This Fall, Evolving Web was recognized by Acquia as a Leader of the Pack in Higher Education for a project in partnership with Princeton University. We received the Acquia Engage award in Miami on Oct 26, 2022, where we also got a chance to learn about all the latest from Acquia with fellow partners and colleagues across the Drupal community. 

Acquia Engage is an unmissable industry event for partners, customers, prospects, and thought leaders, and this year was no exception. In this article, I’ll share some of the trends that we’ve been seeing recently in the Acquia ecosystem, and in our own projects like the award-winning website we built for Princeton International.

Image Patrick Goulet, Alex Dergachev, Laure Duhorane & Lisa Faieta at Acquia Engage Miami

Our Winning Project: An Immersive Website for Students Planning to Study Abroad

The Princeton International website is the product of our partnership with Princeton University to build a site geared toward students looking to study abroad. The interactive, intuitive itinerary-building interface allows students to select their international programs and create a unique curriculum incorporating both their international and on-campus studies. 

The website’s single most innovative feature is the Global Arc. This interactive, intuitive itinerary-building interface allows students to select their international programs and build a unique curriculum incorporating both their international and on-campus studies, while also enabling them to add to their planning section and prioritize curriculum choices, generate a detailed timeline of their desired courses and engage with the Princeton Global Programs System (GPS) and Princeton course catalogue, all by way of a single sign-on.

Imagine it like a tool that helps you plan your trip. You can select your destination country, your dates and the places you want to visit. The tool maps out a suitable itinerary for you, tells you how much money you will need to bring and tells you if any help is available. Need a visa? All the details attached to your profile are available by logging in.

Image Princeton International website

 

“Every single Engage Award submission was ambitious and the combined experiences have touched billions of lives around the world—proving that an open web experience is the best kind of experience.” Baddy Sonja Breidert, Chair of the Drupal Association Board of Directors

The Global Arc uses a decoupled architecture, built on Drupal 9 linked to a React front-end, to prevent heavy database requests. 

Industry Trends to Watch

Speaking of decoupled architecture, it was one of the main industry trends to watch alongside, personalisation, digital assets and data management. Princeton International, our winning project is leading some of these trends in the higher education industry.

Headless

What is headless technology you may ask? You can read more about headless and hybrid content management systems in this recent blog post but in short, headless technology is when the frontend web experience is separated from the back end; the two communicate through an API (application interface). 

This technology allows organisation to collect and distribute content through as many channels as they need. In the case of Princeton International, we used this technology to pull the latest data about the university programs, news, international experiences, and country risk levels to the new website from different external data sources. We built Global Arc's front-end with React, while other pages of the website use a standard Drupal front-end approach. Using React selectively prevents the slowness caused by heavy database requests on interactive pages, without the overhead of creating an entirely decoupled application. This hybrid approach between JavaScript and Drupal is ideal for managing large amounts of content and pushing the limits of interaction design.

Drupal currently offers the freedom and flexibility to pair with other types of frontend technologies like ReactJS and NextJS and has been pushing the concept of the Assembled Web for more than 10 years now.

Personalisation, in the Era of Data Privacy 

Another hot topic at Acquia Engage was how to unify data and content to deliver personalized experiences. A timely conversation as many users are asking for more clarity about the use of their digital data. Secure personalization was in fact one of the key components in the Princeton International project. Users needed to be able to plan their study itinerary, including curriculum requirements, and share this information while preserving user privacy.

Discussions revolved around best practices to maintain users’ trust and allow them to share their preferences while keeping control of their data. As we prepare for a cookieless future, the issue of data collection to deliver unique digital experiences will continue to be a hot topic of discussion.

Drupal 10 Readiness 

With Drupal 10 coming in December, Drupal readiness was also a hot topic. The release date is coming fast and we’re hosting a webinar on D10 to help you learn about its exciting new features and what they mean for teams managing Drupal sites. Register today or send us your questions using our contact form

+ more awesome articles by Evolving Web

Getting Started with Layout Builder in Drupal 9 - A Complete Guide Admin 23 Nov, 2022 Subscribe to our Newsletter Now Subscribe Leave this field blank

Content authors and content editors always look out for a seamless, easy-to-use experience when it comes to page building. Drag-and-drop and WYSIWYG tools are something they expect when they want to create and design pages. Drupal Layout Builder offers this exact experience with its easy-to-use page building capability, in Drupal core. 

