Recognize the problem that your Drupal website is not sending emails? For example, when there's a (security) update or when someone has filled out a Webform. In this blog, I'll show you in a few simple steps how to ensure that the emails your Drupal website sends always get delivered.
The Drupal Association is here to update you on all of the exciting things you may have missed that happened at the conference! From a focus on marketing to updates on innovation, there was much to see and do at DrupalCon. Lille, France, was the perfect city for the Drupal community to unite. Easily accessible from major cities such as London and Paris, it was a bustling city of fantastic cuisine (did you try Le Welsh?!), shopping, museums, and culture. Continue reading to learn more about the latest updates from Europe’s largest Drupal gathering.
On Day One of DrupalCon Lille, things kicked off with the Driesnote, a colorful presentation that took us through a fairytale story fitting for such a historic city. This fairytale took attendees through the Drupal village, learning about the main character Drupal, and other unique villages that Drupal visits along the way: Reactopia, Contentville, Squarix, and Edoby Heights. Drupal stopped along the way to meet with the Drupal Marketing Wizards. A key initiative for the Drupal Association Board’s Strategic Plan is to amp up the marketing of Drupal as a product, and the Driesnote introduced us to Suzanne Dergacheva, Lynne Capozzi, and Nikhil Deshpande. As leaders of the new Drupal Association Marketing Committee, these three marketing wizards are working with a core group of community members to create a product marketing plan to boost Drupal marketing.
Other critical topics from the Driesnote included Drupal’s impact on creating a safe and secure web for everyone and the Open Web Manifesto, as well as Drupal’s latest updates and innovations. You can read more about the DrupalCon Lille Driesnote in Dries’ blog post.
During the opening ceremony, three well-deserving nominees received the Women in Drupal Award! The Define award went to Tiffany Farriss, the Build award went to Marine Gandy, and the Scale award went to Lenny Moskalyk. Congratulations to all three recipients, and thank you for all your work for Drupal and the community!
Continuing with Day One, we saw an update on the Project Browser Initiative with Leslie Glynn and Chris Wells. They discussed the current state of the initiative, including the usability testing they have been conducting, the plan for the UI and Markup, as well as their roadmap for the initiative, and various opportunities to contribute. Learn more about how you can help with the Project Browser Initiative.
Day One also included many other insightful sessions, Birds of a Feather discussions, and the First-Time Contributor Workshop. Alan Burke’s session, Having your cake and eating it too: Using Varnish to serve content from your new Drupal site alongside your Legacy platform - keeping 2 platforms live at the same time, walked audience members through running your own Varnish instance vs using a third party provider such as Fastly, what is achievable 'out of the box' using Fastly, and tricks to make sure Drupal works well in such a configuration.
Bringing Mautic and Drupal closer together in an open DXP with Dropsolid CEO Dominique de Cooman highlighted how Drupal and Mautic can form the backbone of an open DXP, specifically how a DXP can create value for the end user over using Drupal alone or Mautic alone.
Day Two of the conference held two impressive keynotes, starting with KitKat and Jägermeister. These two powerhouse brands shared how they use Drupal to market their products, notably sharing that web traffic increased after KitKat implemented Drupal. Jägermeister showcased their solution for customized, collaborative, and transparent communication across borders with Drupal.
The second Keynote of the day, Fly Higher - How to Lead Fearlessly, brought Sarah Furness, a former combat helicopter pilot and Squadron leader, to the stage to give thoughtful and relatable tips on being the best leader you can be.
In Decoupling your search solution with Drupal Search API with speakers Jose Nieves and Christoph Breidert, we learned about how to use Drupal Search API with decoupled Javascript applications. We also saw an overview of the advantages and considerations when building a decoupled search application.
Other highlights from Day Two included Design in Figma, marketing automation, and a Drupal Association Public Board Meeting where new board members Piyush Poddar, Fei Lauren, Imre Gmelig Meijling, and Lenny Moskalyk were announced. Fei Lauren won the community-elected seat by securing the most votes during the At-Large Board Election!
Finally, Day Three of DrupalCon Lille held the last keynote of the conference, where Drupal core initiative leads updated the audience on new improvements to the base system, event organization, diversity practices, and an update from Promote Drupal. This was the fifth installment of this keynote, and it allowed the audience to learn from key leaders in the community about what they are working on, their challenges, and how folks can get involved.
