DrupalPod is a browser extension and GitPod configuration that allows Drupal contributors to quickly and easily spin up a personal development environment in their browser without pre-installing anything.

Before we go any further, let's break down some of these concepts a bit more…

GitPod is a cloud development platform - meaning that everything necessary for development is installed in the cloud and the only thing that needs to be installed on one's local machine is a modern web browser. Developers can customize their cloud development environments virtually any way they see fit depending on the nature of their project. GitPod cloud development environments are sometimes called personal development environments, as they are normally created as an alternative to a developer's local development environment.

While GitPod environments will sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, their current state will not be deleted for 2 weeks (and when pinned, will never be deleted) and can be re-launched via the GitPod Workspaces page. 

GitPod is a freemium software-as-a-service with a free tier that includes 50 hours/month of usage. 

DrupalPod has two main components - a browser extension (for Firefox and Chrome only) and a set of configuration scripts that customizes a GitPod personal development environment for Drupal core and contributed project (modules, themes, etc…) development.

The DrupalPod browser extension provides a quick way for a Drupal contributor to launch a new personal development environment on GitPod from virtually any Drupal issue queue issue. 

The DrupalPod configuration scripts for GitPod include just about everything a modern Drupal development environment needs, including the drupal/core-dev dependencies (which includes PhpStan, phpcs, and PhpUnit), a complete DDEV-based environment, Xdebug setup out of the box, and a useful tool to help set up a temporary ssh keys for using Git to push changes back to issue forks on Drupal.org in a secure manner.

In addition, every DrupalPod environment includes Drush as well as the Admin Toolbar and Devel modules - all with the idea of making it as easy as possible to focus on the task at hand.

DrupalPod was created and is maintained by Ofer Shaal, who also reviewed this blog post and provided answers to my many questions. Thanks, Ofer!

It is important to emphasize that DrupalPod can completely replace one's local development environment for core and contrib development. 

Who is DrupalPod for?

DrupalPod is not just for Drupal contributors who write and commit code changes. It also (and possibly more-importantly) allows non-coders to get more involved in the contribution process by making it easy for them to perform common issue queue tasks like testing merge requests (or patches) and reproducing reported issues. It can also be used for user experience and accessibility reviews, among other tasks. 

Getting started

There's a few steps that are required before launching a Drupal issue queue merge request in DrupalPod. Luckily, both are relatively straight-forward:

1. Install the DrupalPod browser extension in either Firefox or Chrome.  Be sure to use the same browser for the remainder of the steps outlined in this article.
2. Create a (free) GitPod account and log yourself in through Github. 
3. Login to your Drupal.org user account.

Note that if you're not interested in making code changes to an existing issue, then the steps marked with an asterisk (*) can be skipped.

Launching a development environment

Next, find an issue on Drupal.org that you'd like to work on. If you're planning on making a commit and pushing it back to the issue fork, be sure to click the green "Get push access" button near the top of the issue.

I've created a test issue in the Markdown Easy module issue queue with an issue fork if you'd like to test DrupalPod on an inert issue. The rest of this article will assume you're testing with this issue.

In your browser, click on the DrupalPod browser extension and you should see the interface shown in the screenshot earlier in this article. You'll see that the project (Markdown Easy) and the issue fork for this issue ("markdown_easy-3403460") are pre-selected. Select the "3403460-drupalpod-test-issue" branch, "10.0.9" for the Drupal core version, and "Standard" for the install profile. Since this issue only contains an issue fork and no patches, the "Choose a patch" dropdown can be left blank.

It should be noted that the options for "Drupal core version" are not automatically updated whenever a new version of Drupal core is released, and there may be a delay before the DrupalPod browser extension is updated with the most recent version of Drupal core as an option. 

Then, click on the "Open Dev Env" button and accept the default GitPod configuration settings by clicking the "Continue" button on the GitPod configuration page. By default, GitPod will launch an in-browser version of Visual Studio Code.

