At Electric Citizen, we have long partnered with clients in higher education – from large universities to community colleges. 

That's why we're excited to be sponsoring this year's HighEdWeb conference, dedicated to the intersection of web professionals and higher ed. From Oct 8th to 11th, 2023, we'll be at booth #300 in the exhibit hall.  

This will be our first in-person visit to Buffalo, NY, and we can't wait. Stop by our booth to chat about what our team can do your organization, from strategy and design to web development and ongoing support. We're a team of Drupal experts and open-source enthusiasts, with over 11 years experience in partnering in the education space. Plus we have some fun swag to give away.

For those who can make it, I hope to see you there!

While pursuing higher education is known for its challenges, have you ever considered the intricacies of managing a higher education institution? The massive volume of files, student records, databases, and other elements can quickly spiral into disarray.

Today we are talking about Inclusive Hiring Practices, Disability Employment Awareness Month, and tips to improve your hiring practices with our guest Donna Bungard. We’ll also cover Organigrams as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/418

• When is National Disability Awareness Month
• What is the definition of Inclusive in this context
• Why are inclusive hiring practices important
• Have organizations been doing well with this
• What is disclosure and how can it impact people
• What can organizations do to be more inclusive
• What tools can be used to improve hiring practices
• Whose responsibility is it to address issues
• Any closing thoughts

National Disability Employment Awareness Month Snow shovel cartoon Curb-cut effect

Race after technology Center for accessible technology Apple assistive tech

Donna Bungard - @dbungard

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Jen Lampton - jenlampton.com - jenlampton

Martin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu Organigrams

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever needed a way to define and display an org chart on your Drupal website? There’s a module for that.
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2016 by PatrickScheffer
  • Versions available: 7.x-1.3, 8.x-1.3, and 8.x-2.3 versions, the last two of which can be used with Drupal 8, 9, and 10
• Maintainership
  • Maintenance fixes only
• Number of open issues:
  • 2 issues, neither are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • 377 sites
• Module features and usage
  • The module works by extending core’s taxonomy hierarchy management
  • You can organize who reports to who with a simple drag-and-drop, the same as any taxonomy hierarchy. For anyone who hasn’t used those, it would be basically the same as managing a menu structure
  • Once created, an organigram can be viewed as a dedicated page, a block, and a token
  • The 2.x branch uses Flexbox to achieve a CSS-only presentation that removes the need for any Javascript
  • Appears to have been built to serve the needs of the Dutch House of Representatives
  • I haven’t tested it, but I suspect that for a site with a very large organigram they need to build, tools like Client Side Hierarchical Select, built to make managing large taxonomies easier, are likely to work with Organigrams too

The internet is full of noise—by noise, I mean distraction. Many silly videos eat our time, making us idle and less productive. I confess, I, too, fall prey to it. One such day, while scrolling through YouTube shorts, this video came to my screen, wherein a person is seen cutting open a tree trunk, and lots of catfish fall through the openings.

How the fish climbed the tree and hid inside the trunk is not very genius to share. It was right after a flood, and when the flood water rose, those catfish could find a good hideout inside the tree through some crevice made by a woodpecker. But as the water receded, they couldn't get themselves out. As we know, catfish can survive with little water, and fortunately, the hollow tree was holding enough water for them to stay until the apocalypse came!

There is this saying often attributed to Albert Einstein, who supposedly remarked,

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid."

Like many other bogus quotes around education and personal genius, we can be sure that Einstein might never have said so. But then, there won't be any memes!

The two things I said have no direct connection with each other. The first one might be a staged video by content creators. The second one can at least be used as an allegory, even though the attribution is way off. But could a fish end up in a tree? Is climbing a tree an attribute of a fish? 

Of course, I am not discounting Climbing Gouramies and Mudskippers. There would always be anomalies. And there are urban legends! We are neither. 

The Drop Times is a news portal that celebrates everything good happening around Drupal. We aspire to be the voice of Drupal, reaching out to the wider world outside the Drupal Community. We are not an inward-looking medium but an outreach programme to promote the product and the community.

Communities function based on consensus among various stakeholders. They would have diverse political and cultural leanings, often contradictory. The presence of a mechanism that allows people to fall in line around a common minimum program sets apart a functioning community from those that don’t. It is like a school of fish, a flock of birds, or a swarm of bees that act as a single organism larger than the constituent units.

We align with the values that the Drupal community upholds. At the same time, we would like to limit ourselves to our primary mandate of celebrating Drupal both within and outside the community. We are also not geared towards anything other than this. We rest assured that the Drupal community is a mature FOSS community with formal mechanisms in place to address the different issues it runs into.