Innovation and the Future of Drupal was another topic on Day Three, hosted by the Drupal Association’s own Alex Moreno. Innovation in Drupal is a critical component of the Drupal Association and the Drupal Association Board regarding the vision for the future of Drupal. In this session, Alex led the conversation about the past, present, and most importantly, the future of Drupal. He was joined by a group of experienced tech leads in different areas in the Drupal industry: Scott Massey (Morpht), Cristina Chumillas (Lullabot), AmyJune Hineline (The Linux Foundation), and Nick Veenhof (Gitlab). During the discussion, Alex Moreno shared some numbers and graphs, the result of the work that he is doing on innovation. He shared that Drupal has still been growing strong in some areas of the industry, in particular in the top most popular 10k and 100k sites. We may simply need a little push to replicate the same for the rest:
At the end of the conversation, there was a positive message about the future of Drupal. In Alex's words, “We have the means, the experience, the opportunity, but most importantly, the community, to continue making Drupal a huge success for another 20 years. Let’s do it. There is nothing we cannot achieve together”.
ICT Greenhouse Gas Emissions Are Exploding – How Drupal Community Should Engage and Contribute Their Part with Janne Kalliola took us through why green coding is important, energy consumption in modern software, and how to reduce waste. Janne explained how information and communication technology accounts for 4-10% of the world’s energy consumption and 2.1-3.9% of greenhouse gas emissions. In this session, we learned that a sustainability team is being formed to help remedy this issue. Learn more here.
Finally, to wrap up three days of insightful sessions, the Closing Ceremony had everyone awaiting the much-anticipated announcement of the DrupalCon Europe location for 2024 … it will be held in Barcelona, Spain! We can’t wait to see everyone there.
Overall, DrupalCon Lille was a massive success with many informative and innovative sessions – too many to name in just one blog post! From the Birds of a Feather roundtables to Trivia Night, the community was able to learn and grow not only through all of the presentations and sessions but also through social events that helped connect our community. Thank you to everyone who made DrupalCon Lille a huge success, especially the Kuoni Kumlare team for organizing the event, and to our many sponsors and volunteers for making it possible!
See you all at the next DrupalCon in May 2024 in Portland, Oregon.
The news lately, both close to home and around the world can be a lot to manage for many people. This feeling of overwhelm and heartbreak is echoed throughout many professional communities, including Drupal. The Drupal community is a group that fosters connection and inclusion and as members of the Community Working Group, our mission is to support you, our community.
To that end, we’re releasing an updated list of mental health resources that are available to you and your peers. The majority of these sources are US-based but we’ve tried to include a few international resources as well. If you are looking for support networks in your country please reach out to any member of the Drupal Community Working Group and we will confidentially search our network to find resources that fit your needs.
American Psychological Association (APA) - Psychologist Locator:
Website: locator.apa.org
Crisis Text Line:
Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor
Website: crisistextline.org
Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs):
If you're employed, inquire about EAP services provided by your workplace.
Local Support Groups and Nonprofits:
Search for local mental health support groups or nonprofits in your area that may provide resources and support.
MentalHealth.gov:
Website: mentalhealth.gov
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI):
Phone: 1-800-950-NAMI (6264)
Website: nami.org
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH):
Website: nimh.nih.gov
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:
Phone: 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255)
Website: suicidepreventionlifeline.org
Online Therapy Platforms:
Consider using online therapy platforms like BetterHelp, Talkspace, or 7 Cups for remote mental health support.
Open Sourcing Mental Health:
Website: OSMIHelp.org
A non-profit focused on mental health in the tech community with forums and resources available on the website.
Psychology Today - Find a Therapist:
Website: Psychologytoday.com
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Helpline:
Phone: 1-800-662-HELP (1-800-662-4357)
Website: samhsa.gov
Therapist Directories (GoodTherapy, TherapyRoute, etc.):
GoodTherapy: goodtherapy.org
TherapyRoute: therapyroute.com
University Counseling Centers:
If you're a student, check if your university or college offers counseling services.
UK MIND:
Phone: 0300 304 7000
There is a list of other UK helplines available at
https://www.mind.org.uk
https://www.spuk.org.uk/national-suicide-prevention-helpline-uk/
Veterans Crisis Line:
Phone: 1-800-273-8255 (Press 1)
Text: 838255
Website: veteranscrisisline.net
Your Local Community Mental Health Centers and Hospitals:
Check your local directory or government health websites for nearby mental health clinics and hospitals.
We also want to encourage those impacted by the mental health struggles of others to reach out for help. You’ve been impacted - we see you and want to support you.
None of us are alone - we are a community of peers, friends, and colleagues.
No matter your relationship with mental health challenges or your role in the Drupal community - we’re all better because you’re on this journey with us. Please take care of yourselves.