Next, GitPod builds your personal development environment using the configuration provided by DrupalPod - depending on several factors, the process to create the environment normally takes just a few minutes. Keep an eye on the terminal output in the Visual Studio Code interface to see when it completes.

Another big sign that your personal GitPod development environment is ready is when a web browser opens in the Visual Studio Code interface on the development environment's version of Drupal!

To login into Drupal in the GitPod-powered personal development environment use the credentials:

• Username: admin
• Password: admin

What happens if the project doesn't start up cleanly in GitPod?

A fairly common occurrence (especially when working with older issues) is that during the DrupalPod/GitPod setup phase, a Composer error occurs. This is normally not an issue with DrupalPod, but rather with the issue fork (or patch) being out-of-date and in need of update. 

Setting up ssh keys for pushing Git commits

This step is not necessary for those just looking to test patches or merge requests and not make code commits.

Hopefully, improved integration between DrupalPod, GitPod, and git.drupalcode.org will soon render this manual temporary ssh key setup obsolete.

At the current time, in order to push commits from a GitPod personal development environment back to a Drupal.org issue fork, a temporary ssh key pair must be set up. While DrupalPod does an admirable job of trying to streamline the issue, there are still a couple of manual steps involved and the process isn't super-smooth.

Luckily, the process is outlined in the "Contribution Guide" document that automatically opens in a DrupalPod environment (see previous screenshot). Step 5 of this guide instructs the user to run a script in the terminal in order to kick off the process of creating the temporary ssh key pair. Currently, the script launches a pseudo-GUI in the terminal app, which leads to the instructions-template.md file being displayed with the necessary steps.

At this point, it is important to click on "< OK >" in the "If you completed the instructions above - click OK" box. 

Note that this will kick off a command line task that requires your input, requesting you to enter your desired passphrase for your temporary ssh key (I normally just hit "Return" to leave the passphrase blank). Only once this is step complete will you see your new, temporary ssh public key appended to the instructions-template.md document. After this, proceed with steps 1-9 listed in the document.

Once complete, click to < Exit > the pseudo-GUI in the terminal app, then complete step 10 to confirm that the temporary ssh key is working as expected. I have found that the resulting message is semi-clear at best, but as long as you see "Setup was successful" somewhere in the message, you're probably good-to-go.

At this point, I normally close the ssh-related .md documents open in Visual Studio Code and get to work. 

Using Git from inside a DrupalPod environment

One aspect of using DrupalPod that is quite important for anyone interested in code contribution is understanding at least a little bit about how the code base is organized.

Here's the short version - the directory that you should pay the most attention to is repos. This is where the project of interest (the one whose issue fork or patch you're working on) is available to you for editing and (more importantly) for performing Git operations on. DrupalPod uses symlinks to ensure everything is running smoothly, and the repos directory is automatically symlinked to the project of interest (regardless if it is a module, theme, or Drupal core).

When DrupalPod is opened for a Drupal core issue, https://github.com/joachim-n/drupal-core-development-project is used for the code base.

Inside the repos directory is the project of interest. To modify a project file, navigate to the file inside the repos directory. If/when you're ready to make a code commit to the issue fork, you may use the Visual Studio Code's Git GUI or the command line (after navigating to the project inside the repos directory.)

Assuming that you properly set up a temporary ssh keypair from the previous section, you should be able to perform a git push from either interface. 

The use of the repos directory is the same regardless of if you're working on a contributed module or Drupal core - the project of interest is in the repos directory.

As a matter of practice, once the GitPod environment is up-and-running, the first thing I do is navigate to the repos/ directory on the command line.

Code quality tools

While Drupal's core-dev dependencies are automatically provided in all DrupalPod configurations, they do not work out-of-the box without some configuration (much like as if you installed them yourself in a local development environment.) Setting up code quality tools like phpcs, PhpStan, and PhpUnit for core or contributed modules involves a little bit of configuration that is out-of-scope of this article. More information is available on drupal.org - this material (and much more) is also covered in DrupalEasy's 15-week Professional Module Development course. 

