Open source, sometimes you keep up with the notifications, and sometimes the notifications keep up with you.
Drupal 11.2 alpha phase begins May 7
In preparation for the minor release, Drupal 11.2.x will enter the alpha phase the week of May 7, 2025. Core developers should plan to complete changes that are only allowed in minor releases prior to the alpha release.
The 11.2.0-alpha1 deadline for most core patches is May 7, 2025.
The 10.6.x release branch of core will be created for the next maintenance minor release.
Developers and site owners can begin testing the alpha after its release.
The 11.2.x release branch of core will be created before the alpha is tagged. Future feature and API additions will continue to be targeted against the main development branch, 11.x.
After 11.2.x is branched but before 11.2.0-alpha1 is tagged, alpha experimental modules will be removed from the 11.2.x codebase. Their development will continue in 11.x only.
Following the release of Drupal 11.2 and 10.5, only security issues will be fixed in Drupal 11.1 and 10.4. Additionally, Drupal 11.0 and 10.3 will become end-of-life (EOL).
During the alpha phase, core issues will be committed according to the following policy:
Roughly two weeks after the alpha release, the first beta release will be created. All the restrictions of the alpha release apply to beta releases as well. The release of the first beta is a firm deadline for all feature and API additions. Once the beta commit freeze begins, issues in the Reviewed & Tested by the Community (RTBC) queue will be committed to the next minor release only.
The release candidate phase will begin the week of June 2.
See the Drupal core release process overview, the Drupal core release schedule, allowed changes during the Drupal 10 and 11 release cycles, and Drupal 10 and 11 backwards compatibility and internal API policy for more information.
Today we are talking about Drupal Forge, how it works, and why it’s changing Drupal with guest Darren Oh. We’ll also cover ECA VBO as our module of the week.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/497
TopicsDarren Oh - drupalforge.org Darren Oh
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Kathy Beck - kbeck303
MOTW CorrespondentMartin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Seven years ago, I wrote a post about a tiny experiment: publishing my phone's battery status to my website. The updates have quietly kept coming ever since, showing up at https://dri.es/status.
Every 20 minutes or so, my phone sends its battery level and charging state to a REST endpoint on my Drupal site. Timing depends on iOS background scheduling, which has a mind of its own.
For years, this lived quietly at https://dri.es/status. I never linked to it outside the original blog post, so it felt like a forgotten corner of my site. Still working, but mostly invisible.
Even after seven years, people still mention it from time to time. So I decided to bring it out of hiding.
I added a battery icon to my site's header. It's a dynamically generated SVG that reflects my phone's battery level and charging state.
It's a little goofy. But that's the fun of having a personal website–you get to make it yours.
I've always been drawn to working with images, and when responsive images came onto the scene, I dove deep into learning everything I could about them.
I've written extensively about Responsive images if you need a refresher, but today, let's focus on modern image formats. In particular, WebP.
WebP is a modern image format developed by Google that provides superior compression and quality compared to traditional formats like JPEG and PNG. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, transparency, and animation, making it a versatile choice for web images. WebP helps improve website performance by reducing file sizes, which leads to faster loading times and better user experience.
Since 2020, all major browsers support WebP. (Check caniuse for details). My site, this site, uses WebP exclusively for most images and although it is not a big site, I still see performance improvements.
You would think that a big upgrade like this would be a complex task but you'll be surprised to learn that enabling WebP for new and existing images in Drupal is straightforward. Let's quickly go over the steps.
Edit each of your image styles and add the Convert effect.
Fig. 1: Selecting the Convert effect for an image style.
Select and add the WebP format to the image style.
Fig. 2: Adding the WebP format to an image style.
That's it!
Fun fact!: WebP support was introduced to Drupal core in Drupal 9.2.0, which was released on June 16, 2021. Before this core integration, WebP support in Drupal was only available through contributed modules or custom code. The inclusion in core made the format's benefits available to all Drupal 9.2+ sites without requiring additional modules.
I did a quick and simple test to show the difference in file size when adding a typical JPEG image to an article, then converting it to WebP using the steps above. The test was done in Drupal 10.x.
Using a JPEG image on an article node, shows a file size of 289kb.
Fig. 3: Example shows using a JPEG format.
After converting the imag eto Webp by updating the image style of that image, the file size was reduced to 76kb. That's about 60% file size reduction.
Fig. 3: Example shows using a WebP format.
NOTE: This was a pretty basic comparison test. File size reduction will vary depending on original file zize, format, and other preferences on your site.
The Avif image format is also a great option with many benefits. The browser support is really good at the time of this post (See caniuse), and it's worth looking into it as an alternative to WebP, or even combining the two depending on your media needs.
It's all about the small wins. This one is pretty simple but can provide significant performance benefits. Give it a try!