Drupal Layout Builder is unique and provides a powerful visual design tool to let content authors change the way content is presented. Introduced in Drupal core in its latest version, Layout Builder in Drupal 9 allows you to add/remove sections to display the content using different layouts, and customizing your pages based on the requirements. The Layout Builder Module in Drupal 9 also allows you to combine these sections and create a truly customized page. 

The Drupal 9 Layout Builder can be used in two different ways. It can be used to create a layout for each content type on the website, and also to create a layout for an individual piece of content.

Introducing Layout Builder 

The Drupal 9 Layout Builder module allows you to customize the design of the entities such as content types, taxonomy, users etc. It provides an easy-to-use drag and drop option for site builders to place blocks, fields etc.

The layout builder module in Drupal 9 makes it easier to build your layouts by offering a preview of the changes made while building your layouts. Instead of having to save every small change made in the layout and then looking it up on the front-end, layout builder in Drupal 9 layout builder allows previews of the changes made for a seamless layout building experience. 

Installing and setting up the Drupal 9 Layout Builder module

In order to install/setup the Drupal 9 layout builder module, navigate to Extend and enable both Layout Builder and Layout Discovery module.

Note: Layout Builder was introduced as a stable module in Drupal 8.7 core. So, make sure you’re using the latest version. In older versions of Drupal, it was an experimental module.

Use Drupal Layout Builder to Customize Content-Type and Taxonomy

Once you have installed the module, navigate to Structure, Content types and click on “Manage display” for any content type , For now we will use the “article” content type.

 

 

Scroll to the bottom and click on Layout options and select “Use Layout Builder”, then click on Save.

 

 

Once you’ve enabled Layout Builder on the view mode, you can see a “Manage layout” option instead of field formatters. You can use Layout Builder for any of the view modes present.
 

 

When you click on “Manage layout”, you will be redirected to article content type layout.

 

 

Add Sections to the Layout

To add sections to the layout builder, remove the default section first. Click on the close icon (as depicted in the below screenshot). Further, you will be provided with an option to the right side of your screen to remove the default section. Click on “Remove”.

 

Let us add a few sections to our layout by clicking on the “Add Section” option. Further, you will be provided with options to choose a layout of your choice for your section, on the right side of the screen. For now, let us select the “Two Column Section”.

 

You will have an option to choose the width for your “Two Column Layout”. Let us select a “50%/50%” for now. Then click on “Add section”.

 

 

Once added, you should be able to see an “Add Block” link for each section region.

 

 

Add Blocks to the Section Regions

After choosing your section for the layout, you can add blocks into your section. To add a block just click on “Add Block” and the “Choose a block” option will slide out from the right.

Choosing a Block
 
Blocks can be chosen from the right by just clicking on them. You can even find blocks by filtering them out by their name using the “Filter by block name” text field. 
We will select “Authored on” content field for now.

 

 

When you click on the block you want to add, you’ll be able to adjust the field formatter. Once you’ve configured the formatter, click on “Add Block”.

 

 

The “Authored On” content field will be placed on the left side of the block.

 

 

After placing the “Authored On” field, you need to save your changes. Save all the changes you have made to your section by clicking on “Save Layout” option at the top of the Drupal 9 layout page.

 

 

Let us try adding some more fields into our layout to further customize our layout builder.

 

 

After saving this layout, if you visit an article content type page, you will be able to see a preview of the layout which you just built.

 

Override Default Layout

The layout which we just built will be applicable for all the articles. If you want to build a customized layout for a particular article in Drupal, we have to enable some options provided by Drupal for the same. You can do it by selecting “Allow each content item to have its layout customized.”

 

After enabling this option, if you go to an article, you should see a Layout tab button.

 

You can now modify the layout using the same interface. However, this will only change the layout on this specific piece of content.

 

 

The Drupal 9 Layout Builder has immensely improved the content editing experience for site builders and content editors. The easy drag and drop functionalities, visual designs, customizations, more control over content, and more such features have made it easy for non-technical editors to design customized layouts in Drupal 9. Experience features like this and more on Drupal with our expert Drupal development services. If you’re still on Drupal 8/7/6 and looking for a seamless Drupal 9 migration, we can help. Connect with us today.
 

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Drupal ECA wins at German/Austrian Splash Awards 2022 Jürgen Haas Tue, 11/22/2022 - 09:50

November 2022, Hamburg, Germany: the Splash Awards ceremony was long awaited and ECA made it to the top, together with many other very successful projects from Germany and Austria. Being awarded with a special price for the "Biggest Community Value" is exceptional and this blog post publishes the project application for the Splash Awards because that nicely describes, what makes ECA so exciting.