Sincerely,
The Drupal Community Working Group
This is a short video for how to use the LocalGov Content Access Control Module, based on Drupal's Workbench Access module.
We added Drupal's default pink background to LocalGov Drupal's unpublished pages recently. It didn't go down as well as we might have hoped!
Drupal Commerce is an ecommerce platform that has become the talk of the town. Ecommerce giants including Puma, Timex, and Lush rely on it to ensure top-notch operation of their online stores. Such immense popularity of this ecommerce software piques the curiosity of many. If you are also one of them, this blog will satiate your curiosity by exploring multiple facets of Drupal ecommerce development that make it unmatchable. So, are you ready to dive in?
First of all, let’s delve into what Drupal Commerce is.
The last two weeks the dust settled after an energetic and productive Drupalcon. Now there is a new stable release for all of the three most popular contrib modules Nuvole maintains: Config Filter, Config Split and Config Ignore.
This is the most stable module, its new releases just switch over to Gitlab CI and fix a small inconsistency in how config storages are expected to behave. The first iteration introduced a bug which the second release fixed. Thank you to the early adopters who spotted the bug. Config Filter will remain supported but its relevance is probably going to decrease with the release of stable versions of the modules which used to depend on it but no longer do. For example Config Split 2.x and Config Ignore 3.x do not depend on Config FIlter and both now have a stable release. Modules are encouraged to switch to the Config Storage Transformation API added to Drupal 8.8. Both branches remain supported and recommended on drupal.org since most commits can be cherry picked between the branches. But for performance I would recommend the original 1.x branch. Both branches have exactly the same API, just the behaviour is different when importing or exporting. Other config modules can use either branch for the test traits which facilitate writing tests that pass before and after refactoring from Config Filters API to the core API.
If your site indirectly depends on Config Filter because you use a module which depends on it, you need to explicitly require Config Filter when you upgrade the modules. Drupal can not uninstall a module that is no longer in the codebase. So explicitly require Config Filter, uninstall it and then in a subsequent deployment remove Config Filter.
Our oldest Drupal 8 config module has a new stable 2.0.0 release. In it, bugs and edge cases discovered in last year's release were fixed. It also contains a "new" feature which brings back the functionality of the 1.x branch. This should help sites holding back on upgrading because the functionality changed. With that out of the way the plan is to deprecate the 1.x branch and end support with the end of Drupal 10 support. There will not be any features added to 1.x.
Previous releases of the 3.x branch have not been feature compatible with 2.x. But the stable 3.0 release has been re-written from previous 3.x beta versions. It is configurable so that most use cases can be catered for with enough creativity. One can configure the configuration to ignore for create, update and delete for both import and export. But one can also just keep it simple and then it will be as all the versions before. In particular, however, it can be configured easily to behave like: the last 2.x release, the last 2.x release with the popular patch to allow filtering on export and the previous 3.x release. Because of that the 2.x branch is deprecated as of now and it will be marked as unsupported by the end of the year on Drupal.org. There is a new hook replacing the one which existed in 2.x and which addresses the new capabilities (the old hook is still invoked and will be removed in 4.0.0). With the end of Drupal 9 being supported, PHP 8.1 is now the minimum required version, but 3.0 does not yet take advantage of the new PHP language features. So the plan for 4.0.0 is to switch the string constants to enums and switch to semantic versioning and remove the old hook.
Our Drupal 8 modules have always been maintained "like a php library". The development of UI Patterns was initially hosted on Github among other things for that reason. Config Split and Config Filter shipped with their docker compose files and scripts to symlink the module into the Drupal site. Later the custom scripts were replaced by drupal-spoons. Since the now generally available drupal-gitlab-ci is inspired by spoons and DDEV is likely becoming the recommended development environment for contributing to Drupal, I switched my local environment for maintaining the contrib modules to DDEV with the ddev-drupal-contrib plugin, the spiritual successor of drupal-spoons. For contributing to Drupal core I can only recommend the ddev-drupal-core-dev plugin created by justafish during Drupalcon. I helped beta test it and it works like a charm. That said my PhpStorm configuration had to be updated a bit even though I installed the ddev plugin for it. In particular I had to add a second server mapping for Xdebug to work as described in a comment on the issue. The release notes for the contrib modules were generated with drupal-mrn.dev.
Many thanks to everyone who contributed with feedback, code, ideas or even just listened to my ramblings as I discovered untested edge cases.
Tags: Drupal PlanetDrupalConA roundup from our conference session at DrupalCon Lille
Tamsin Fox-Davies Fri, 11/03/2023 - 12:26