Drupal is thriving due to the contributions of its community of developers, site builders, designers, business owners, and more. Our open source model ensures that everyone has a voice and can directly contribute to the platform’s growth, making it more powerful, flexible, and secure. In a couple of weeks, our chance to come together in person is not just about learning the latest in Drupal development; it’s about connecting with like-minded individuals who share a passion for open source and the open web. 

We welcome all attendees to stop by the Drupal Association booth at DrupalCon Barcelona to share their ideas, meet our team, learn more about our work, and how to get involved. If you’re not already a supporter, you can sign up and discover how your contribution as a Ripple Maker or a Drupal Certified Partner can make a significant impact. Other opportunities are the Drupal Certified Partner Roundtable or the Ripple Makers Roundtable. The Drupal Association is hosting a coffee for Ripple Makers on Wednesday, 25 September at 8:45 am. The first 50 people who RSVP reserve their spot - you can RSVP here!

Other Drupal Association sessions include Bridging the Gap: Unlocking Non-Code Contributions on Wednesday, the Drupal.org Engineering Panel, the Local Drupal Regions & Associations Round Table, and Supply Chain Security in Drupal and Composer on Thursday. Lastly, we also encourage you to attend the Drupal Association Public Board Meeting, also on Thursday. At this session, the community-elected 2024 At-Large Board member will be announced and welcomed onto the board.

Make sure to also ask about Drupal CMS (aka Drupal Starshot) to learn more about the initiative when you’re visiting the Drupal Association booth. We’ll share:

• The latest Drupal CMS news
• Plans for the future of Drupal CMS, especially the first market-ready version
• How you can get involved in helping with this awesome product!

There will also be a giveaway to win one of three Drupal Starshot initiative posters. Visit us at the booth to enter for a chance to win! 

DrupalCon is a vibrant, collaborative space where individuals from all walks of life come together to create, innovate, and share. The event fosters friendships, offers inspiration, and provides opportunities to contribute back to the community in meaningful ways. The excitement around Drupal CMS and the energy of being surrounded by people who love Drupal is palpable, making DrupalCon an invaluable experience for both newcomers and seasoned contributors alike.

If you can’t make the event in person, we invite you to become a Ripple Maker or a Drupal Certified Partner. You’re not just making a contribution—you’re investing in the future of Drupal. With increased and customized communication, you will learn how these programs support critical initiatives such as security updates, community events, and educational resources that benefit users and developers alike. With your support, you'll be part of the dedicated group of community members who understand the importance of giving back and ensuring that Drupal remains a powerful, free, and open-source tool for everyone. 

See you in Barcelona from 24-27 September 2024!

Integrating third-party applications with Drupal using REST APIs offers significant flexibility and extensibility, enabling developers to create interoperable and efficient solutions. This article explores the technical aspects of this integration, providing practical examples to guide developers.

DrupalCon Barcelona is just around the corner, running from September 9 to 12, 2024. As one of the most anticipated events in the Drupal community, this year’s conference promises to deliver a blend of technical insights, community collaboration, and exciting updates that everyone will be talking about. If you're a developer, site builder, project manager, or just someone intrigued by the future of web technology, there’s something in store for you.

Why DrupalCon Barcelona Matters

This year's DrupalCon is packed with key sessions, hands-on workshops, and networking opportunities designed to bring the community together. Whether you’re looking to dive deep into Drupal 11, which will see some significant updates during the event, or catch the latest on how Drupal is evolving as a powerful digital platform, the conference is shaping up to be a can't-miss opportunity.

What’s New? A Focus on Starshot

A highlight of the event will be the ongoing work on the Starshot Initiative, which is aimed at taking Drupal to the next level. In a recent interview with The Drop Times, Drupal’s founder Dries Buytaert shared, 

"Our next big milestone is DrupalCon Barcelona, which is in September. We hope to show some real progress there on a variety of different things, from marketing to our demo of Starshot to maybe having the first recipes... implemented."

This makes DrupalCon Barcelona not just another tech event but a milestone where the community will witness key advancements, including live demos of Starshot. The first recipes, a crucial technical feature within Starshot, might be unveiled, offering an early glimpse into the future of Drupal.

Program Highlights

The event's schedule will feature sessions on critical topics such as Composer, security, local development, and the latest updates in Drupal 11. Expect to hear about performance improvements, new modules, and security enhancements that aim to make Drupal 11 even more powerful. Developers will also have the opportunity to discuss workflows, integrations, and DevOps practices that can streamline their projects.

