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Cocomore: Drupal 9: How to successfully upgrade

The big day has come: the new version of the CMS Drupal was launched on June 3rd!

Cocomore: How to get ready for Drupal 9

As Drupal support for the CRM-versions D7 and D8 will be running out in November 2021, it is advisable to start planning your D9 upgrade asap. On t3n our expert Marc Kutschera explains how to do it.

Cocomore: Composer in Drupal 8.8.0 - First impressions

With the release of the new Drupal 8.8.0 version, a number of new changes are waiting for the community. From a development point of view, the most interesting one is probably the full support of Composer to build Drupal projects.

Five Jars: Stakeholder Management: How to Outline Responsibilities of Partner Agency and Client

In the article, we will share the approaches to stakeholder management for the smoother collaboration of partner agencies and clients.

Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #379 - The EOWG

Today we are talking about The Drupal Event Organizers Working Group with Avi Schwab.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/379

Topics

What is the EOWG
How was it formed
What are some of the initiatives
How does the EOWG support Drupal Events
How is the EOWG different from the Contrib Events Community Initiative
What is planned for 2023
How do you get involved
Becoming a board member
Drupalcon
Midcamp

Resources

Guests

Avi Schwab - froboy.org @froboy@mastodon.online

Hosts

Nic Laflin - www.nLighteneddevelopment.com @nicxvan John Picozzi - www.epam.com @johnpicozzi Leslie Glynn - redfinsolutions.com @leslieglynn

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu Previous/Next API Provides a performant way to define a sequence of content.

xjm: Why sponsor a core committer?

Why sponsor a core committer? xjm Wed, 12/21/2022 - 19:40

This post was collaboratively authored with other Drupal core committers including quietone, pameeela, catch, effulgentsia, larowlan, lauriii, and Dries.

Evolving Web: 2022 in Review: A Growing Team with a Home-Grown Heart

Hello, I’m new here.

I joined Evolving Web a few short weeks ago, and let me tell you, it’s been a fast-moving yet warm and welcoming experience. Evolving Web appealed to me above other agencies because of their focus on mobilizing meaningful stories and humanizing digital experiences. I love that they partner with organizations looking to make a difference in the world through industries like healthcare, government, nonprofits and education. And with all this team has accomplished, I’m beyond proud to be part of it.
Have you met us before? I’ll give you a tour:

Evolving Web team

Evolving Web is the digital agency partner empowering organizations to adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape with the tools and guidance to grow a meaningful online presence.

We’re growing, and 2022 was huge for us. Here’s a highlight reel from some of our best moments from this year:

1. We trained nearly 200 people in Drupal.

In addition to our agency services, we provide public and private Drupal training for developers, decision makers, and end-users for organizations throughout the year. Our trainers are familiar with the latest tech trends and best practices. They’re industry experts working with real-life Drupal projects of different sizes, across multiple industries. Since our 15-year inception, we have trained over 3,000 people in Drupal.

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For those of you secretly wondering, what is Drupal? Let me catch you up:

Drupal is a content management system (CMS) that is:

Open source: no licensing agreement - any user can inspect, modify, and enhance;
Customizable: it can be tailored from simple website to complex digital experiences;
Community-driven: powered the Drupal Association;
Accessible and multilingual: more people can use and access it easily, including those with disabilities and/or multiple languages users;
And, it’s free!

Drupal is a trusted system that’s powerful yet flexible. It has a huge following worldwide - Suzanne Degracheva, one of our co-founders, attended both DrupalCon in Prague and DrupalCon North America in Portland this year.

I was proud to learn that Evolving Web is in the world's top 20 organizations supporting Drupal. As my new colleague, Pierina, wrote in her blog post, "This year alone, we supported 16 projects and have been credited over 200 times for a wide range of tasks, from contributing to migration and multilingual modules to leading the Promote Drupal initiative. All of this earned us the badge of Platinum Drupal Certified Partner, and we’re proud to be makers in the community."

Last Friday we had a #DrupalFest event for @DrupalBA
3-hour long conversation about tools, best practices, recruiting and business.
23 people from 5 countries in LatAm 🙇‍♀️💙
I'm still smiling.
Check the upcoming events in your timezone & #CelebrateDrupal https://t.co/PiniT0NtXe pic.twitter.com/pNZ8Xb3mff

— Pieri (@pieriwww) April 13, 2021

The global Drupal community also welcomed the long-anticipated Drupal 10 in December, so you’d better believe there was a launch party across time zones to celebrate.

Still not convinced?

Here are some of the heavy-hitters whose sites are powered by Drupal: NASA, UNESCO, the United Nations, Harvard University and yes - even the Royal Family.