What's next for DrupalPod?

Based on conversations with Ofer Shaal, the primary maintainer of DrupalPod, users can expect the following improvements in the coming months:

• Better integration between DrupalPod and git.drupalcode.org to remove the "temporary ssh key" setup. See https://github.com/shaal/DrupalPod/issues/42 , https://drupal.slack.com/archives/CGKLP028K/p1699418406981909, and https://www.drupal.org/project/infrastructure/issues/3404441.
• Evolution of the DrupalPod browser extension to provide better integration with Drupal issue pages to launch personal GitPod development environments. See https://github.com/shaal/DrupalPod/issues/16. 

Hosted by Michael Meyers, - Managing Director of Tag1 Consulting, and Janez Urevc, Sr. Engineer at Tag 1. This podcast series focuses on the strategies involved in upgrading and migrating Drupal websites and applications. This is the last episode in a mini series in which we aim to answer the common question: “How much will my migration cost?” Spoiler alert: It’s complicated. We team up with Lucas Hedding one more time to help demystify the complexities of estimating your project, delving into unexpected variables that could shake up your budget and reveal why quality assurance is more than just a checkbox. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Please let us know if you have specific migration-related topics you'd like to see us cover. Or, reach out and let us know if we can be an active part of ensuring your migration is a success! --- For a transcript of this video, see A Guide to Estimating Migrations - How much will my Drupal Migration Cost? - Part 3/3. --- Photo by Julia Craice on Unsplash

December is here. In my part of the world, the most livable months are December to February. There will be a drop from the sun's scorching heat to the cooling embrace of misty mornings. We don't have snow. The only heavy snowfall that most of us see will be either in cinemas or in literature.

I have wished for such lovely mornings to last forever. But seasons change. People change. People and their technology contribute to large-scale climate change. Let us make a concerted effort to bring down ICT greenhouse gas emissions, taking a cue from Janne Kalliola's session in DrupalCon Lille, and pave the way for a better tomorrow. 

As the year ends, many people have started taking stocks of their past year in retrospect. So do companies. In mid-October, during DrupalCon Lille, we witnessed Dries taking stock of the state of Drupal in his presentation. He placed Drupal against competing CMS offerings and evaluated their strengths and weaknesses. He explained the new marketing initiative and the Drupal Association's decision to partly sponsor the Web Summit Lisbon with the aid of four leading Drupal agencies. It happened in November. Drupal had a happening booth. Everybody was in a resurgent mood.

Anything good will not go uncontested. It shouldn't, either. A good adversary can be an indication of worth. In recent weeks, if you ask me what the most pertinent point of discussion among Drupalists was, I would say it was about a medium blog post by Maxime Topolov, CEO of Code.Store. It was a critique of Driesnote. Although he published the review by the end of October, it suddenly came into discussion through some recent LinkedIn posts. It is interesting to read counter-narratives.

Coming down to the week in retrospect, TheDropTimes (TDT) published the second part of the interview with Grzegorz Pietrzak. He talks about Droopler to Thomas Elias K. Catch the conversation here. We ran a featured story on the Calender View Module by Matthieu Scarset. Alka Elizabeth did the honors.

In a significant organization news, Mautic started offering live trials by collaborating with DropSolid. After Acquia incorporated Mautic into its offerings and returned it to the community, this was the first break for the open-source marketing automation platform.

Local and regional communities play a remarkable role in strengthening the Drupal ecosystem. The recently concluded DrupalCamp Costa Rica had more than 120 participants. Kazima Abbas gives us a glimpse into the successful DrupalCamp. The 3rd annual EvolveDrupal Ottawa summit has concluded successfully. Evolving Web has also raised a call for session submissions to their next summit in Atlanta, GA, in early 2024.