We are here to weave the community's good narratives and showcase them to the outside world. Let us continue to focus on that, like the fish in the water, unlike the fish inside a tree trunk trying to figure out how we ended up there or how to get out of there.

Yesterday, TheDropTimes (TDT) published an interview with Pierina Wetto, Marketing Manager at Last Call Media. Pierina also manages the Promote Drupal initiative, where she is committed to producing content and marketing efforts to promote Drupal outside of the community. Alethia Rose Braganza, former sub-editor at TDT, spoke to Pierina over a Zoom call in August.

Another major story we ran was this report on the "Non-profit Drupal" Community. In a conversation with Alka Elizabeth, sub-editor at TDT, Johanna Bates, co-organiser of the community, underscored the enduring preference of non-profits for Drupal, a testament to their commitment to open-source software.

We also brought you two stories on two modules that got some recent shine and glory.

The WordPress Migrate module from Mike Ryan serves as a vital tool for seamlessly migrating WordPress blog exports (in WXR format) into the Drupal ecosystem. The module integrated into Drupal 8's core is now compatible with Drupal 9 and 10.

The Visual Layout Suite (VLSuite) project, a content editing experience built upon Drupal Core’s Layout builder, released its latest release candidate version, 1.1.0-rc4, on September 21, 2023.

As usual, we echoed several blog posts from other companies, among which I am reintroducing a selected few in this newsletter.

Evolving Web published an article by Sebastián González Díaz wherein he lists 5 Useful Modules to Enhance CKEditor 5 in Drupal 10.

Matt Wetmore, Senior Director of Web Operations at Acquia, shared A Beginner's Guide to Installing the Simple XML Sitemap Module in Drupal. In the wake of Drupal 9's EOL, Acquia has published a guide for a smooth transition to Drupal 10.

Salsa Digital has published Kristen Pol’s self-help guide on Drupal website security. Divided into six parts, "Drupal Security — A Drupal Self-Help Guide to Ensuring your Website’s Security" covers the significance of security for online experiences, Drupal’s capabilities and initiatives, and, most crucially, the top 10 strategies for enhancing Drupal security. She has also listed the top 10 tips for Drupal website performance. John Cloys is helping us with directions to improve Drupal website accessibility through his three-part practical guide.

Ivan Zugec has shared insights on harnessing the power of Bootstrap 5 with Radix in Drupal. The video tutorial was published on WebWash's YouTube channel.

For those waiting to migrate their D7 sites to D10, Pantheon and ImageX have put together some guidelines to Boost Performance & SEO.

To build public sector websites effectively with LocalGov Drupal, read about Nomensa's webinar and watch the video. WebCurl has written about LGD Microsites that transform the digital landscape for UK Councils.

Head to Arocom's blog about Algolia, a robust search and discovery API that smoothly integrates with Drupal.

Dropsolid has published a blog post by Jasper Debaere about Connecting Drupal Content to Mautic Email Marketing.

Raghad Eid writes in Vardot about How Drupal's Atomic Design Enhances Web Accessibility and Empower Inclusive Education.

Droptica has published three informative ebooks available for free download.

Avi Schwab Sparks Drupal Community Dialogue on governance and transparency through his blog post.

Elsner Technologies lists 15 leading Drupal modules in 2023, authored by Tarun Bansal.

QTA Tech is talking about "Demystifying Decoupled Drupal with NextJS."

DrupalCon NA, scheduled from May 6-9, 2024, in Portland, Oregon, has opened its doors for session submissions. AIR FRANCE, KLM, and code-shared flights offer an exclusive discount of up to 15% for those attending DrupalCon Europe from October 17 to 20, 2023, in Lille, France.

Thanks to Ricardo Sanz Ante, the Behat workshop from DrupalCon Spain is now available on Metadrop's website.

Third and Grove has published Maximizing Drupal's Authoring Experience: A Path to Digital Success by Tara Arnold.

Alphons Jaimon of QED42 explores the application of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the capabilities of search engines.

Xandermar LLC LLC offers a pragmatic guide for Drupal 10 users on seamlessly consuming APIs with credentials. The method relies on Drupal's built-in Guzzle HTTP client library, ensuring a straightforward process for developers.

Acquia has launched Acquia Exchange—an integration hub designed to elevate the flexibility and extensibility of its Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

The list is overwhelming, and there is no dearth of stories to share. But there comes some point when we need to put a hard stop. Let there be even more stories in the coming weeks. Let us celebrate Drupal.

Sincerely, 
Sebin Abraham Jacob 
Editor-in-Chief, The Drop Times.

With Composer and several useful modules, your Drupal 9 site can be upgraded to Drupal 10 as quickly as possible. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to do this and save you time.