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.

Our update for the third quarter of 2022 includes some exciting highlights from DrupalCon Prague in September, a progress report on the GitLab Acceleration Initiative, small improvements to help bring the community together, and more. 

Did you miss the chance to attend DrupalCon Europe in Prague? Don't worry, most of the excellent content is available on the Drupal Association YouTube channel. Almost 50% of the attendees in Prague were new to DrupalCon, an amazing milestone that shows just how healthy the Drupal ecosystem in Europe really is. 

With so many hours of recordings, maybe you'd prefer to check out our event recap for some of the highlights. 

Drupal.org Updates

#Driesnote Highlights

The major theme of the #Driesnote at DrupalCon Prague was how the community is making Drupal easier to use and easier to innovate, with information about Automatic Updates, the Project Browser, and the GitLab initiative.

Watch the full #Driesnote 

The Drupal Association has direct involvement in each of these three initiatives, alongside all of the community contributors and organizations participating. 

If you or your organization is interested in supporting these or other initiatives, please feel free to read up on the official initiative pages to learn how to participate. 

GitLab Acceleration Updates

We want to highlight section of the #Driesnote in particular, Drupal Association team member @fjgarlin gave a significant update on the process of moving Drupal.org issues to GitLab issues, and the full migration code is now written and waiting for the additional pieces of the puzzle (issue credit, CI). 

To increase the rate of innovation in Drupal, the Association is putting a heavy emphasis on the tools we use to contribute. With three pillars of issues, contribution credit, and CI testing each nearly ready to go, we'll be seeing rapid adoption of the new tools in the coming months. 

GitLab server upgrades

As contribution activity ramped up prior to the first Drupal 10 beta release and DrupalCon Prague, it quickly became clear that our GitLab hosting environment was struggling with the increased load. 

The Drupal Association has historically hosted a majority of our infrastructure at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, on bare metal virtual machine hosts that we maintain. We use this in combination with a more modern cloud infrastructure hosted on AWS. While we see significant savings hosting with the OSL, there is clear value in making strategic investments in faster infrastructure for our communities collaboration tools.

Together with our infrastructure management partners at Tag1, we significantly scaled up the server infrastructure backing our GitLab instance: 

Time and money invested in speeding up our GitLab instance directly translates into time saved for thousands of contributors to the Drupal project (and to their employers billable hours). 

It's a much simpler thing than adding new contribution features, but it's a good reminder that investing purely in performance can have a really positive impact on our community. 

Training Marketplace: Recognizing Contribution

Managing the Drupal.org marketplace is one of the more crucial responsibilities of the Drupal Association. Recent efforts have been focused on recognizing the hard work that organizations do to contribute to the project, by sponsoring the time of their team members to give back. For a long time, many of our training partners have also been tremendous contributors, and we're now factoring that into the ranking of organizations in the training marketplace. 

By sorting our training partners in order of contributions, we not only reward those organizations that contribute the most with more business, but we also promote those training companies that will hopefully include contribution training as part of their curriculum, bringing in new contributors to our community. 

Drupal 9( and 10!) Updates for Drupal.org

We're often asked when Drupal.org itself is going to be updated to Drupal 9 (or at this point, Drupal 10!). Historically, with most major version updates of Drupal, Drupal.org is one of the last sites to migrate. This is because Drupal.org has a lot of bespoke tools that we are the sole maintainers of, and so it takes us a little bit longer to get things ready. 

We're happy to say, several sites are in pre-production, ready for deployment soon, including: 

• api.drupal.org
• events.drupal.org 
• localize.drupal.org (thanks to the community!) 

Groups.drupal.org is going to have functionality moved directly into Drupal.org, where it can be more easily connected with systems like the community/events portal and the contribution recognition system. 

Finally, we have designs and front-end work for Drupal.org itself, just about ready to go thanks to our partnership with Third and Grove. 

Drupal.org needs to be a showcase of the best that Drupal can be. As the 'front door' of the Drupal ecosystem, we want to make a great first impression on Drupal evaluators, developers, and organizations who may want to build their business on Drupal. 

Contribution Dashboard for Organizations

Every Drupal.org organization profile now has a contribution dashboard that can be viewed only by the user who owns the profile. This is an important feature addition to help make current and prospective members of the Drupal Certified Partner program more aware of their current progress towards increasing their contributions. 

