Contact forms have been a staple on websites for years.

But, are they becoming outdated?

Say hello to AI chatbots.

Here’s why an AI chatbot might just be the better choice.

Real-time Engagement 

• Contact forms often mean waiting. Users type out their message, hit send, and then wait for a response. With AI chatbots, the response is instant, providing immediate support and answers.
• Example: A user needs information about your services. Instead of waiting hours (or days) for an email reply, the chatbot instantly provides the details they need.

Enhanced User Experience 

• Chatbots can guide users through their queries, step-by-step. This ensures visitors aren't left guessing, navigating through multiple pages to find answers.
• Example: Someone asks about your pricing. The chatbot not only shares the info but can also offer links to relevant pages, FAQs, and even schedule a meeting with a sales rep.

24/7 Availability 

• Unlike human staff, chatbots never sleep. They're available around the clock, ensuring your site visitors always get the support they need, no matter the time zone.
• Example: A potential client from another continent visits your site at 3 AM. The chatbot assists them in real-time rather than making them wait until your business hours.

Personalisation 

• Modern AI chatbots can personalise interactions based on user data. This means more relevant responses and recommendations tailored to each visitor.
• Example: The chatbot recognises a returning user and picks up the conversation where it left off, making the interaction feel continuous and personal.

But is it all sunshine and rainbows? Not quite.

There are challenges.

Some users may prefer human touch over automation. And, implementing a sophisticated AI chatbot can be resource-intensive.

So, should you replace your contact form with a chatbot?

Maybe not completely. A hybrid approach might work best. Let the chatbot handle routine inquiries and simple tasks, while the contact form can serve for more detailed and specific requests.

What do you think? Can AI chatbots replace traditional contact forms on Drupal websites?

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Monday August 19, 2024 definitely was a milestone:

1. I had the satisfaction of being able to remove the TwoTerribleTextareasWidget that I introduced two months ago, because the Experience Builder (XB) UI now is sufficiently developed to be able to place a component and populate its props using static prop sources — by now this terrible hack was now doing more harm than good, so: good riddance! :D
2. a huge sigh of relief was heard emanating from Ghent, Belgium because finally comprehensive docs for the XB data model were published, and ADR #2 was published to capture the initial back-end decisions, but is expected to be superseded
   (an ADR or Architecture Decision Record can be a way to unambiguously capture current choices, knowing it will be superseded).

Those docs define all XB terminology (such as “static prop sources” in that first bullet above), which enables more precise communication. Contributing to XB becomes simpler thanks to those docs 1, as does observing from a distance — with reviews to ensure accuracy & clarity from Simon “siramsay” Ramsay, Dave “longwave” Long, Ted “tedbow” Bowman, Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis and of course, crucially, Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein, whose proposed abstract data model it is that XB makes concrete.

While we’ll continue to iterate fast, it now is a hard requirement that every MR updates affected docs. That’s why several updates already have been committed.

Docs to come for other aspects!

Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.

Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!

For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!

For a huge DX leap forward for both those working on XB itself as well as those working on the Starshot Demo Design System (spearheaded by Kristen Pol): Felix’ MR to auto-create/update Component config entities for all discovered Single-Directory Components (SDCs) landed — if they meet the minimum criteria.
For example, each SDC prop must have a title defined, because otherwise XB would be forced to expose machine names, like I mentioned at the start of last week’s update. So: XB requires SDCs to have rich enough metadata to be able to generate a good UX.
That also allowed Omkar “omkar-pd” Deshpande to remove the awkward-but-necessary-at-the-time add/edit form we’d added months ago. When installing the demo_design_system theme, you’ll see something like:

Ted helped the back end race ahead of the front end: while we don’t have designs for it yet (nor capacity to build it before DrupalCon if they would suddenly exist), there now is an HTTP API to get a list of viable candidate field properties that are able to correctly populate a particular component prop. These are what in the current XB terminology are called dynamic prop sources 2 3.

The preview in the XB UI has been loading component CSS/JS for a while, but thanks to Dave & Ted it now also loads the default theme’s global CSS/JS.

