Dear Readers,

The Drupal Burkina Faso Association is working hard to bring back DrupalCamp this April at Joseph KI-ZERBO University in Ouagadougou. But there's a hitch: they’re still short on the funding needed to make it happen. That means a potential pause, not for lack of passion or planning, but because access to resources still draws the line between who gets to gather, learn, and grow, and who doesn’t. And for a community that’s trying to build something from the ground up, that line is everything.

This isn’t just Burkina Faso’s problem. It’s a challenge for the entire Drupal ecosystem. If Drupal is going to stay relevant and expand beyond its current reach, it has to grow where the need is greatest and the potential is untapped. Africa’s tech scene is rising fast, and platforms like Drupal could be part of that momentum. But that depends on whether we show up for the developers and organizers making it possible. These aren’t side stories. They’re the future of Drupal, and they deserve real investment.

The code is solid. The talent is there. What’s missing is community at scale. Supporting efforts like DrupalCamp Burkina Faso isn’t charity. It’s strategy. It’s how we build a global, sustainable open-source movement that reflects the diversity of the world it serves. If you believe in the long-term vision of Drupal, now’s the time to act. Because when one community grows, we all move forward.

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Let’s Get Loud: Using LinkedIn to Amplify Drupal
• Drupal Considers Marketplace for Site Templates with Open Source and Commercial Options
• Drupal Deep Dive Project Connects Scuba Divers in the Drupal Community
• Media Library Translate Module Crosses 100-Site Usage on Drupal
• Metadrop's “Content First” Module Adds Text-Only View for Easier Content Review
• CivicTheme 1.10.0 Launches with Major Upgrades

EVENT

• DrupalCamp Burkina Faso 2025 Seeks Sponsors to Support April Event in Ouagadougou
• Merlijn Sebrechts to Present Keynote on WebAssembly at Drupal Developer Days 2025
• James Abrahams to Keynote on AI in Drupal CMS at Developer Days 2025
• Registration for DrupalCon Vienna 2025 is Now Officially Open!
• COSCUP 2025 Set for August, Celebrating Open Source in Taiwan
• Drupal Events This Week: Webinars, Meetups, and Community Sessions

ORGANIZATION NEWS

• Meet the 2025 Pantheon Partner Award Winners: A Closer Look at Their Impact
• DDEV Adds XHGui Support for Easier PHP Profiling
   

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you, 
Sincerely 
Alka Elizabeth 
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

Today we are talking about Drupal Basics, Why we got away from them, and what we do to bring them back with guest Mike Anello. We’ll also cover Entity Reference Override as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/496

• Where did this idea come from
• Why do you feel more basic content is necessary
• How did Drupal get away from the basics
• How can we get more basic talks into Drupal events
• How do we balance basic content with new topics like recipes or Drupal CMS
• How do we entice speakers to take these talks
• Could this adversely affect attendance
• Question from Stephen: How do we address virtual events and that they are preferred by a younger crowd
• Will Florida Drupal Camp have a track

Mike Anello - drupaleasy.com ultimike

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Kathy Beck - kbeck303

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to replace a text field on entities you reference in your Drupal site? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Entity Reference Override
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Sep 2016 by Jeff Eaton, though recent releases are by Benjamin Melançon (mlncn) of Agaric
  • Versions available: 2.0.0-beta3 which works with Drupal 10.1 or 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage, yes but needs a stable release
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation - user guide
  • Number of open issues: 13 open issues, 2 of which are bugs against the 2.0.x branch
• Usage stats:
  • 2,004 sites
• Module features and usage
  • The module defines a new field type, with associated widgets and formatters.
  • Your site editors will see a normal entity reference field (autocomplete or select) with an additional text field. Text provided in that additional field can be used to override a specific field in the referenced entity’s display, or add a class to its rendered markup.
  • This could be handy in use cases like showing people with project-specific roles, or showing related articles with the summary tweaked to be more relevant to the main content being viewed.
  • It’s not a super-common need, but if you need this capability, it can save having to set up a more complicated content architecture with some kind of intermediary entity
  • I thought this module would be interesting because today’s guest, Mike Anello, is listed as one of the maintainers. Mike, what can you tell us about your history with the module and how you’ve used it?

Drupal CMS 1.0 launched in January with a fresh and simple installer, and user feedback was great! But even with these improvements, getting Drupal up and running is still harder than it should be. At DrupalCon Atlanta, Dries Buytaert shared a solution: a super simple desktop app. Instead of downloading and setting up Drupal manually, you can now install it with just a few clicks!

The Drupal CMS Launcher is already available for Mac (Windows is coming once we are able to sign the app). It has everything you need to run Drupal locally built-in—no extra software required! It comes with a web server and an SQLite database, so you can run Drupal right away. It also has Drush built-in, making it even easier to manage your site. Your Drupal files are stored in your Documents folder, so you can access them anytime.

This app is still new, and the team isn’t sure what’s next for it. But it’s already a big step toward making Drupal more accessible. Once you set it up, you can use Project Browser to add extensions to Drupal that are not yet installed.

To try it, download it now at new.drupal.org/drupal-cms/launcher. Check out the source code and contribute on GitHub at github.com/drupal/cms-launcher!