2. We welcomed 20+ new employees.

Our international, multilingual team has really expanded this year. We’re now a team of 90+, including marketers, project managers, strategists, developers and designers.

With staff coming from a wide range of backgrounds, representing over 20 nationalities and speaking more than 30 languages, we’re well-stacked and ready to tackle anything.

3. We won an award for our work with Princeton International.

We took home the Acquia Engage Award, which honours organizations that bring together marketers and technologists to imagine, build, and deliver the most ambitious digital experiences.

Here’s the scoop: Princeton International wanted to redesign its website to provide a unified source of information for students and faculty looking for international learning opportunities, increase the number and diversity of students and provide a unifying, clean, modern, and engaging website that would be a helpful resource for anyone in the Princeton community.

So, we conducted project research and a series of user journey workshops, evaluated and prioritized the user stories to ensure that development tasks were clear and actionable, making sure the users were at the center of the design process. We conducted usability testing with students to assess one of the project’s most innovative features, the Global Arc: an interactive, intuitive itinerary-building interface where students can select their international programs. The result was award-winning.

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

Some of the team, including Laure, Alex, Lisa and Patrick, also got to travel to Miami, FL to accept the award in person.

You can read more about our case study on Princeton here.

4. We partnered with some big names and industry leaders.

Evolving Web specializes in supporting organizations in higher education, enterprise, governmental organizations, travel and tourism, nonprofit, healthcare, tech and finance. Here’s just a couple of notable projects we took on in 2022:

Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD)

To continue our partnership from 2020, OCAD U in Toronto partnered with us again to replace its website's Admissions section with a stand-alone site, making it more intuitive, assistive, and visually appealing to all their prospective students. Short on time? Watch the video. Curious to know more? Read the case study.

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Beneva

We collaborated closely with Beneva—a newly created giant in Canada's insurance sector—to launch a new Drupal-based website that is accessible, performant, and built according to best practices. Our experts worked as an extension of the client's team of developers, content specialists, and scrum masters, providing technical assistance and guidance throughout the project. Read the case study.

5. We continued our partnership with Discover Drupal’s Scholarship Initiative.

Evolving Web’s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion goes beyond our team and projects and into our wider community. We provide scholarships through Discover Drupal, which we co-launched to support people in underrepresented communities to develop skills they need to start a career in web development. In 2022, we began with a new cohort, investing in more student futures.

6. We turned 15!

Founded in Montreal in 2007 by two university graduates–our co-founders, Alex and Suzanne–who wanted to build better digital experiences. Fast-forward 15 years later, Evolving Web is one of North America’s premier open source web agencies.

7. Oh, and we revamped our website, too.

This past fall, we went through a redesign of our website - a bit of a brand refresh to better reflect our UX (user experience), marketing and design expertise. We also switched our domain from .ca to .com. This was no small undertaking! We’re still very much a Canadian company, but our scope has widened significantly, and we’re looking to continue growing internationally – particularly in the US market.

Let’s Keep in Touch.

It’s been a year of growth, dynamism, and expansion, and we’re not slowing down anytime soon. If you’ve been inspired by the work we do at Evolving Web, you can check out our careers page or sign up for our newsletter to get industry insights and best-practices straight to your inbox. Let’s chat in 2023!

+ more awesome articles by Evolving Web

DrupalEasy: DrupalEasy Podcast S14E1 - Brian Perry - How to write your first web component

Direct .mp3 file download.

We talk with Brian Perry about web components, and how to get started with this new-ish technology.

URLs mentioned

DrupalEasy News

Professional module development - 15 weeks, 90 hours, live, online course.
Drupal Career Online - 12 weeks, 77 hours, live online, beginner-focused course.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-396-2340. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or corrections. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page.

Opensource.com: How to migrate your code from PHP 7.4 to 8.1

How to migrate your code from PHP 7.4 to 8.1 gilzow Wed, 12/21/2022 - 03:00

With the recent end-of-life for PHP 7.4, it's time to migrate your code. Here are a few options to do that.

The end-of-life (EOL) for PHP 7.4 was Monday, November 28, 2022. If you’re like me, that date snuck up much faster than anticipated. While your PHP 7.4 code isn’t going to…

Specbee: Everything you wanted to know about Drupal 10 - Q&A with Experts

Everything you wanted to know about Drupal 10 - Q&A with Experts Priyanka Phukan 21 Dec, 2022 Subscribe to our Newsletter Now Subscribe Leave this field blank

Have you heard yet? Drupal 10 just got released on December 15th, 2022, and we couldn’t be more thrilled! Recently, we had a chat with some of our Drupal experts where we spoke about Drupal 10 and what we can look forward to.

Use this to get familiar with the updates and out-of-the-box features brought about by Drupal 10. And if you’re still using Drupal 9/8 or an older version, maybe this will give you a bigger reason to move on that upgrade!