The next edition of DrupalCon Europe will be in Barcelona from September 24 to 27, 2024. Know the venue in advance. The Bay Area Drupal Camp is returning with a two-day hackathon in San Francisco, tentatively scheduled for April 13 to 15, 2024. You can submit sessions for Florida DrupalCamp 2024 until December 18. Drupal Developer Days 2024 will happen in Burgas, Bulgaria, from June 26 to 28, 2024. The camp needs sponsors. Acquia has announced a webinar on Crafting Human-Centric Digital Experiences: A Guide for Drupal Developers. It will happen on December 14.

We shared a few case studies last week. Read about Evolving Web's Successful Drupal Migration for INSPQ or Pantheon's support to WebMD. Srijan published a case study on Drupal site migration from version 8 to 10. Read how Acquia drives digital transformation for Nestlé.

Drew Webber has written about a security vulnerability in Drupal 7. Catch it here. Enterprise support for PHP 8.0 ended on November 26. It will be wise to upgrade your PHP installation. Starting from Drupal 10.2, developers can use PHP attributes instead of annotations for certain plugins. Goran Nikolovski writes about it. Incidentally, he has also written about a debugging experience in webforms in Drupal 10.

A Brazilian city offers 2,500 spots for free Distance Learning courses in technology. In a video tutorial by D4Drupal, Saranya Ashok Kumar demonstrates how to create custom pagination in a custom module for Drupal 10, 9, and 8. Oliver Davies offers a free 7-day email course dedicated to automated testing and test-driven development in Drupal. The 4th episode of the LocalGov Drupal tutorial series focuses on deploying websites to the cloud using platform.sh. Selwyn Polit invites open collaboration on GitHub for a ready reckoner on Drupaling.

Read about Hux, a tool for managing hooks in Drupal website development. Lee Rowlands writes about PreviousNext's journey toward Drupal frontend nirvana by leveraging Vite, Twig, and Storybook. Bluedrop, a French Drupal agency, advocates conducting a 5-day design sprint to finalize UI/UX design for a Drupal project. The process involves understanding, drawing, deciding, prototyping, and testing.

Luca Lusso writes about the state of modules maintained by SparkFabrik. Allan Chappell writes about the significance of Composer, a dependency manager for PHP. The article published by Four Kitchens contextualizes Drupal projects wherein developers navigate the complexities when dealing with modules that haven't fully transitioned to the next major version of the Drupal framework.

'Beyond Blocks' podcast by Oliver Davies is a comparatively new podcast series about Drupal. The previous episode of the podcast features Niklas Franke, Digital Marketing Manager at Factorial. In it, the guest shares his rich experience organizing Splash awards in Germany.

'Beyond the Build' interview series by Drupal Associaton features Sean Keating from The Michael J. Fox Foundation and Jim Barnthouse from Specbee. Kelly Delaney, the Director of Development at Drupal Association, and Nathan Roach, Marketing Director at Axelerant did the interview. Watch the 3rd episode here.

Talking Drupal podcast episode #426 interviews Stephen Mustgrave about the Needs Review Queue Initiative. Meanwhile, Agiledrop has published an interview about the Next-Drupal project with John Faber, Managing Partner of Chapter Three. Next-Drupal aims to integrate the Next.js frontend with the Drupal backend.

Matt Glaman has shared his talk from Midcamp this year about porting top projects to Drupal 10. The major challenge here is maintaining support for Drupal 9.5 while dealing with deprecated code removed from Drupal 10.

Last but not least, check out the benefits of Drupal LTS (long-term support) from Vimal Joseph's blog post on Zyxware.

There are more stories available out there. But the compulsion to limit the selection of stories is forcing us to put a hard break on further exploration—happy Drupaling folks.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Thank you,

Sincerely
Sebin Abraham Jacob
Editor in Chief, TheDropTimes.

For our fifth door, Cristina Chumillas (ckrina) introduces us to the new Admin Navigation a new admin toolbar (not to be confused with Admin Toolbar), which aims to replace the default admin menu in a future Drupal release.

