 hosted by SystemSeed
Alexey Beloglazov Tue, 10/24/2023 - 06:35
A little over a year ago, I ventured into the world of Drupal; a complex content management system. Despite making considerable progress in understanding its intricacies, it's widely acknowledged that Drupal presents a steep learning curve. To navigate this learning curve successfully, one must maintain unwavering dedication and find satisfaction in troubleshooting and problem-solving, which can provide a rewarding sense of achievement.
I was fortunate to have an exceptional team that provided a constant stream of knowledge, invaluable advice, and overall support in my pursuit of mastering Drupal. A significant milestone in my Drupal journey was the invitation to attend DrupalCon2023, a pivotal moment as it marked my first conference participation, entirely dedicated to my field of interest.
I'll admit that I felt apprehensive in the lead-up to Dries' keynote address, with doubts about my qualifications to be part of such a prestigious event nagging at me. However, my confidence had a steady revival following the opening ceremony and the initial conference keynote. The first session I attended provided an in-depth exploration of SearchAPI, which provides a quicker and more robust approach to formulating queries and has the potential to reduce reliance on Solr and enhance response times. Additionally, the discussion on the Gin Admin Theme held my attention. Remarkably, observing fellow attendees using Linux on their laptops further motivated me to expedite my laptop's development setup.
The collective experience at DrupalCon instilled a profound sense of community. It reinforced the commitment of remarkable individuals tirelessly working to improve Drupal and, by extension, making positive contributions to the broader world. Immersing myself in this environment was incredibly insightful, offering deep inspiration and motivation. Watching the collaborative brainstorming of like-minded individuals led to the formation of new ideas, which was a unique experience for me.
The event expanded my horizons, particularly in understanding the diverse potential of the applications of Drupal. It also deepened my appreciation of the open-source philosophy and has inspired me to endeavor to contribute back to the Drupal community.
I treasured the opportunity to strengthen my connections with colleagues, engage in collective sessions, and subsequently share insights from the various talks we attended.
This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.
Last week, approximately 1,300 Drupal enthusiasts came together in Lille, France for DrupalCon. In good tradition, I delivered my State of Drupal keynote, commonly referred to as the "Driesnote". You can watch the video of my keynote or download my slides (264 MB).
This keynote was unlike any other. I narrated a fairy tale that explores how the Drupal community is working together to simplify the process of starting, building, and maintaining Drupal websites. Yes, you read that correctly – a fairy tale. However, rest assured, it's a fairy tale with a happy ending.
If you're keen to experience the full magic of the Drupal fairy tale, I highly recommend watching the video instead of reading this blog post. And if you want to avoid any spoilers, stop reading here.
As the speaker, I took the audience on a journey that started with my discovery of a mysterious book related to Drupal. The book uses an analogy to explain Drupal as a character living in the Drupal Village. This village is full of different types of houses, from cozy cottages to grand estates. In this bustling village, ambitious villagers work together to construct and take care of their homes.
The Drupal villagers cherish core values such as creativity, flexibility, scalability, accessibility, collaboration, empowerment, security, and freedom.
In the Drupal Village, a young builder grows frustrated with the challenges of constructing and maintaining homes. Driven by curiosity about alternative approaches, the young builder makes the bold decision to leave Drupal Village and embark on a journey to neighboring towns. Their hope was to uncover if there were superior methods for homebuilding.
The Drupal character leaves on a journey to visit nearby villages.
Drupal, our central character, decides to follow the young builder, embarking on a journey that takes them to four unique villages: Reactopia, Contentville, Squarix, and Edoby Heights. Along the way, Drupal gathers valuable insights from each of these unique villages. Despite uncovering some of their shortcomings, Drupal also came to understand why these villages hold allure for young builders.
Summary of lessons learned from Drupal's visits to Reactopia, Contentville, Squarix, and Edoby Heights.
