The Drupal Community Working Group is pleased to announce that nominations for the 2024 Aaron Winborn Award are now open. 

This annual award recognizes an individual who demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community. It includes a scholarship and travel stipend for the winner to attend DrupalCon North America and recognition in a plenary session at the event.

Nominations are open to all Drupal community members*, including but not limited to people who have made a big impact in their local or regional community. If you know of someone who has made a big difference to any number of people in our community, we want to hear about it. 

This award was created in honor of long-time Drupal contributor Aaron Winborn, whose battle with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or  ALS (also referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease)  came to an end on March 24, 2015. Based on a suggestion by Hans Riemenschneider, the Community Working Group, with the support of the Drupal Association, launched the Aaron Winborn Award.

Nominations are open until Friday, March 29, 2024.
A committee consisting of the Community Working Group members (Conflict Resolution Team) as well as past award winners will select a winner from the nominations. 
* Current members of the CWG Conflict Resolution Team and previous winners are not eligible for winning the award.

Previous winners of the award are:

2015: Cathy Theys  
2016: Gábor Hojtsy
2017: Nikki Stevens 
2018: Kevin Thull 
2019: Leslie Glynn  
2020: Baddý Breidert
2021: AmyJune Hineline
2022: Angie Byron 
2023: Randy Fay

Now is your chance to show, support, and recognize an amazing community member!

If you know someone amazing who should benefit from this award please submit a nomination.

Also, if you are a creator and would like to help craft one of our future Aaron Winborn Awards, please reach out to the Drupal Community Working Group.
 

DrupalCon Portland 2024 promises to be an unmissable event for web developers, designers, and business professionals invested in the Drupal ecosystem. As one of the most significant gatherings in the Drupal community, the conference offers a variety of benefits that extend beyond just technical knowledge. From networking opportunities to staying ahead in the rapidly evolving digital landscape, attending DrupalCon Portland can be a game-changer for professionals. Let's explore 6 of the top benefits of being part of this transformative event!

Cutting-Edge Insights

DrupalCon is renowned for bringing together thought leaders and experts in the Drupal community. Attendees will have the chance to gain insights into the latest trends, innovations, and best practices in web development, ensuring they stay at the forefront of the industry.

Networking and Career Opportunities

Connect with like-minded professionals and Drupal enthusiasts at DrupalCon. The conference offers a networking platform beyond sessions, fostering relationships for potential partnerships, job opportunities, and collaborative projects. Explore career prospects by engaging with hiring companies and recruiters in the Drupal ecosystem, as many organizations actively seek skilled professionals to join their teams.

Skill Enhancement

Join interactive training sessions and learn from industry experts at DrupalCon. These sessions aim to improve your skills and offer practical knowledge for immediate application to your projects. DrupalCon provides a variety of session tracks suitable for different interests and skill levels. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced developer, there are sessions customized to meet your requirements, guaranteeing a comprehensive learning experience.

Stay Informed About Drupal releases

DrupalCon Portland 2024 presents a fantastic chance to stay informed about the latest developments and insights in Drupal's upcoming core and feature releases. By participating, you can stay ahead of the curve by gaining knowledge about the new features, enhancements, and possible challenges that Drupal has in store. This event provides a valuable opportunity to stay current and well-informed within the Drupal community.

Contribute to the Community

DrupalCon provides a comprehensive experience beyond training and discussions, allowing participants to actively contribute through collaborative code sprints. These hands-on sessions, where developers collectively enhance Drupal core and modules, offer valuable practical experience. Beyond coding, attendees can also contribute through non-code avenues such as volunteering and mentoring, enriching their overall DrupalCon experience. This inclusive and collaborative spirit defines DrupalCon, fostering a vibrant community of shared knowledge and expertise.

Vendor Expo

Take advantage of the vendor expo at DrupalCon Portland 2024 to explore cutting-edge tools, services, and technologies that seamlessly integrate with Drupal. Immerse yourself in engaging conversations with industry-leading vendors to gain a deep understanding of their offerings. This is a unique opportunity to identify potential partnerships or solutions that can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your Drupal projects. By actively participating in the expo, you'll be able to discover and leverage the latest innovations that can elevate your Drupal experience.

DrupalCon Portland 2024 is not just a conference; it's an immersive experience that can significantly impact your professional growth. The benefits are extensive, from staying updated on the latest Drupal developments to forging valuable connections and contributing to the open source community. Attendees can expect to leave the conference with enhanced skills, fresh perspectives, and a network of contacts that can propel their careers to new heights.

Registration is now open for DrupalCon Portland 2024, held from 6-9 May at the Oregon Convention Center.

Upgrading your site from Drupal 9 to 10

Perry Aryee

With Drupal 9 having reached its end of life (EOL) on November 1, it’s time to start planning for an upgrade.