Here’s a little about the speakers in the discussion:

Jim Barnthouse, VP, Sales & Marketing at Specbee, exuberantly led the discussion and interviewed all the experts. He’s been working with Drupal websites for 10 years.

Jigish Chauhan, Drupal Architect at Specbee, has worked with Drupal for more than 10 years in the diversified IT industry, dealing with custom web application development. Whether it’s web development, maintenance, or testing, he has polished his expertise in every arena.

Malabya Tewari, Drupal Practice Head at Specbee, is an Acquia-certified full-stack Drupal developer having over 10 years of experience. In addition to leading the Drupal team at Specbee, he also introduces new best practices to constantly evolve the development process.

Michael Weaver, VP, Operations, comes with 20+ years of experience in the web development industry. Michael has enjoyed success working with a wide variety of clients helping them deliver better Drupal experiences.

Sagar Chauhan, Frontend Lead at Specbee, isn’t just a regular Drupal themer but a developer with 5 years of experience and driven by curiosity to explore new things to make user experience easier and cooler.

Saranya Ashokkumar, an Acquia-certified Drupal Specialist at Specbee, is a pro at handling tech queries and issues with in-depth experience implementing enterprise systems using complex back-end management systems.

Shreyal Mandot, an Acquia-certified Grand Master, is a Solution Architect at Specbee with 7+ years of experience in web and application development and specializes in developing web-based solutions in Drupal and PHP.

As you’ll be able to tell, Drupalists are thrilled now that Drupal 10 is released. We thought we’d ask the whole team about what they’re really excited about in Drupal 10. And while there are tons of new things coming up, each of the Drupal experts had different reasons for excitement.

Along with finding out what each of the experts are most excited for Drupal 10, we had specific questions to each of them. Read on to find out how it went!

Will the upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 be an easy one?

Saranya: Upgrading from Drupal 9 to 10 is relatively easier than upgrading from Drupal 7 to 8 or 8 to 9 because we now have more tools to boost the upgrade. Modules like Upgrade status and Drupal check helps make the upgrade from Drupal 9 to 10 very easy.

Saranya is most excited about the admin theme changes from Seven to Claro and frontend theme changes from Bartik to Olivero, given how interesting it is going to make it for developers to work with the new Drupal setup.

What are some of the major interface improvements for site admins?

Michael: I think the first improvement is really the Claro admin theme. It's such an improvement from its older versions. It's a result of the Drupal admin design system, which is an open-source project that started years ago. It's the best in class for CMSes. The best that I've heard for it is that it's a respectful design and has an emphasis on usability and accessibility. So, it can be used by anyone on any device. And it's such a clear and clean user interface which is a joy to use. And then, of course, CKEditor 5 is such a great improvement, and it's going to really change the game for a lot of site editors.

Michael talks about how Drupal 10 is set to greatly improve the editorial experience and overall usabilit for our clients. That said, he also adds about how developers will find it easier to work with the new Starterkit theme, the Claro admin theme taking the Drupal experience to the next phase.

With CKEditor 5 being the default editor in D10, what can content authors look forward to?

Michael: I think it's a vastly improved experience. CKEditor 5 is a redesign from scratch, and CKEditor 4 was released a decade ago this month. So, older guys like me know that it was great for a while, but sometimes they need to get replaced. So, there's a more up-to-date editor for the site editors. It'll be more like Microsoft Word or editing Google Docs. You can drag and drop images, add media easily, and links will have a contextual pop-up instead. Additionally, it has like a better plugin architecture. You can actually add in some pro plugins. Plus, there's also the option of using collaborative editing with comments. So, for people who need to go back and forth with multiple people involved in editing, that’ll be a great addition.

How easy/difficult is it to upgrade to CKEditor 5 in D10? Is there an upgrade path at all?

Malabya: It's easy and difficult at the same time. There’s been a huge amount of effort being put to have an upgrade path from CKEditor 4 to 5. It is also added in Drupal 9 as an experimental module so you can check out how CKEditor 5 works with Drupal 9. There is an upgrade path from CKEditor 4 to 5. You can test out your text formats which are being currently used only on your site. However, the tricky part comes in when there are a lot of plugins used in CKEditor 4. Those plugins need to be updated or made compatible to be used with D10 and CKEditor 5.

Malabya is most excited about the Recipes initiative and how it is replacing Distributions, giving users a more granular approach to adding functionalities to a Drupal site.

There's not too much time between Drupal 10's release and Drupal 9's EOL. Is that going to be a challenge?