Learning from the strengths of these four villages, the Drupal character realizes that for Drupal Village to prosper, it must offer an exceptional builder experience. Furthermore, through their visits to these four villages, our main character developed a clear idea of what an exceptional experience might look like. With a clear goal in mind, Drupal decides to simplify the process of starting, building, and maintaining homes in the Drupal Village.
Drupal understands that for the Drupal Village to prosper, the builder's experience must be exceptional: it should be simpler to get started, easier to build, and effortless to maintain.
Drupal brings together some of the most skilled craftspeople from the community to meet at a nearby atelier called OuiWork. Within this collaborative space, initiative leaders Tim Plunkett (Acquia), Cristina Chumillas (Lullabot), and Lauri Eskola (Acquia) shared valuable insights about the work they are doing.
In practical terms, I discussed the significance of the Project Browser and Automatic Updates Initiatives. These initiatives serve to streamline the process of starting and maintaining your Drupal sites. Our goal is to include Automatic Updates and Project Browser into Drupal 10.3, scheduled to be released in June 2024. Achieving this milestone will be the culmination of over a decade of dedicated effort. I believe Drupal's Automatic Updates and Project Browser will be both the most advanced and most security-conscious tools of their kind among all PHP applications.
I also highlighted various efforts to make it easier to build with Drupal. This includes improvements in content modeling features (watch video segment) and enhancements to Drupal's administration toolbar (watch video segment). This work not only follows a design-first approach but also showcases our ability to make rapid progress, underscoring changes in the way we work and collaborate.
Drupal announces a new strategic initiative: a Next Generation Page Builder.
Lastly, I introduced a new strategic initiative aimed at improving the user experience for building pages with Drupal (watch video segment). The initiative is called Next Generation Page Builder and focuses on improving Drupal's layout builder, which was first introduced in Drupal 8.
The Closed Web proponents casting dark clouds over Drupal Village.
After working on improving the builder experience, the Drupal character returns home to discover Drupal Village shrouded in dark clouds. These ominous clouds are the work of the Closed Web advocates, sinister figures in the story. Hope arrives in the form of a visit from Fairy Godfather Tim Berners-Lee. The visit inspires Drupal to become an unwavering promoter and protector of the Open Web. In the morning, the Drupal character takes it upon themselves to write the Open Web Manifesto. This seminal document binds the entire community to a shared commitment: the creation of a digital future that is more accessible and inclusive for all.
Drupal seeks the assistance of three sorcerers with magical (marketing) powers.
Sadly, the Open Web Manifesto alone can't clear away the dark clouds created by the Closed Web advocates. As the dark clouds creep closer and obscure the village, Drupal seeks help from three powerful sorcerers. The sorcerers use their magic to dispel the dark clouds, unveiling the remarkable work occurring in Drupal Village to the entire world.
In reality, the "sorcerers" are the Drupal Marketing Committee. Their mission is to shine a light on Drupal, promoting it to showcase the impressive work being done. The goal is to encourage more individuals to consider Drupal over closed web solutions, who often have significant resources for marketing themselves.
The Drupal Association launched a Drupal Marketing Committee after DrupalCon Pittsburgh. Comprising seasoned marketing professionals like Lynne Capozzi (former Acquia CMO), Suzanne Dergacheva(Evolving Web), Nikhil Deshpande (State of Georgia), and more, this committee is developing a marketing strategy for Drupal – a first in Drupal's 20+ year history. I had the honor of conducting an on-stage interview with them during my keynote (watch video segment), where they discussed the importance of marketing for Drupal and how it might impact the Drupal community.
We're committed to investing in Drupal's marketing efforts in the next few years. While the full marketing plan will be unveiled towards the end of this year, expect to see things like:
The Drupal Marketing Committee welcomes all Drupal community members to participate in our marketing efforts.
In the end, our main character, Drupal, commits to three important promises:
With these promises in motion, the dark clouds fade. As they clear, the village's future sparkles with newfound hope, and the eager young builder returns home.