For those already operating on Drupal 9, upgrading to Drupal 10 is not as daunting as earlier upgrades and promises to be easy, reflecting the software’s overall trend towards smaller, more incremental upgrades and faster iterations. According to Drupal, you should "completely update your Drupal 9 site to the most recent version of the modules and theme(s), before updating to Drupal 10." 

The deprecated code will be based on Drupal 9 moving into Drupal 10, but there are ways to search your system and update the specified code block.

The first thing to do is to install the  drupal/upgrade_status module in your project and enable it. composer require drupal/upgrade_status && drush en upgrade_status, if you have drush installed else go to admin > modules  and search for upgrade status and install it. After the module is enabled, go to Admin > Reports > Upgrade Status. This page should contain all the upgrades and code changes necessary before your site can be upgraded to Drupal 10.

Steps to upgrade Drupal 9 to Drupal 10

Migrating from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 can be easy or can be difficult depending on the project you are involved in. Yes, because every site is different and may present its own unique challenges.

These are the following steps to migrate from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10.

1. Keeping your custom modules up to date with new standards and removing deprecated code will result in small changes before you have to do a major core upgrade. If the site is well maintained the changes are mostly with the core_version_requirement. You will need to update from core_version_requirement: ^9 to core_version_requirement: ^9 || ^10 . As soon as we are sure that our custom code is compatible with Drupal 10, we can move to check the contrib modules. And this is where things might get tricky

2. Upgrade contrib modules to versions which support Drupal 9 and 10. If the new version only supports D10, then you can add it to composer as an alternative version, for example: 'drupal/module_name': '^1 || ^2', and you can have version 1 still installed while on Drupal 9. Once you install Drupal 10, version 2 of the module will be installed by composer.

3. Uninstall obsolete modules and themes like Color, RDF, Seven etc. You can’t remove core modules or themes, but if you are not sure if these are depended upon, it can be moved from core to contrib especially classy and stable, which you can keep as contrib modules. You may need to set your Admin theme to Claro and re-export your config on this step. Use drush theme:uninstall theme(s) command (drush thun for short) to uninstall themes.

4. Remove orphaned permissions which are still assigned to user roles. Export your config before starting this step. The upgrade_status module will tell you which permissions need to go from which roles. Simply edit the user.role.[role].yml config ymls and remove the relevant lines from the permissions array. 

5. Upgrade Drupal core to latest 9.5, in order to upgrade to 10.

composer require drupal/core-recommended:^9.5 drupal/core-composer-scaffold:^9.5  --update-with-all-dependencies

Now let's look at the tricky part. Drupal 10 has some specific things we have to do to allow us to upgrade to drupal 10.

1. Drupal 10 runs with PHP 8.2 or later so make sure you have it to be able to upgrade. 

2. Not all modules are Drupal 10 ready so you will have to use drupal lenient.  You will have to get a patch for Drupal 9 only modules. Install mglaman/composer-drupal-lenient before attempting to upgrade. Otherwise these modules will create a dependency problem. After the installation, you need to declare the Drupal 9 modules which should be treated as Drupal 10 modules. For example, to allow drupal/token to be installed run:

composer require mglaman/composer-drupal-lenient

composer config --merge --json extra.drupal-lenient.allowed-list '["drupal/token"]'

3. If you have Drush installed make sure the version is ^11 || ^12, we use this because some module may not be version 12 compatible.

4. Drupal Console (drupal/console) is not Drupal 10 compatible and as such we have to remove it. 

composer remove drupal/console --no-update

5. Upgrade CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5,if you have custom CKEditor 4 plugins which don’t have an upgrade path to CKEditor 5, then you can keep using CKEditor 4 but as a contrib module. You may have to use it although it is deprecated, to avoid errors when you deploy the Drupal 10 upgrade, when the config import tries to uninstall CKEditor.

6. If you use Entity Embed, you need to manually replace CKEditor Embed buttons with SVG icons as Drupal 10 is not using png.

7. Check custom code for core/jquery.once if it does exist update it to use core/once because jquery.once is removed from Drupal 10

8. If you encounter dependency issues, and composer just won’t let you upgrade to D10, but you are sure that all the dependencies are in order, then the quickest thing to do is to delete the composer.lock file(although its not a best practice), delete vendor folder then run composer install which will install from the composer.json file and create a new .lock file.

9. Note that you can ignore some false positives such as an empty custom profile, which phpstan can’t scan, and as such upgrade status would complain, the trick would be to create an empty .php file to get the issue fix

After all these are done and ready for upgrade, you can run this command

composer require 'drupal/core-recommended:^10' 'drupal/core-composer-scaffold:^10' 'drupal/core-project-message:^10' --no-update

If   drupal/core happens to be part of the composer.json file, remove it. This dependency is included in drupal/core-recommended and may cause problems. If you have drupal/core-dev installed, you can run this

composer require 'drupal/core-dev:^10' --dev --no-update

Now,let us test perform the update with the --dry-run option: this allows us to see if the update will runs smoothly or might encounter some errors.

composer update --dry-run

If you encounter any errors, walk through the process to resolve them. Resume the process when the errors are resolved, run the update with dependencies to update any transitive module.

composer update -W

Don’t forget to run drush updb and drush cex after the upgrade. This means you should run the upgrade on top of an installed and functioning D9 database.