This 'Owner tools' dashboard provides an at-a-glance look at an organization's contribution status, including:

• Weighted contribution credit in the last 12 months
• Case study count
• Supporting partner level

And critically, highlights the progress towards the next tier of partnership.

If you are the node-owner for your organization profile, look for the 'Owner tools' link at the top of the page. 

Community Events Improvements

In collaboration with the Events Organizer Working Group, we've made additional improvements  to drupal.org/community/events in Q3. 

Because of the return of in-person events as Covid moves from pandemic to endemic, it's more important than ever to provide a central repository for all of the activity happening in the Drupal community. 

In particular, with Drupal 10 just over the horizon, we focused on adding support for 'Contribution Events'.

The new 'contribution events' category was used to support several highly successful 'Drupal 10 porting days' to help get the module ecosystem ready for the upcoming release of Drupal 10. 

You'll also see Drupal 10 release parties being added - so if you're looking to join (or host!) a Drupal 10 launch event, check out drupal.org/community/events. 

Regional Filters for Case Studies

Last but not least, we fulfilled a long-time request to add the ability to filter Drupal.org case studies by region. Just prior to DrupalCon Prague we were able to slip in this functionality. 

For partners hoping to show new clients case studies in the same regions they operate, it should now be much easier, and for end-users looking to see organizations like them who already use Drupal, it should be easier than ever. 

.. and after that?

We're well into Q4 2022 as this blog is getting posted. So what else will be coming soon? The major milestone on everyone's mind is the impending release of Drupal 10, targeted for 14 Dec, 2022. A major part of the Drupal Association team's efforts in Q4 has been on support for Drupal 10 readiness, particularly with the Drupal testing infrastructure. But that's not all - and you'll need to tune in to our Q4 update in early 2023 to get all the highlights. 

———

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: 

• Acquia - Renewing Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Platform.sh - *UPGRADE* Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Srijan Technologies -  Renewing Enterprise Supporting Partner
• Four Kitchens - Renewing Signature Supporting Partner
• Palantir - Renewing Signature Supporting Partner
• Salsa Digital - *UPGRADE*  Signature Supporting Partner
• 1xINTERNET - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• Aten Design Group - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner 
• Axelerant - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• ImageX - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• Phase2 - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• Zoocha - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
• ]init[ - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Adapt Agency - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Agileana - *UPGRADE* Classic Supporting Partner
• Appnovation Technologies - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Code Koalas - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Digital Polygon - *UPGRADE* Classic Supporting Partner
• Dofinity - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• F5 Web Design - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Lemberg Solutions  - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Position2 - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Synetic BV - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Unic AG - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Unleashed Technologies - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Websolutions - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Wunder - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• APMG International - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• BKJ Digital - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• Burtronix - Renewing Community Supporting Partner
• CleverReach - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• crowd-creation GmbH - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• Debug Academy - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• Mythic Digital - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner
• Pixel Onion - Renewing Community Supporting Partner
• StratAgile  - Renewing Community Supporting Partner
• Trigyn Technologies - Renewing Community Supporting Partner
• Versantus IT Services - *NEW* Community Supporting Partner

If you would like to support our work as an individual or an organization, consider becoming a member of the Drupal Association. 

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra

In the Services Industry, a Technical Lead or Technical Architect or Delivery Manager, one is always looking at the work, either as a Project or a Product, but I say, one should look at it as both, because work would be a Project for us but work would be a Product for the clients. While working on Agile basis, being at the leading positions one will be seeing the scope of work, then prepare the b

A Content Management System (CMS) facilitates the interaction between a nonprofit and its stakeholders. This blog post discusses if Drupal is a good CMS for nonprofit organizations.

Running Drupal on the PHP built-in server can be used for quick evaluation / testing, but also for day-to-day development. Let's see why, what it takes, and how to solve common pitfalls or requirements like a mail catcher, Solr, ...

Today we are talking about Neurodiversity with Matthew Saunders.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/374

Topics

• What is Neurodiversity
• People first
• What got you interested in Neurodiversity
• Youtube series My Neurodivergent Brain
• How does it apply to Drupal
• How can the community help Neurodivergent folks
• How does this impact work relationships
• How do you attend camps and cons
• Is there testing we can apply to our projects to help
• What are best practices in design
• Will this be at DrupalCon
• How would you improve the world for neurodivergent folks
• Representation in media

Resources

• My neurodivergent brain youtube
• Drupalcon talks about Neurodiversity
  • Pivot Points - Drupalcon Amsterdam 2019
  • Neurodivergence in Tech - Drupalcon Portland 2022

Guests

Matthew Saunders - @Creech

Hosts

Nic Laflin - www.nLighteneddevelopment.com @nicxvan John Picozzi - www.epam.com @johnpicozzi Randy Oest - randyoest.com @amazingrando

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu Views User Term Filter Make your site experience aligned to your users by showing them content that share a taxonomy term with their user profile Created to demonstrate how Drupal can make a site feel “customized” based on a user’s profile

Only a few more days till the launch of Drupal 10. Here is a time of all Drupal 10 launch parties, announcements, meetups and sessions.