Additionally, keep an eye on the Starshot Initiative sessions, where you’ll get a closer look at how this ambitious project is progressing and what it means for Drupal’s future. We have listed the key Starshot sessions happening at DrupalCon Barcelona—take a look at the Key Sessions on Drupal Starshot Initiative at DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 

Community and Networking Opportunities

As always, DrupalCon is more than just technical talks. It's about community. The event is set to feature numerous networking events, helping attendees meet fellow Drupal enthusiasts, share ideas, and collaborate on projects. Whether you're looking to expand your skill set or connect with others in the industry, DrupalCon Barcelona offers the perfect platform.

Why You Should Attend

With all the excitement surrounding Starshot and the recent release of Drupal 11, there’s no better place to catch up on the latest developments in the Drupal ecosystem. With keynotes from leading voices in the community, hands-on workshops, and the promise of some surprise updates, DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 is poised to leave a lasting mark.

Don’t miss your chance to be part of this landmark event. Now, as we proceed further, let’s find out what The Drop Times has covered last week:

In an exclusive interview, Vincenzo Gambino, Drupal Architect and Senior React Developer, shared his career journey from Palermo to London with our former sub-editor, Elma John. He discussed working on high-profile projects, such as those for Cambridge University, and co-authoring Jumpstart Jamstack Development. Vincenzo touched on the role of Drupal in headless architectures and its future in open-source technologies.

Christian Burk, Senior Backend Engineer at CivicActions, provided insights into managing complex content changes on large sites like VA.gov during Drupal GovCon 2023. He highlighted the codit_batch_operations module, which simplifies revisions, logging, and script execution alongside co-presenter Steve Wirt.

At the same event, Michael Kinnunen, Backend Engineer at CivicActions, discussed A/B testing within Drupal using LaunchDarkly, underscoring the platform’s versatility for government websites. He also attended sessions on content translation and large-scale content management, deepening his understanding of Drupal's growing influence.

In other news, Drupal CMS has launched a community survey to improve its default search configuration. The initiative, led by 1XINTERNET, focuses on making Drupal’s search functionality more flexible for both developers and no-code users. Community members are encouraged to contribute to shaping the future of Drupal’s search experience.

Additionally, Drupal.org has updated its fonts to enhance readability, switching to ZT Gatha for headings and Noto Sans for body text. The update modernizes the platform’s look, improving user experience across its global community.

For a deep dive into Dresktop, an open-source tool transforming Drupal management, check out a tutorial by José Daniel Estrada Guzmán. From local development to cloud integration, Dresktop streamlines workflows using Docker, SSH, and Drush.

Lukas Fischer, CEO of Netnode AG, shared his innovative Native Design Flow, which integrates Figma and code at the outset of a project. This approach aims to eliminate the traditional design handoff, creating a more cohesive and efficient workflow from day one.

For the first time, local Drupal associations will jointly host a booth, highlighting collaboration within the European Drupal community. The booth will serve as a hub for networking and sharing information about upcoming events.

Looking ahead to other events, the NEDCamp 2024 session submission deadline has been extended to September 15, offering opportunities for presenters of all experience levels. Splash Awards Switzerland 2025 is scheduled for March 11 in Davos, coinciding with Drupal Mountain Camp. These awards celebrate the best in Drupal projects and innovation.

Early bird registration for DrupalCamp Berlin 2024 remains open until September 15, offering a discounted rate of €80. After October 15, the price will increase to €120, so early registration is recommended. The ticket includes entry, lunch, and an official event T-shirt.

Additionally, DrupalSouth Community Day 2024 in Canberra is seeking volunteers for event support, speaker coordination, and attendee assistance. The call for papers is also open, inviting Drupal professionals to submit session proposals for the event on November 14.

Meanwhile, The Splash Awards will debut in Asia at DrupalCon Singapore on December 9, 2024, celebrating excellence in Drupal projects across categories like Government, Corporate, and Education.

Mark your calendars for DrupalCamp Atlanta on October 18, 2024, in Sandy Springs, Georgia. This one-day conference will offer sessions on the technical and business aspects of Drupal and plenty of networking opportunities.

Finally, join The Drop Times at DrupalCon Barcelona as a volunteer to help cover the event’s best moments. From live updates to behind-the-scenes stories, it’s a great way to engage with the community and share the excitement.

