Most Drupal developers have come across this problem at least once. You are running a basic Drupal website, but somehow it only shows a plain white screen with “The provided host name is not valid for this server" on it. Here’s what it means and how to fix it.
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Drupal 9 was released on June 3rd, 2020. It marks a major milestone in the history of the world’s number one enterprise open source CMS. Although any major version update may sound like a risky undertaking, upgrading from Drupal 8 to 9 is a walk in the park. Here’s why.
Drupal 8 dramatically improved the capabilities for creating multilingual websites. Content translation was moved into core and an improved architecture made internationalization of complex sites much easier. The language switcher however, could do with some…
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On February 25th 2019 the Drupal Association announced that Drupal 7 will be officially supported until November 2021, after which Drupal 7 will be marked “End of Life”. Since Drupal 7 was released in November 2011, reaching “End of Life” in…
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Drupal is known to be a secure CMS. Drupal also provides much flexibility when it comes to providing a highly interactive user experience. Often this means allowing users to upload files of various types to your website, to provide a resumé for instance when reacting to a job…
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Should you upgrade to Drupal 8? Although the reasons why are still unclear for many, the answer for almost everyone is yes. Let us explain some important benefits of upgrading to Drupal’s latest major release.
Read moreWe talk with Andy Blum about the Drupal Smart Snippets extension for Visual Studio Code. The extension brings some really useful Drupal-y features to Visual Studio Code including hook completion, form and render array element completion, and service and service method autocomplete.
Suggested Visual Studio Code settings to go along with Drupal Smart Snippets extension:
"editor.snippetSuggestions": "top", [this used to be the default behavior until 1.6.0]
"php.suggest.basic": false, [source]We're using the machine-driven Amazon Transcribe service to provide an audio transcript of this episode.
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Drupal Dev Days 2023 ended 10 day ago and it was great!
Let me explain what happens during a Drupal Dev Days for those who haven't been there. It's like a Drupal Camp, but with a more diverse attendees because it is not a local event but an international one.
Usually, there are many sessions talking about many different topics not only about Drupal, as you can see below. The sessions are selected from all the people that submitted a session proposal prior to the event. Thus, the sessions come from the Drupal Community folks or other people interested in the event. While there are big names between the speakers, those events always feature speakers that are not know and may be the first they hold a session. Drupal is a very open and welcoming community and we love new people to come and enjoy it.
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…Bug Smash Initiative 3-year update
The Bug Smash community initiative started in May 2020 with the goal of reducing the number of open bugs against Drupal core.
Following advice from Gábor Hojtsy that 'an initiative should have an exit strategy', the initiative's definition of done was a 5% reduction in bugs in Drupal core.
Over the past three years, we've smashed this goal and passed our definition of done with a 27% reduction in bugs!
Priority
Initial - 2020-04-21
Goal
% Diff
Recent - 2023-05-09
Actual Reduction
% Diff
Minor
338
300
-11%
311
-27
-8%
Normal
6205
6000
-3%
4397
-1808
-29%
Major
1113
1000
-10%
896
-217
-20%
Critical
57
50
-12%
47
-10
-18%
Total
7713
7350
-5%
5651
-2062
-27%
Next steps
So the question is - where to next for the initiative? We've discussed this in our fortnightly meetings and see two paths forward:
We announce the initiative goals are complete and wind up our operations
We reframe our goals and start again.
Let's explore what those two look like.
This option may seem drastic, especially given there are still bugs in core. This wouldn't mean we'd stop trying to fix them or that we'd stop working together as a collective. It would just mean we would wind up the formal administrative tasks that go with an initiative, such as regular meetings and minutes and our twice-daily triage goal.
Winding up the initiative doesn't mean that the #bugsmash slack channel or the BugSmash table at sprints would cease to exist. Nor does it mean the like-minded folks who've worked together in the initiative would cease collaborating.
It just means we'd drop the formal parts of the initiative and revert back to being a loose collective with a shared goal.
This option would allow us to reset our goals and decide on our focus for the next couple of years. We need to ask ourselves if we still have the same passion AND if we think we can make as much progress as fast as we did.
There is much less low-hanging fruit than when the initiative started. This means that many of the remaining bugs are difficult to fix. This can have an impact on morale and participation. Lately, our daily triage tasks are receiving less interest - most likely because the bugs are harder or require a specialist..
Do you have thoughts on which option we should take? Or is there an alternative that we’ve missed?
Please take part in our community survey and let us know.