The Drupal Village celebrates after the clouds vanished. Finally the world can see what a great place it is for ambitious villagers.
Last but not least, I want to thank everyone who made DrupalCon Lille a tremendous success. I always come away inspired and full of ideas, and this year is no exception. Here is to a long and prosperous future for Drupal Village and all of its ambitious villagers! I look forward to sharing future chapters of the fairy tale as we continue to grow our community and software together!
— Dries Buytaert
Retrofit for Drupal now has documentation to explain what Drupal 7 hooks and APIs are supported. Retrofit for Drupal provides backward compatibility layers to run legacy Drupal 7 code in your sites using Drupal 10 and beyond. The problem, however, is anyone evaluating Retrofit for Drupal has had to take time to give it a test run and "see what happens." The documentation explains the various backward compatibility layers.
First, let's start with the most exciting part of the updates. The dedicated team working on Policy-Based Access has successfully completed the work. Kristiaan Van den Eynde has been a pleasure to work with and has always been very responsive. Here is Kristiaan's own update:
The Access Policy API is ready to be committed and was integrated into core with zero test fails. It will revolutionize how contribution access modules are able to interact with the access layer.
While we wait for core maintainers to have a thorough look at it, we still have budget left to follow up on the merge requests until completion
The core committer team is already informed, so it’s just a question of waiting and, if necessary, responding to any reviews.
We have received an extensive update from Brad, which I’ll reproduce next.
The initiative to implement JSON data storage and introduce an MVP for core field schema support is proceeding on schedule, perhaps even a little ahead. While I had initially intended to work mostly on schemas in the first half of the project, I gained early momentum on JSON data type and ran with it. This is the most complex part of the project, so it’s promising to be more than halfway done with the truly “hard stuff.”
Of specific interest to those who are looking forward to JSON data type support is our handling of database indices. (Thank you to @daffie for his early guidance on this.) I also received some excellent suggestions by a community member who wishes to be a silent helper. As a result, I was able to include auto-magical creation of generated columns for indexing frequently-used jsonpath expressions, which will then be used as indices. It turns out there is quite a bit of variation between core’s supported database drivers on indexing, but we are largely abstracting away this complexity.
The use of jsonpath expression in query conditions necessitates that we add a new condition method, ::jsonCondition(), to the DB abstraction layer. I would love to get more community feedback on the ergonomics of this new syntax.
As I’ve spent the bulk of the first half of the project deep in the weeds of the database API, I haven’t worked as much on schemas, but have switched focus around our project mid-point. The bulk of this work will be in contrib-land, with the exception of the addition of a “schematic normalizer” interface to core.
I welcome community help and suggestions on all the above and appreciate the advice and support by those who have already contributed. - Brad Jones
PreviousNext has been regularly sharing updates on their project. Below, we have highlighted their recent progress. For a quick summary in video format, we recommend watching their demo to get an overview of the current status at this link.
September updates:
October updates:
For a more in-depth understanding of their progress, be sure to check out their blog posts:
Brian Perry, lead of this initiative, shared the following update:
We're making good progress on our vertical slice Proof of Concept (POC)
As of right now half of the issues under that meta issue are complete, and all of the remaining issues have open PRs. That puts us slightly behind schedule, but we seem to be closing the gap a bit.
The slide deck for the First-Time Contributor Workshop is now drafted and scripted, designed with accessibility in mind. It serves as a flexible template that can be tailored to suit the specific requirements of the event where it will be presented.
The Mentoring team presented this version on Tuesday, 17 October, at DrupalCon Lille, after which they will make any necessary iterations.
The team has started working on the starter theme, and a demo with the work in progress is scheduled soon. At the moment, the Drupal Association is helping arrange meetings with Automattic and beginning to plan workshops that will take place in the next few months.
A group conversation at DrupalCon Lille 2023
Branimir Juranić Tue, 10/24/2023 - 06:04