Personally I’ve found most value in the smaller sessions. There are discussion-style groups around a common interests (BoFs) and presentation seminars. I’ve enjoyed being able to share what wisdom I can in the former – for example, about what page building experiences work best for our clients, or ways to accelerate projects. Drupal is built on collaboration so it’s only fair to give back where we can. My colleague Steven has given back by volunteering to help some sessions run smoothly. 

As for the front-led seminars, here’s which ones each of us found most interesting… 

Andrei: Decoupling your search solution with Drupal Search API 

You could almost feel the speed of how quickly searches run! A new neat abstraction for searching from Drupal-backed sites (including decoupled apps) without so much effort, and with an easy-to-use UI. 

Ross: Having your cake, and eating it too: Using Varnish to serve content from your new Drupal site alongside your legacy platform. 

Seeing a relatively simple and effective example of making this work was helpful. Moving from one platform to another can be fraught with pressure so being walked through how to do this, and for such a large scale project, was ace! 

Irina: Design in Figma and deploy a pixel perfect Drupal websites in days not weeks

This session was just one of several that helped demonstrate how site builders and editors can achieve their goals quickly with Drupal. It’s a pleasant surprise to see what’s possible. The editing experience can be really good! Extra modules can help to tailor solutions for clients. More improvements are on the way too!

Greg: Test-Driven Drupal

Gaining a wider vision & perspective on Drupal's potential has been helpful - whether from Dries' keynote or sessions like this one that offered a quite different approach to what we might normally do. This was an introduction to automated testing and test-driven development in Drupal which challenged our assumptions - perhaps "coding by wishful thinking", writing test assertions before implementations, could lead to better quality code?  

Steven: So I logged in, now what? The Dashboard initiative welcomes you

It was great to see that people cared about the experience for users right after they'd logged in. The solutions outlined used existing Drupal tools and methodologies and so combined the flexibility and scale that we've come to love from Drupal, without sacrificing the flexibility to customise to suit the needs of individual sites and clients.

Me (James): Drupal Translate interface on steroids

Drupal has really robust multilingual capabilities; this session demonstrated using it with a microservices architecture. This included exporting translations into an abstracted storage bucket for Node.Js applications to use, whilst still leveraging Drupal as the central translation hub. I'm looking forward to seeing their solution open sourced as promised!

That wraps up the first two days of the conference. What I haven't mentioned so far is the wonderful food from the bakery just near where we're staying .... baguettes, croissants and Merveilleux!

Drupal 7, the reliable platform that's been powering websites for quite a while, is getting ready to say goodbye. While Drupal 8 has already waved its farewell and Drupal 9 is counting down to its end in 2023, Drupal 7 is on the horizon with its end-of-life scheduled for January 5, 2025. So it would be wise to avail of Drupal migration services for better website performance.

In this blog, we'll take a closer look at what it means for Drupal 7 to reach the end of its life, and explore the path ahead for users of this platform. But first, let’s understand what “end-of-life” exactly means. 

End-of-Life: What Does That Mean For Software? 

The term "end-of-life" (EOL) signals the conclusion of official support for a specific software or product. It means that the software is no longer actively promoted, sold, or maintained. 

In the case of Drupal 7, this signifies that the Drupal community and its security team will cease to release security patches and updates after Drupal 7's official EOL date in November 2022.

Drupal 7, the reliable platform that's been powering websites for quite a while, is getting ready to say goodbye. While Drupal 8 has already waved its farewell and Drupal 9 is counting down to its end in 2023, Drupal 7 is on the horizon with its end-of-life scheduled for January 5, 2025. So it would be wise to avail of Drupal migration services for better website performance.

In this blog, we'll take a closer look at what it means for Drupal 7 to reach the end of its life, and explore the path ahead for users of this platform. But first, let’s understand what “end-of-life” exactly means. 

End-of-Life: What Does That Mean For Software? 

The term "end-of-life" (EOL) signals the conclusion of official support for a specific software or product. It means that the software is no longer actively promoted, sold, or maintained. 

In the case of Drupal 7, this signifies that the Drupal community and its security team will cease to release security patches and updates after Drupal 7's official EOL date in November 2022.

One of the major problems observed in getting contributed modules Drupal 10 compatible was maintaining support for Drupal 9.5, which remains in security support (or remained if it is now past November 1, 2023.) Contributed modules should be compatible with all security-supported versions of Drupal core or more if they so choose. This can be difficult as Drupal 9.5 contained deprecated code removed in Drupal 10. It was up to maintainers and contributors to find workarounds and copy-pasting tricks using if/else statements with version_compare.

