The Drop Times: A Journey Through the Pages of Life

"The purpose of our lives is to be happy."

—Dalai Lama, XIV [Link] 
India Today, September 30, 2021

This profound quote by the Dalai Lama underscores the significance of happiness as the ultimate purpose of our existence. It serves as a guiding light on our quest to live a fulfilling life.

Have you ever picked up a book and felt transported to another world, only to snap back to reality hours later, wondering where the time went? Recently, I found myself in such a literary trance, lost in the depths of a compelling story. During one of these moments, as I glanced at the clock, a stark realization dawned on me: time is a relentless sprinter.

As the pages turned and the clock's ticking became more pronounced, I couldn't help but contemplate the brevity of life. We often find ourselves trapped in the daily grind, chasing deadlines and meeting obligations while neglecting a crucial aspect of existence—the pursuit of joy and happiness. It's not a luxury; it's a necessity.

Regret is an unwelcome companion. It often emerges from the shadows, reminding us of opportunities missed and passions left unexplored. It serves as a poignant reminder that life is too short to be lived with reservations. We should seek happiness and engage in endeavours that, when we look back, we won't regret.

As we embark on this journey, let us remember that life's clock is always ticking. Every moment is a chance to make choices that align with our desires and aspirations. Pursuing happiness should be a deliberate act, not a fleeting wish.

Turning our attention to the world of technology, we enter the realm of Drupal. In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, Drupal stands as a steadfast pillar. It is an open-source content management system that plays a pivotal role in shaping the digital world. The Drupal community is abuzz with exciting news and events, and The Drop Times has been at the forefront of covering them. Here are some highlights from the past week, starting with events:

If you're preparing to speak at DrupalCon 2023 or any other event, Drupal Belgium offers a valuable speaker training opportunity on October 16.

For those seeking to deepen their Symfony expertise, SymfonyLive Paris 2024 offers an exciting opportunity. Early bird tickets will close today.

Exclusive CxO Lunch with Drupal Founder Dries Buytaert is scheduled for Wednesday, October 25, 2023, from 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM CEST.

Discover the secrets to successful digital transformation on Drupal through the workshops at DrupalCon Lille 2023.

Elevate your Drupal skills by joining the London Drupal Meetup on September 26, 2023.

The Drupal Ahmedabad Community held an exciting meetup on September 23, 2023.

Unlock your potential in web development with Promet Source's upcoming Drupal training courses for Fall 2023.

"Drupal's Path Forward: Challenges and Opportunities", a thought-provoking blog post by Ricardo Marcelino, delves into the challenges and opportunities ahead for Drupal, the renowned open-source content management system (CMS).

Dive into Traditional Drupal vs Headless Drupal, a blog post by Bordinary, to discover the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, helping you make informed decisions for your project's architecture.

Delve into A Mentor's Journey of Growth in Drupal Community, the inspiring journey of Philip Frilling. 

Explore the advantages and streamlined processes of upgrading to Drupal 10 with insights provided by Promet Source. 

Read about amazee.io's recent achievement of ISO 27001 certification for enhanced security.

Łukasz Dudzińsk provides valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of Drupal in an extensive blog post featured on StrefaKodera.pl.

Version 1.2.0 of Drupal's Front-end Editing Module offers users enhanced control and a smoother content editing experience. Developed by Artem Dmitriiev, this update redefines Drupal's front-end content management capabilities.

Stay informed about the evolving world of Drupal. Follow us on social media, subscribe to our newsletter, and join our growing community. Your engagement keeps our journey vibrant and enriching.

Sincerely, 
Kazima Abbas 
Sub Editor, TheDropTimes

Drupal.org blog: What’s new on Drupal.org - Q1 2023

Read our roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community. You can also review the Drupal project roadmap.

Editor's note from Tim Lehnen(hestenet): A Q1 update in September? What's the deal?

The Drupal Association has recently undertaken a variety of new initiatives to accelerate innovation in the Drupal project, and to begin expanding our capacity and capabilities by seeking grant funding. Unfortunately this has meant my personal capacity has been degraded, and I'm afraid I just fell off the wagon of posting these regular updates. I want to thank my colleague Alex Moreno for stepping into the gap to get this news flowing out to all of you again! Now on to the update!

Drupal recognized as a Digital Public Good!

Image removed.

The Digital Public Good registry recognizes digital goods, including open source software, that advance the Sustainable Development Goals as defined by the United Nations. This recognition supports the Association's broader mission to support the Open Web, and should give users of Drupal in the public sector even greater confidence in their choice. 

We want to thank the community volunteers who worked with the Drupal Association to make this happen!