The new administration navigation has been created to replace core’s default Toolbar. More than 70% of Drupal sites customize it with contrib modules, so it’s clear that it has become obsolete. The new navigation will move most of the existing top toolbar into a left vertical sidebar that we’ve been testing and evolving over the last months. The goal is to provide a more…

Tags

• New Admin Toolbar
• Admin Toolbar
• Administration
• gin admin theme

On today’s show we are turning the tables and Nic and John will be interviewed by our guest host Melissa Bent. We’ll also cover Content Model Documentation as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/427

• What made you decide to start the podcast
• Who does what tasks
• The first episode was on May 30 2013. What do you know now that you wish you knew then
• When did the guest host start
• What has been your favorite episode
• How did you come to this format
• Where did the tagline come from
• What technology do you use in production
• The show is supported by multiple platforms, would you recommend this
• What advice would you give someone just starting

• GovCon Session for Content Model Documentation
• First Episode
• Three hundred
• The Night before DrupalCon
• Wade Wingler
• Jono Bacon
• Dries’ First Episode
• Needs Review Issue Queue
• Sustainability Guidelines
• A Website’s Carbon Footprint
• vdo.ninja
• kdenlive
• Audacity
• Patreon
• Youtube
• Libsyn
• Kid3
• Auphonic
• Midjourney
• Trello
• Hackmd.io

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi

Melissa Bent - linkedin.com/in/melissabent merauluka

Martin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu Content Model & Site Documentation

• Brief description:
  • Have you wanted to make your Drupal site self-documenting directly within the admin UI? There’s a module for that.
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Jan 2023
  • Versions available: 1.0.23, compatible with Drupal 9 and 10
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release was a week ago
  • Test coverage
  • No official guide, but there was a recent talk about the module at GovCon, so you can watch that
  • Number of open issues: 43 open, 9 of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • 82 sites
• Maintainer(s):
  • Steve Wirt (swirt) who works for Civic Actions
• Module features and usage
  • Allows your Drupal site to generate its own documentation
  • Has fieldable Content Model Document entities that allow you to customize what data will be stored
  • Can optionally document things like your content types, taxonomies, block types, paragraph types, and more
  • Documentation elements can also be associated with parts of your site configuration, and they become available within the relevant parts of your admin UI. For example, if you add documentation for a specific content type, when a site builder goes into edit that content type they will see a link to the documentation as a tab
  • You can generate entity relationship diagrams using MermaidJS
  • Also includes a field search capability originally developed as a separate module by Matthieu Scarset, who was a guest on this show back in episode #298
  • Will also generate diagrams to illustrate your content workflows, showing the states defined and the transitions between them

Translatable Inline Lists in Drupal

One of the things that got me started using Drupal was its powerful ability to work with multiple languages. I believe it's still a differentiator for Drupal in an increasingly crowded CMS space, particularly the degree to which all the text that appears on a Drupal site can be translated through the admin interface.

Tags

• Drupal

Choosing the best Drupal approach for your project can be a daunting task. Do you choose a headless or decoupled approach? Both approaches have their pros and cons and it is important to understand what they are before making a decision. In this blog post, we will compare the two approaches, explore the pros and cons of each, and help you determine which one is best for your project.

Disclaimer: This blog is based on analyzing events that have taken place in the DAO market over the past few years. The DAO market is unpredictable, so we are not responsible for your sudden desire to start creating blockchain content right now.
This blog offers insights into Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), which are often subject to innovation, cosmic disruptions, and quantum leaps.
Note: the future is uncertain, so no one can know exactly what will happen next minute. It can surprise you with an unexpected challenge. However, you must first get acquainted with DAO to learn how to make money on both. Please fasten your seat belts because we are going on an incredible journey.
But: Before acting independently, consult our expert to avoid any mistakes or spontaneous DAO-related endeavors.