If you're interested in these challenges, I recommend catching my talk from MidCamp this year – Lessons learned from helping port the top contrib projects to Drupal 10.

Six of our team have come over to Lille in France where the annual Drupal conference for Europe is this year. It’s a new experience for some and a chance to reconnect with friends in the community for others. We’re all here to learn, and also share where we can. I’ll talk here about the first main keynote sessions, with more articles in the pipeline.

Tuesday opened the conference with a comical introduction from the local French Drupal association, in which we were taught which part of a baguette is «le quignon» and which is «les miettes». They – the association, not the baguette parts! – seem a great example of how Drupal’s success relies on local communities as much as the global community. That human aspect to this conference was also obvious as we celebrated the Women in Drupal awards. None of the big sessions in the main auditorium have been very techy so far, but that’s good! It’s been much more about inspiring us, building our understanding of ourselves and Drupal’s place in the world.

Drupal’s founder, Dries Buytaert gave his keynote in the form of a fairy tale, using a metaphor of villagers trying to build their homes - with many puns! It helped us remember Drupal’s strengths and recognise how it stands in contrast to some other similar solutions. As with all of the sessions, recordings will be available online - this one is worth finding the slides or a video to see the story’s pictures! 

Information overload can be a risk at Drupalcons so we skipped Wednesday’s first keynote which was a case study into some specific brands’ Drupal projects, but the day’s second keynote was interesting. Sarah Furness, a former military helicopter pilot, advised us about how to lead fearlessly - recognising we’re all humans who make mistakes, but that ‘going first’ to share those can actually be the best way to lead. Again - nothing techy at all, but inspiring advice from a new perspective, worth taking in. Though in all honesty I’m glad my job doesn’t involve the level of pressures and costs like hers did.

I’ll be back with more tomorrow on our favourite smaller sessions so far. For now, see how pretty parts of Lille can be at night? Much prettier than most of us ;-)

DrupalCon Lille Day 2 has already proven to be a unique day at DrupalCon! I’ve been lucky enough to attend “a few” DrupalCons in my day (I’ve been to every North American DrupalCon since Denver in 2012) but this is only my second European DrupalCon. And today for the first time at a DrupalCon (or tech conference) I listened to a keynote from a retired helicopter pilot. 

DrupalCon, the main event about the digital experience platform Drupal, is being held this year in Lille, France. Over 1,200 digital experts and Drupal professionals are getting together to exchange ideas and work on the Drupal project. KitKat and Jägermeister are giving a showcase of their online platforms, and many other Drupal users are present. On 17 October, founder and project lead Dries Buytaert gave an inspiring keynote about Drupal's impact on creating a safe and secure web for everyone and about new opportunities and developments happening with Drupal. 

Drupal, often referred to as a content management system or digital experience management platform, is one of the most popular open source solutions for creating ambitious digital solutions. In his keynote, known as ‘Driesnote’, Dries Buytaert, who founded the project over 20 years ago, talked about the recent innovations Drupal underwent. Drupal is constantly updating with new features and new ways to accommodate the growing needs for ambitious digital platforms. A lot of effort goes into optimizing the user experience for content editors and marketers, including new ways to make content management easier and to allow for more exciting layouts and designs of digital content. 

Drupal continually offers new options for site builders and organisations using Drupal for their websites to make an impact by creating more inclusive and accessible digital solutions. With a clear focus on data ownership, Drupal lets users keep control over their content and their data, unlike many cloud platforms. The Open Web Manifesto supports protecting personal data instead of exploiting it. 

Finally, the recently formed Drupal Marketing Committee is working on showcasing Drupal’s unique capabilities and highlighting what people do every day with Drupal. Notably, KitKat and Jägermeister are keynoting about their Drupal platform. Other organisations using Drupal include Medcmedecins sans frontières, Tesla, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

This year, DrupalCon Europe is a four-day conference held in Lille, France, from 17-20 October. Over 1200 professionals and Drupal users collaborate on the project for a week. The Drupal Association is a non-profit organisation that caters to the needs of Drupal and its worldwide community, focusing on the growth of the Drupal community and supporting the project’s vision to create a safe, secure, and open web for everyone. Are you using Drupal, or are you a Drupal community? Feel free to connect!