Read the news: Drupal recognized as a Digital Public Good

Securing AutoUpdates OSTIF.org Partnership

The Drupal.org secure signing infrastructure for Automatic Updates and Project Browser is now in testing, with the leads on those projects. 

The Drupal Association has reached out to the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund to identify a partner to audit PHP TUF and Rugged, the two key software libraries being used to secure the Drupal.org supply chain for Automatic Updates and the Project Browser.

For an initiative as critical as applying automatic updates, external validation from a security vendor is critical.

OSTIF.org was previously involved in arranging the security audits for Python TUF and several other implementations of the framework, making them an ideal partner. 

GitLab CI templates

Image removed.

Any project that opts in to using GitLab CI can now take advantage of an off-the-shelf .gitlab-ci.yml template that configures testing to follow core development. This template uses include files maintained by the Drupal Association on an ongoing basis.

We expect to open GitLabCI to every project on Drupal.org at DrupalCon Pittsburgh. 

Having a template that we could centrally maintain was essential to being able to enable GitLab CI for every project, as many Drupal.org project maintainers are not CI experts. 

This makes the migration much easier.

GitLab Issue Credit

After scaffolding out our plan to manage contribution credit in GitLab, we have implemented a full development prototype, which allows a credit node to be created on modern Drupal, with a webhook from a bot-created comment on GitLab.

This allows us to create and store contribution credit information from an external source, and could even be expanded beyond GitLab.

This clears one of the final barriers to completing our tooling migration to GitLab.

With GitLab CI nearly ready for every project, and a solution for credit fully prototyped, our last major step is to solve the issue workflow (see the next topic).

GitLab Issue Migration

With a solution for credit in pre-production, and GitLabCI about to roll-out to all projects the next phase is to move forward with migrating projects to GitLab issues.

The key problem to solve is shared access to issue forks. In Drupal, we're used to being able to collaborate with each other by default. In GitLab (and GitHub and most other tools) collaborators typically have to manually request access, or fork into a private workspace.

We are going to use an issue bot and webhooks to create simple tools for contributors to collaborate.

Moving to GitLab is part of our commitment to removing friction from the Drupal contribution process, and helps us to keep up to date in the latest innovations in code collaboration platforms.

However, we still lead compared to these platforms in collaborative workflow. 

In fact, GitLab's own new 'Community Fork' experiment looks to implement ideas we pioneered in a GitLab context. Bringing these two ideas together is the best of both worlds

Events.Drupal.org on Drupal 9, pending Drupal 10 update

Events.drupal.org was the first drupal.org property to be updated to Drupal 9, and is in prep to be upgraded to Drupal 10 when the final contributed module is ready. 

Up next:

Drupal.org is historically one of the last sites to upgrade to the latest version of Drupal. This is because we have a lot of unique project infrastructure that is not in use by other Drupal end users, and so is likely the last functionality be ported. 

Upgrading the events site gave us a greater than 5x improvement in performance, with improved caching behavior, better editorial tools, and is battle-testing our new k8s based hosting cluster.

Improvements to anti-spam controls on Drupal.org registration

We've made changes to Drupal.org's anti-spam protection that detect bot-like behavior or repeated account creation. 

These changes decouple the anti-spam/anti-bot behavior from the account registration process, an important step so that we can move to a new Single Sign On system for Drupal.org.

Every moment spent on cleaning up spam is a moment not spent on Drupal contribution, and so it is a critically important if often invisible part of our work to protect and moderate Drupal.org.

We also thank the volunteer Drupal site moderators for their work to support this effort.

Multiple performance improvements (and bug fixes) to our GitLab installation.

GitLab has feature releases and security releases every month, and keeping git.drupalcode.org up to date is an important part of the work we do. 

In the first quarter of 2023, several of these updates introduced unexpected performance issues, having to do with repository file sizes, replication, etc.

We were able to work with the upstream maintainers of GitLab itself to resolve these issues, and improve the overall performance of git.drupalcode.org

As always, we’d like to thank all the volunteers who work with us and the Drupal Association Supporters who help to fund our work. In particular, we want to thank: 

Web Wash: Getting Started with Bootstrap 5 using Radix in Drupal

Radix is a Bootstrap base theme for Drupal that provides a solid foundation for building your website. It includes built-in Bootstrap 4 and 5 support, Sass, ES6, and BrowserSync. This makes it easy to create a website that looks great on all devices and is easy to maintain.

In this video, you’ll learn the following:

  • Download and install Radix.
  • Generate a Radix sub-theme.
  • Integrate a Bootswatch theme in your site.
  • Implement the Carousel component using blocks and paragraphs.
  • Implement the Accordion component using paragraphs.
  • Display articles in a Bootstrap grid using Views.
Subscribe to