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also, join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you, 
Sincerely 
Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

How does cta1href sound to you? Gibberish, right? :D
Jesse “jessebaker” Baker pointed out that Experience Builder (XB) in its current state was subjecting its users to such nonsense! Fortunately, thanks to every Single Directory Component (SDC) specifying a title for each prop, we were able to automatically generate the much more readable CTA 1 link — thanks to foundations Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins did in #3461422 from 3 weeks prior.

Utkarsh “utkarsh_33” and Omkar “omkar-pd” Deshpande eliminated an extraneous “preview” request from the client, hence improving performance (as well as sanity).

Ben & Jesse made XB’s Cypress end-to-end tests leap massively ahead (especially compared to Drupal core’s use of Nightwatch), by introducing cypress-terminal-report. The resulting test failure output on GitLab CI makes it far easier to figure out where something is going wrong: a big productivity boost!

Two weeks ago I alluded to it, and now it finally happened: after months of getting basic infrastructure off the ground, we now finally were able to Kyle “ctrladel” Einecker’s set of representative SDCs that Lauri approved, Ivan “finnsky” Berdinsky and I reviewed, and Ted “tedbow” Bowman pushed across the finish line.
(Not everything Kyle proposed landed, because XB and the SDC subsystem do not yet have all the capabilities needed for some of the SDCs he wrote — see the follow-up if you’re interested.)

Some of the people working full-time on XB are doing so using DDEV. And running end-to-end tests that use WebDriver with both the test runner and the system under test living in a Docker container turns out to be quite challenging! Besides us, we know that many (most?) in the community use a DDEV-based development environment, and we’d love to welcome as many contributors as possible. Not being able to run the most important tests of all then is of course quite a problem.
That’s why Travis “traviscarden” Carden had been diligently (he actually joined a few weeks ago!) working on making that painless. The result: the ddev-drupal-xb-dev DDEV add-on — once installed, running (and seeing!) the XB end-to-end tests requires only ddev xb-cypress-open :)

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!

Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis is back full-time on XB, and he’s started working on the super important #3463999: Auto-create/update Component config entities for all discovered SDCs that meet XB’s minimum criteria. It’s a critical piece in making Lauri’s product vision come to life: it will ensure that any SDC that we’re confident will work in XB becomes available automatically.1 While working on that, he discovered that there was a pretty big oversight in the StorablePropShape work I landed two weeks ago: in some places Drupal core does not distinguish between “instance settings” and “storage settings” at all (and nor did the code I landed then), but in some places it actually does. Felix was running into that now, thanks to config validation, and so he fixed that.

Many of the things that happened this week were on the “enablement” side of things. Nonetheless, the XB UI also made progress:

1. Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang and Jesse landed the updated “insert” UX and hierarchy view, based on the updated design.
2. But, most importantly, nicely rounding out this post by combining “enablement” and improved UX: Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri implemented error boundaries. In principle, you should never see these, but we all occasionally have internet connection issues. At those times, Bálint’s “Try again” addition works beautifully :)
   (And as a bonus it accelerates debugging failing server responses!)

Thanks to Travis for reviewing this!

Week 14 was August 12–18, 2024.

1. At this early stage, it’ll happen indiscriminately. Later, we’ll ensure that on production environments no new SDCs will be made available to the Content Creator without explicit approval by the Site Builder. See the first steps towards auditability of the available XB components if you’re interested in this aspect. ↩︎

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

• The very first component tree rendered in Experience Builder: both slots of this 'two column' SDC contain other SDCs!
• Error boundaries with a friendly 'Try again'.

I've got some big news.

One of those weeks where we got lots and lots of smaller issues cleared up, and a new module released, and a very quirky bug discovered.

In my 15+ years in the Drupal community, I've been fortunate to have been able to lead a few Drupal-related groups and I sometimes find myself in the position of encouraging other leaders - who are experiencing burnout - on how to gracefully step down from leadership positions after multiple years of service.

When I say "groups," I'm talking about things like:

• Drupal event organizers
• Drupal module/theme/project maintainers
• Drupal initiative leaders
• Drupal working group leaders

It seems counter-intuitive to encourage folks to step away from things they have successfully led, but I'm very fond of the concept that the true sign of a healthy organization is a successful change in leadership to make way for new perspectives, insights and ultimately fresh ideas.

In this article, I'll share some of my thoughts on my experiences in doing this exact thing with two prominent Drupal groups: the Florida DrupalCamp organizing team and the Drupal Community Working Group.