As Elon Musk destroys Twitter, a lot of clients have asked about alternative social media, especially 'Mastodon'— meaning the federated network that includes thousands of servers, running that software and many other FLOSS applications, all providing interconnecting hubs for distributed social media. Agaric has some experience in those parts, so we are sharing our thoughts on the opportunity in this crisis.

In short: For not-for-profit organizations and news outlets especially, this is a chance to host your own communities by providing people a natural home on the federated social web.

Every not-for-profit organization lives or dies, ultimately, based on its relationship with its supporters. Every news organization, it's readers and viewers.

For years now, a significant portion of the (potential) audience relationship of most organizations has been mediated by a handful of giant corporations through Google search, Facebook and Twitter social media.

A federated approach based on a protocol called ActivityPub has proven durable and viable over the past five years. Federated means different servers run by different people or organizations can host people's accounts, and people can see, reply to, and boost the posts of people on the other servers. The most widely known software doing this is Mastodon but it is far from alone. Pleroma, Friendica, Pixelfed (image-focused), PeerTube (video-focused), Mobilizon (event-focused), and more all implement the ActivityPub protocol. You can be viewing and interacting with someone using different software and not know it— similar to how you can call someone on the phone and not know their cellular network nor their phone model.

The goal of building a social media following of people interested in (and ideally actively supporting) your organization might be best met by setting up your own social media.

This is very doable with the 'fediverse' and Mastodon in particular. In particular, because the number of people on this ActivityPub-based federated social web has already grown by a couple million in the past few weeks— and that's with Twitter not yet having serious technical problems that are sure to come with most of its staff laid off. With the likely implosion of Twitter, giving people a home that makes sense for them is a huge service in helping people get started— the hardest part is choosing a site!

People fleeing Twitter as it breaks down socially and technically would benefit from your help in getting on this federated social network. So would people who have never joined, or long since left, Twitter or other social media, but are willing to join a network that is less toxic and is not engineered to be addictive and harmful.

Your organization would benefit by having a relationship with readers that is not mediated by proprietary algorithms nor for-profit monopolies. It makes your access on this social network more like e-mail lists— it is harder for another entity to come in between you and your audience and take access away.

But the mutual benefits for the organization and its audience go beyond all of this.

When people discuss among one another what the organization has done and published, a little bit of genuine community forms.

Starting a Mastodon server could be the start of your organization seeing itself as not only doing good works or publishing media, but building a better place for people to connect and create content online.

The safety and stability of hosting a home on this federated social network gives people a place to build community.

But organizations have been slow to adopt, even now with the Twitter meltdown. This opens up tho opportunity for extra attention and acquiring new followers.

Hosting the server could cost between $50 to $450 a month, but this is definitely an opportunity to provide a pure community benefit (it is an ad-free culture) and seek donations, grants, or memberships.

The true cost is in moderation time; if volunteers can start to fill that you are in good shape. A comprehensive writeup on everything to consider is here courtesy the cooperatively-managed Mastodon server that Agaric Technology Collective chose to join at social.coop's how to make the fediverse your own.

You would be about the first for not-for-profit or news organizations.

You would be:

• giving people a social media home right when they need it
• literally owning the platform much of your community is on

And it all works because of the federation aspect— your organization does not have to provide a Twitter, TikTok, or Facebook replacement yourselves, you instead join the leading contender for all that.

By being bold and early, you will also get media attention and perhaps donations and grants.

The real question is if it would divert scarce resources from your core work, or if the community-managing aspects of this could bring new volunteer (or better, paid) talent to handle this.

Even one person willing to take on the moderator role for a half-hour a day to start should be enough to remove any person who harasses people on other servers or otherwise posts racist, transphobic, or other hateful remarks.

Above all, your organization would be furthering your purpose, through means other than its core activities or publishing, to inform and educate and give people more capacity to build with you.

Not surprisingly, Drupal has already figured this out!

Read more and discuss at agaric.coop.