Hey there, this is my Drupalcon-experience review, all the views/opinions here are mine and don’t extend to the company or partners I work with.

This was my second Drupalcon in general, and first one in North America - I used to be cautious about attending Drupalcons because the pricing can be quite prohibitive for small businesses, freelancers, and independent devs… I do enjoy DrupalCamps though - my 1st being BADCamp (US), then followed by camps in Ukraine, Romania and the ones we organized in Moldova, I think I attended ~6 camps and co-organized 3 more.

This year, thanks to Dropsolid, I had the chance to visit the US-flavored Drupalcon. This time it was in Atlanta, Georgia - in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The venue was pretty fancy, I’d say - classy. I liked it, although not sure it was ca...

If you caught the State of Drupal presentation (aka Driesnote) from DrupalCon Atlanta, maybe you noticed something missing. There was no news about Drupal 11 or what lies ahead with Drupal 12. Instead, we talked about Drupal CMS, Experience Builder, and the upcoming concept of site templates.

Typography isn’t just a visual asset — it’s a language of its own. Are you ready to allow beautiful fonts to tell their tale and give your website the typographic personality it deserves?

Can AI actually help with real Drupal development? I wanted to find out.

This morning, I fired up Claude Code and pointed it at my personal Drupal site. In a 30-minute session, I asked it to help me build new features and modernize some of my code. I expected mixed results but was surprised by how useful it proved to be.

I didn't touch my IDE once or write a single line of code myself. Claude handled everything from creating a custom Drush command to refactoring constructors and converting Drupal annotations to PHP attributes.

If you're curious what AI-assisted Drupal development actually feels like, the video captures the experience.

DDEV at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025

While I didn’t speak at any formal sessions this year, I had the chance to lead several Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) discussions:

• DDEV VS Code Integration Improvement: We talked about ways that DDEV could integrate better with VS Code. Although the well-maintained DDEV Manager VS Code Extension does great for people, there are a couple of things VS Code does not know how to do well. The biggest is that it doesn't know how to use php or phpstan or phpunit properly inside a Docker container (like the DDEV web container), so it's hard to use the nice VS Code integration with those tools. DDEV Community member Mike Anello was present and talked about his favorite usage, which involves the Remote Explorer extension. In his long-form Drupal trainings at DrupalEasy he teaches folks to use Remote Explorer with DDEV and work inside the web container all the time, and that solves the problem, but it is different from what DDEV users normally do. (PhpStorm knows how to use tools and interpreters inside the container, so doesn't have this problem.) Mike has presented his technique many times as Maximizing Visual Studio Code with DDEV.
• Replacing Gitpod for DrupalPod and DDEV: Many of you know that Gitpod has been a great resource for DDEV users to do development in a web environment, and that Gitpod Classic is scheduled to shut down in April 2025. The DrupalPod project, which wrapped Gitpod and DDEV to make Drupal contribution easy in a browser was used extensively by Drupal community members to review issues and contribute code. It was great for Contribution Day at DrupalCons these last few years because there was no need for people to set up a local development environment, and the bandwidth requirements were minimal. The Drupal.org issue about this has the details of the discussion, including a recording.
• DDEV Office Hours: DDEV Office Hours are a simple place to talk about anything DDEV-related, and we had a pleasant time.
• Git Bisect for Fun and Profit: This Git tutorial on the lovely git bisect technique went well and we all had a good time. It was based on the Florida Drupal Camp presentation. Here's the git-bisect-example repository. This was a shorter version of the Florida Drupal Camp presentation.

First-time Contributor Mentoring

The highlight of every DrupalCon is helping new contributors on Contribution Day, a whole day where folks get help contributing for the first time to code, documentation, or marketing. I was able to help a few people, and of course, was the resident DDEV and DrupalPod expert.

Helping Out

I published an invitation to meet one-on-one and a few people took advantage of meeting in person to look at their DDEV issues. It was great to meet them!

Notes

• Drupal CMS was all the rage: The Drupal CMS project has been quite successful this year, and it seemed like dozens of sessions talked about it. It seems to me like the Drupal community has taken an excellent path with this. As Dries said in the Driesnote, Drupal was always a huge bunch of building blocks that could do lots of things and do them well... but only experts understood how to do that. And they all did it in different ways. Now Drupal CMS provides a clear and refined starting point for people who need a website, but still has all the power of Drupal behind it, and you don't have to be an expert to get that polish and those features at the very beginning of your journey.
• DDEV Maintainer Stas Zhuk can't travel outside Ukraine, but he was welcomed with an honorary badge!
• Docksal seems to be in trouble: In the Drupal community many folks have happily used Docksal over the years, but its maintenance has recently fallen off. (Docksal is a Docker-based local development environment similar to DDEV.) There were people at DrupalCon asking about the situation with Docksal and asking for help migrating their sites to DDEV because of frustration with the project, which hasn't had a release since May, 2024. As open-source maintainers ourselves, we understand the pressures of maintenance and life and hope the Docksal maintainers are getting all the support they need in both places.

Thanks!

Bernardo Martinez shared a room and a DrupalCon ticket, making this whole thing possible.

Platform.sh was kind enough to fund the airline ticket to Atlanta.

Thanks to both of you! I wouldn't have made it without both those things.