If you have a custom theme that is  based on classy,seven or stable then don’t forget to install them as  contrib themes - composer require 'drupal/[module_name]'. You should uninstall and remove upgrade status after the upgrade process.

Pathauto has an issue with some config files so, if you have Pathauto installed then you need to update some configs by hand. Namely pathauto.pattern.[name] config files have had their selection_criteria plugins updated. For example node_type becomes entity_bundle:node. or  try the following command

drush eval 'include_once(DRUPAL_ROOT . "/modules/contrib/pathauto/pathauto.install"); pathauto_update_8108()'

In summary the whole update process for a site can be very difficult and ranges from project to project. It could have different modules installed, with some even locked to specific dev versions, as well as heavily patched old major versions of modules which needed to be upgraded. You walk through these steps and iterate through if need be to get your upgrade completed.

Take advantage of Symfony Mailer’s first-class integration with Symfony Messenger brought to Drupal via the SM project, allowing your site to send emails asynchronously.

This post is part 6 in a series about Symfony Messenger.

1. Introducing Symfony Messenger integrations with Drupal
2. Symfony Messenger’ message and message handlers, and comparison with @QueueWorker
3. Real-time: Symfony Messenger’ Consume command and prioritised messages
4. Automatic message scheduling and replacing hook_cron
5. Adding real-time processing to QueueWorker plugins
6. Making Symfony Mailer asynchronous: integration with Symfony Messenger
7. Displaying notifications when Symfony Messenger messages are processed
8. Future of Symfony Messenger in Drupal

Since Swift Mailer and its Drupal contrib integration were recently deprecated, many projects have naturally switched to its replacement: Symfony Mailer, either via Drupal Symfony Mailer or Drupal Symfony Mailer Lite.

This post outlines how you can take advantage of Symfony Mailer’s first class integration with Symfony Messenger brought to Drupal via the SM project. This integration allows for dispatching emails off-thread, potentially improving performance of the dispatching (usually web-) thread by offloading email-related tasks to dedicated Symfony Messenger workers. This setup can be considered an alternative to using Queue Mail.

Setup

As of writing, of the two Symfony Mailer implementations in contrib, Drupal Symfony Mailer Lite has built in support for Symfony Messenger. Drupal Symfony Mailer does not yet support it, an issue and merge request exist to add it. Apply a patch until the changes are merged.

Symfony Messenger itself does not require any special configuration, other than installing SM.

To run asynchronously, the \Symfony\Component\Mailer\Messenger\SendEmailMessage message must have routing configuration to a transport. Or at least the fallback transport must be configured. Without transport configuration, Emails will still be dispatched through Messenger, however they will be executed synchronously in the same thread they were dispatched.

Opting out

If you happen to have both Symfony Mailer and Symfony Messenger installed but do not want emails to be sent asynchronously, you can configure routing for the \Symfony\Component\Mailer\Messenger\SendEmailMessage message to instead use the synchronous transport.

If you’re using the SM Config submodule:

Sending emails and dispatching emails

Emails may be dispatched using the usual Drupal mechanism, or you can dispatch using Symfony Mailer directly by constructing an email object:

After the send method is executed, Mailer checks Messenger is available, creates a new SendEmailMessage message to wrap the \Symfony\Component\Mime\Email object. Then dispatches SendEmailMessage to the messenger bus.

As is typical with Symfony Messenger, email messages must be serialisable. Avoid including any Drupal entities or service references in an email object, and render email contents before sending it.

Processing emails

To process email messages, run the worker with sm messenger:consume. This command will either listen or poll for messages and execute them in a dedicated thread, ensuring quick processing after they are dispatched. For more information on the worker, please refer to post 3 of this series.

In the next post, we’ll explore how to add a user interface to notify users when relevant tasks have been processed.

Tagged

Support for Drupal 7 will end next year. If you're running your website on this version of the system, now is a great time to figure out what to do with it. Is upgrading to Drupal 10 a good idea? And how about choosing other technologies to migrate your site? Join our free webinar on February 22nd to discover your options as Drupal 7's end-of-life becomes a reality.

Authored by: Nadiia Nykolaichuk.

One of the earliest known calendars was created by ancient Egyptians, who used hieroglyphics and carvings to represent the months, days, and important events. Today, visually appealing and user-friendly calendars are easily created on websites, all thanks to powerful CMSs like Drupal. We’ll share some modules in Drupal that are available for calendar creation and management, and carefully walk you through the key steps of building a calendar. 

Instead of showing the original author of a node, show the last person to edit it.