Being a leader in the Drupal community comes with responsibilities, but it also comes with prestige. Leaders tend to be more visible and therefore able to promote themselves or their organizations to their advantage. 

Background

My leadership positions were gratifying, and I was still committed to them, but from my perspective, I had remained in them longer than was good for the organization or for me. But, I had an incredibly strong drive to ensure that I left the group in better shape than when I joined.

I was one of the original organizers of Florida DrupalCamp and ended up being the leader of the team by attrition. The other original organizers became less involved as the years went on, and I ended up taking on more-and-more duties. There wasn't a breaking point, but I realized that things weren't heading in the right direction.

For the Drupal Community Working Group, I was added to an incredibly strong team dealing with really difficult issues, but without a structured plan for length of terms or any other way to protect the mental health of its members.

In both cases, I was incredibly proud of the work we were doing, but didn't see a clear path to roll over leave either team in a healthy manner. 

The good news

From my perspective, there are two things people need to do in order to successfully step down from leadership positions:

1. Train your replacement(s).
2. Codify roles and responsibilities.

The bad news

Neither of these two steps can be done overnight.

The details

Train your replacement(s)

You (yes, you) need to make a concerted effort to identify, approach, and ask someone (or in many cases, "someones") to fill your role when you leave. Once you find these magical people, then it is (again) up to you to train them in what you do. It is important that you communicate not only the work involved in being a leader, but also the advantages that come with the role.

For Florida DrupalCamp, I made it known well in advance that I was looking to step down as its leader (but willing to stay on in a lesser capacity). I knew it would be good for the event and community if there was new leadership. I told the other organizers as well as mentioning it during the event's opening and closing sessions. Most importantly, I did it early and spoke about it often. This directly led to several people stepping up.

This will likely be a time-consuming process, but it will make the team stronger. It will force you to document and organize what you do, and just the act of explaining it to someone else will allow you and your replacement to identify things that need to be documented as well as possible opportunities for efficiency gains.

Assume that you'll need to be training your replacement for at least a few months, but the timeframe really depends on the cadence of your team's primary tasks. 

Codify roles and responsibilities

This was especially important for the Drupal Community Working Group, as prior to my joining the group, there weren't any guidelines for length of term, how the leader was selected, and how to step away gracefully. Under the leadership of George DeMet, our team implemented all of these, and more. Both George and I led the team for more years than was probably healthy for either of us, but by the time I stepped away, there were clear guidelines for all of these things (with a significant focus on the mentally draining Conflict Resolution Team).

For less formal teams, this could be as simple as a wiki page or an issue in the project's queue with what you and the other leaders do, what your boundaries are, and what your plans for the future are. This can be especially effective when someone makes a request of you that you feel is above-and-beyond - it is nice to have a document that you could point to where roles and responsibilities are detailed.

I'll admit that I skipped this step when stepping down as leader of the Florida DrupalCamp organizing team, as I wasn't leaving the team completely - I just stepped down into a lesser role but was always available to the new leaders for questions and advice. 

Getting started

There are many Drupal groups that have informal leadership roles, with many leaders who definitely feel that if they leave, then the group will fall. Clearly, this is not a healthy situation.

In this case, my advice is this: start by writing up a document/drupal.org page that describes what you do as leader and share it with the rest of the group. Then, be proactive and find a potential replacement and start the training process using the document as a guide. 

No replacement

It should be obvious that the "finding your replacement" step requires a human being other than yourself being involved. But what happens if you can't find someone…

This situation can be stressful and heartbreaking at the same time, but I have a strong opinion on this - if you find yourself in this situation, then maybe it is time for the team to be disbanded or go dormant. If there's not enough interest in the community to keep the group alive, it's not your responsibility to sacrifice your time/money/mental-health. My advice is to write up your thoughts, announce your intentions (and time frame) and post it to all members of the group. This can be done in a way that sets up a future leader to use the codified roles and responsibilities as a framework to get things moving again. In a way, you're still training your replacement - just not in realtime.

Will there be people who are disappointed and/or angry with you for "abandoning" the group? Perhaps, but you'll need to do your best to ignore those folks and focus on setting up the next leader for success.

I would suggest that you keep things simple and focus on the main goal of always leaving the group in a positive manner, setting up future leaders for success.

Thanks to AmyJune Hineline, Adam Varn, Mike Herchel, George DeMet, and Gwendolyn Anello (who reviews pretty much everything I write) for reviewing this post prior to publication.