Small(ish) but noteworthy

• Ted proved via a test that both symmetric and asymmetric translations work correctly in the current data model/field type implementation
• Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri & Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins fixed the component props form showing the wrong values
• Now that component trees started working (since last week), Jesse “jessebaker” Baker discovered that it is not actually possible to drag and drop a nested component :D Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang quickly squashed that bug!
• Felix and I were able to narrow down why images with spaces in the filename were being refused to be rendered by the SDC subsystem: Drupal core’s File entity type stores a file stream wrapper URI like public://cat and dog.jpg and considers that a valid URL … but it’s not! URIs cannot contain spaces — that should be encoded as public://cat%20and%20dog.jpg to be valid.
  SDC is right, the >10 year old PrimitiveTypeConstraintValidator is wrong! This is being added to the increasingly long list of low-level bugs in Drupal core that went unnoticed for over a decade, so we worked around it for now.
• Utkarsh “utkarsh_33” fixed a bug where the name/label of a component instance was lost.
• Finally, a hilarious one to end with: at some point, we set up the “canvas” to be to 10,000x10,000 pixels. Unfortunately, this means that people trying XB have sometimes gotten lost :D
  So Jesse reduced it to a mere 3500x3500 pixels, for now that’s sufficient, later we’ll compute this dynamically.

Week 15 was August 19–25, 2024.

1. Yes, that’s the third time I’m linking to docs/data-model.md. It’s that important! ↩︎

2. Dynamic Prop Sources are similar to Drupal’s tokens, but are more precise, and support more than only strings, because SDC props often require more complex shapes than just strings. ↩︎

3. This is the shape matching from ~3 months ago made available to the client side. ↩︎

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

• More accurate previews, including for example the Olivero font stack, background and footer showing up.
• The 'components' listing, all auto-generated based on discovered SDCs meeting criteria.

In today's digital ecosystem, the choice of technology stack is crucial to the success of any project, particularly when developing large-scale web applications. A trend gaining momentum is the decoupling of the frontend and backend, which enhances flexibility, scalability, and the overall user experience. This architectural choice is brilliantly exemplified by the integration of Next.js and Drupal, where Drupal's robust content management capabilities are combined with the modern frontend framework of Next.js.

Recognizing the limitations of its traditional Twig-based frontend, Drupal has embraced a more flexible approach known as "Decoupled Drupal." This blog post delves into  projects that we’ve worked on: Novozymes and Novonesis that leveraged Next.js for the frontend and Drupal as the headless CMS backend, offering valuable insights for digital solution leads and developers keen on exploring this technology stack.

Authored by Nadiia Nykolaichuk.

Having your website on the World Wide Web is a responsible task because it must always be impeccable in the eyes of your audience. What if you must launch a new product, run a content-rich campaign, or just review and publish large amounts of content?

Today we are talking about Progressive migration with Drupal, What it is, and how you can do it with your organization with guest Stephen Cross. We’ll also cover Views JSON Source as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/466

• What is a progressive migration
• What other types of migration are there
• What problem does progressive migration solve at the ATF
• What versions of Drupal are involved
• Technical implementation
• Technical challenges
• Non-Technical challenges
• Processes needed for success
• When to use another migration process

• Drupal GovCon Presentation - Progressive Migration
• Talking Drupal #334 - Managing Drupal Teams in Government

Stephen Cross - stephencross.com stephencross

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Nate Dentzau - dentzau.com nathandentzau

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to use Drupal’s Views interface to allow visitors to browse and navigate data from another source? There’s a module for that
• Module name/project name:
  • Views JSON Source
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2020 by Pradeep Venugopal (venugopp), but recent releases are by Viktor Holovachek (astonvictor), a member of the Ukraine Drupal community
  • Versions available: 2.0.2 compatible with Drupal 8.8 and newer, all the way up to Drupal 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Documentation: pretty lengthy README to help you get started
  • Number of open issues: 17 open issues, 4 of which are bugs against the current branch, although one had a fixed merged in the past week
• Usage stats:
  • 1,641 sites
• Module features and usage
  • After installing the module, you can create a view and specify it should show “JSON” instead of some kind of content entity
  • In the view settings you can then provide a URL for where to retrieve the JSON, and an optional Apath value to indicate a section of the data to show
  • It also supports contextual filters, so you can create a single view that will show different sections of data depending on the path used to access it
  • From there you can build out your view in the normal way: using fields to specify what data should be shown and how, filters to limit which rows will be shown, and sort criteria to specify the order in which it will be listed. And of course, the ability to expose controls for users to filter and sort the data in ways that meet their own needs make this an extremely powerful way to make data available to your site’s visitors
  • We spoke a couple of episodes ago about how powerful it can be to use Drupal as the “glass” or experience layer through which visitors can interact with other systems, and I think this is another great example of that

We recently hosted an AI Ideation workshop for over 60 participants, guiding them through the hands-on process of creating AI applications and sparking creative ideas to improve their work. Read more about the experience and the innovative solutions participants developed!