If you're a business owner, monitoring your website traffic is not just an option; it's a necessity. As the heartbeat of your online presence, your website's performance can make or break your business. Fortunately, Mautic and Drupal offer a seamless integration that empowers you to stay in control.

Bug Smash is a community initiative started in May 2020 to reduce the number of bugs in Drupal core.

This post follows Quietone’s Bug Smash Initiative 3-year update a few months ago by providing an update on the decisions of the Bug Smash community about the future of the initiative.

What are Bug Smash’s stats?

Here’s the raw data:

Priority

Initial - 2020-04-21

Goal

% Diff

Recent – 2023-10-13

Actual Reduction

% Diff

Minor

338

300

-11%

308

-30

-9%

Normal

6205

6000

-3%

4401

-1804

-29%

Major

1113

1000

-10%

875

-238

-21%

Critical

57

50

-12%

57

0

0%

Total

7713

7350

-5%

5641

-2072

-27%

Within ~3.5 years, this initiative has reduced the number of bugs in Drupal core by 27%! 

That’s an incredible achievement for everyone involved!

What have we been up to since the three-year update?

Since Quietone’s blog post, we have completed a survey to decide the next steps for the initiative and to collect further feedback from the community.

The survey was open for several weeks and received responses from all over the world. 

In summary, the Bug Smash community has voted overwhelmingly to continue the initiative in its current form and expand our goals.

Here’s a summary of the responses:

• Expanding Goals: Several respondents suggested expanding Bugsmash’s goals.

• Quality over Quantity: Multiple participants emphasised the importance of focusing on crucial, long-standing issues rather than any one bug.

• Sponsorship: One user proposed exploring official sponsorship to tackle challenging bugs.

• Triage and Issue Management: Several participants discussed potentially changing goals to focus on triaging or creating an IssueTriage Initiative.

• Component-Focused Approach: A few respondents suggested a component-focused approach to reduce bugs in specific areas.

• Efficiency: Some participants mentioned reducing meetings to make them more impactful.

Some positive quotes and feedback:

• “The bug smash initiative renewed my interest in working on Drupal core. It is also a great way to get people into working on core, so I think the focus should move more to events and sprint tables.”

• “This is perhaps one of the most vibrant and important contribution to Drupal. Thanks again for the hard work. “

There were also plenty of suggestions about the initiative's future:

• “I am actually split between expanding our goals to more than bugs vs. focusing on bugs. I think having the initiative focused specifically on bugs is beneficial since these are often the most crucial to site owners. However, the initiative has been so successful that we could add tasks to its scope and help the core queue a lot that way as well. Maybe just major and critical tasks or something to start, as one standing item in the weekly objectives/threads.”

• “We should concentrate on the most crucial issues (bugs/feature requests), the issues that have been open for years and have hundreds of followers. Quality over quantity.”

So, what actions did we take from that feedback?

Based on the feedback, we’ve decided to implement the following steps for Bug Smash:

• Keep the initiative focused on bugs and expand our goals for another year

• Move the meetings to monthly to get some more engagement

• Reduce the daily triage to one item a day

Why not go further than this?

This is a fair question, especially since so much feedback was about ‘quantity over quality’ and targeting critical/more complex bugs. 

The reason we’ve not proposed this is twofold:

1. We’ve tried having targets based on priority before, and unfortunately, they don’t get much traction. Major and Critical issues are labelled that way for a reason, which leads to the second reason:

2. Having an increased focus on more challenging and complex issues makes Bug Smash harder to get into for new users (both to Drupal and contribution), which is a key objective of the initiative.

Additionally, we want to bring some momentum back into the initiative. These past few months have been relatively quiet after a very active few years, and we want to lower the barrier to entry and not make busy community members feel guilty for not contributing.

Okay, so what are the new goals?

I propose maintaining our original goal of a 5% reduction in Drupal Core’s bugs. 

That would require something like the following by October 2024:

Priority

Recent – 2023-10-13

Goal

% Diff

Minor

308

-15

-5%

Normal

4401

-220

-5%

Major

875

-44

-5%

Critical

57

-3

-5%

Total

5641

5359

-5%

Okay, wrap it up Griff…

In conclusion, Bug Smash has been a tremendous success for Drupal over the past three and a half years and has helped hundreds of community members collaborate easily. 

The community wants to keep this going for at least another year, so we’re doing that.

If you’re interested in getting involved, please join the #bugsmash channel in the Drupal Slack and say hi!