You've likely heard repeatedly about the impending end-of-life for Drupal 7 and the potentially daunting task of updating to the latest version.
We're joined by the esteemed Matt Glaman, a prominent Drupal contributor and Principal Software Engineer at Acquia, who introduces his latest innovation: Drupal Retrofit.
This tool serves as a compatibility layer, enabling you to execute legacy Drupal 7 code on your Drupal 10 site. The goal? To potentially ease your upgrade process and expedite your transition to modern Drupal.
So that’s it, DrupalCon Lille 2023 has come to a close - for me at least. I’m currently sitting in the train heading home. Now’s the perfect time to reflect on what’s been an amazing three days. And it really has been amazing! Lille has been the perfect host city, providing great brasseries with great beer and lots of food with lots of melted cheese all over it - who could ask for more? And this DrupalCon has provided me with so many opportunities to learn, to talk, to listen and to have fun. 2023 has been a vintage year.
Join us TODAY, Thursday, October 19 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, as we resume our normally scheduled call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)
No pre-defined topics on the agenda this month, so join us for an informal chat about anything at the intersection of Drupal and nonprofits. Got something specific on your mind? Feel free to share ahead of time in our collaborative Google doc: https://nten.org/drupal/notes!
All nonprofit Drupal devs and users, regardless of experience level, are always welcome on this call.
This free call is sponsored by NTEN.org and open to everyone.
Join the call: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81817469653
Meeting ID: 818 1746 9653
Passcode: 551681
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The Drupal Association is saying goodbye to three board members and welcoming four new members who will join the Drupal Association Board.
First off, the Drupal Association extends a sincere thank you to Mike Herchel, Ryan Szrama, and Board Chair Baddý Sonja Breidert for their service and dedication not only to Drupal but to the Drupal community. Thank you for everything you have done while on the Drupal Association Board! Your time spent on the board made such a difference to the future of the Drupal project, and we thank you all for participating with grace, thoughtfulness, and insightful contributions.
We are also excited to announce that Baddý will continue as a non-voting Immediate Past Chair on the Executive Committee for one year.
The Drupal Association would now like to congratulate our newest board members, officially announced during the recent public board meeting at DrupalCon Lille:
An additional congratulations to Fei Lauren for winning the community-elected seat during our 2023 At-Large Board Election! We cannot wait to see what amazing things Fei will accomplish while on the Drupal Association Board. We invite you to get to know Fei and learn more about their background in our ‘Meet Fei Lauren’ blog post.
I am deeply honoured to have the support of so many brilliant people - and I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish together." - Fei Lauren
We extend our gratitude to all the candidates who participated in the 2023 election. On behalf of all the staff and board of the Drupal Association, a heartfelt Drupal Thanks to all of you who stood for the election this year. It truly is a big commitment to contribution, the Drupal Association, and to the community, and we are so grateful for all of your voices. Thank you for your willingness to serve, and we hope you’ll consider participating again in 2023!
There were 10 candidates in this year’s At-Large board member election.
477 voters cast their ballots out of a pool of 2,873 eligible voters.
Under Approval Voting, each voter can give a vote to one or more candidates. The final total of votes was as follows:
Candidate
Votes
Fei Lauren
156
Matthew Saunders
144
Mark Dorison
126
Vladimir Roudakov
113
John Doyle
107
Ashraf Abed
104
Carlos Ospina
101
Esaya Jokonya
86
Stephen Mustgrave
85
Brad Jones
77
Personally I’ve found most value in the smaller sessions. There are discussion-style groups around a common interests (BoFs) and presentation seminars. I’ve enjoyed being able to share what wisdom I can in the former – for example, about what page building experiences work best for our clients, or ways to accelerate projects. Drupal is built on collaboration so it’s only fair to give back where we can. My colleague Steven has given back by volunteering to help some sessions run smoothly.
As for the front-led seminars, here’s which ones each of us found most interesting…
You could almost feel the speed of how quickly searches run! A new neat abstraction for searching from Drupal-backed sites (including decoupled apps) without so much effort, and with an easy-to-use UI.
Seeing a relatively simple and effective example of making this work was helpful. Moving from one platform to another can be fraught with pressure so being walked through how to do this, and for such a large scale project, was ace!
This session was just one of several that helped demonstrate how site builders and editors can achieve their goals quickly with Drupal. It’s a pleasant surprise to see what’s possible. The editing experience can be really good! Extra modules can help to tailor solutions for clients. More improvements are on the way too!
Gaining a wider vision & perspective on Drupal's potential has been helpful - whether from Dries' keynote or sessions like this one that offered a quite different approach to what we might normally do. This was an introduction to automated testing and test-driven development in Drupal which challenged our assumptions - perhaps "coding by wishful thinking", writing test assertions before implementations, could lead to better quality code?
It was great to see that people cared about the experience for users right after they'd logged in. The solutions outlined used existing Drupal tools and methodologies and so combined the flexibility and scale that we've come to love from Drupal, without sacrificing the flexibility to customise to suit the needs of individual sites and clients.
Drupal has really robust multilingual capabilities; this session demonstrated using it with a microservices architecture. This included exporting translations into an abstracted storage bucket for Node.Js applications to use, whilst still leveraging Drupal as the central translation hub. I'm looking forward to seeing their solution open sourced as promised!
That wraps up the first two days of the conference. What I haven't mentioned so far is the wonderful food from the bakery just near where we're staying .... baguettes, croissants and Merveilleux!