Malabya: There’s a gap of one year. By the end of November 2023, Drupal 9 will be deprecated. And that's because D9 is heavily dependent on Symfony 4 and Symfony 4 is deprecating on November ’23. So, Drupal users or Drupal site maintainers have to move to D10. That's a hard end of life that has to be imposed. Now the migration or upgrade to Drupal 10 is a challenge depending on how vast your custom code base is because the contributed modules will be pretty easy to upgrade, but it depends on the amount of custom code in your website.

How can website owners/site admins get ready for Drupal 10?

Jigish: As we already know, Drupal 8 reached its end of life last year and Drupal 7 and Drupal 9 are also going to reach their EOL in November 2023. So, it is recommended to upgrade the sites to Drupal 10 before Drupal 9 reaches its EOL. So, for site owners or site admins currently on Drupal 9, the good thing is that the Drupal 9.3 version is compatible with PHP 8 and the code working with Drupal 9.5 will be compatible with Drupal 10 as well. Plus, we have the Upgrade Status and Rector modules as well. Using those, we can rectify some deprecated codes in our custom modular and any contributed modules. And so, we can have the site ready for Drupal 10.

Jigish eagerly waits to have a hands-on experience using the out-of-the-box features like Symfony 6 support, CKEditor 5 and Decoupled menus.

How easy/hard is it to move custom modules to Drupal 10?

Malabya: As Jigish mentioned, there are tools available. We have the Upgrade status module and the Drupal Rector modules that actually checks the deprecations in your code. Now, if you're working or if your site is built on the latest D9 core, it’s very important that have those checks in your development process. It will help the developers and the site owners, along with your clients, to be D10-ready whenever they want to move to D10. So, it's fairly easy to stay upgraded for your site. It’s simply like not using the deprecated code or when some APIs are deprecated with a better alternative in D9 or the later part of D9 and D10. So, it's fairly simple to have a custom module upgrade from D9 to D10. It's basically the same code, excluding the deprecations.

Outdated libraries like jQuery, Backbone, etc. have been removed and replaced by modern Javascript components. How is this helpful?

Sagar: These are the bundles that have been used in Drupal for a long time now, and being a part of the core, there was no alternative to remove this. Now they are and can be removed, and we can move on to writing modern JavaScript, modern ES6 code, which is much more native to the browser. It gives a performance boost, and it is something that we need to have right now. Jquery was once the king, but now we have a lot of alternatives or levels which we should use in our frontend themes. And apart from that, it also gives a cause for the developers to move away from Jquery and explore newer frontend libraries and frameworks.

The new themes like Claro, Olivero and Starterkit theme are what Sagar is excited to work with in Drupal 10. He talks about how the Starterkit theme generator in Drupal 10 takes the whole concept of themes to a whole new level.

Front-end developers are excited about the New Starterkit theme in Drupal 10. Why is that?

Sagar: The Starterkit theme is a good concept that the Drupal team has come up with. Instead of inheriting from a theme, we are cloning itand developing our theme from it. The advantage is that the original theme can still move on to development, adding new features if we want. So, in the future, backward compatibility with the earlier versions of the theme won’t be necessary. This way, the theme development can happen in one way and the custom code development of custom theme can happen parallelly with the developers. And that’s a great feature to have!

We're skipping a version of Symfony and jumping straight from Version 4 to version 6. Why? What improvements does Symfony 6 bring along?

Shreyal: To understand this, we need to understand what's driving this change. Dependencies like Symfony are pushing the Drupal upgrades forward.

Since Drupal 8, we were always one version behind Symfony’s latest release. So, the point is if we move to Symfony 5 now, in another year we have release another version of Drupal. Symfony 6 was already out in 2021 and is stable now. If we move to Symfony 6, we get another two years of life for Drupal.

There are many improvements with Symfony 6. We're getting new components. Along with Recipes, we have a few more things coming up in terms of security, performance andcode optimization. Now if you don’t upgrade to Symfony 6 in Drupal 10, you won’t get a warning, but an error this time. The warning process was only in Symfony 5.

Shreyal is thrilled about the upgrade from Symfony 4 to Symfony 6. And of course, every developer is looking forward to Automatic updates that’s going to make security and other updates really easy with just a click!

Talk to us about the new "Recipes" functionality that Drupal 10 is going to bring in

Shreyal: Let me give you an example. If you need to create a blogging site, with recipes, all you need to do is use a pre-defined recipe for a blog. You’ll now get pre-defined recipes in Drupal core that will have the necessary modules and it will configure those modules, followed by the required permissions and some demo content. This recipe is built in a user-friendly way. So, you don't need to know about all the details. You can simply choose the recipe, and it will be a blogger site the next time you see it.

How helpful is Drupal Rector in upgrading a website from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10?

Saranya: Drupal Rector is an open-source tool built with Rector. It helps you upgrade deprecated codes automatically. You don’t need to touch any code, it will update your code automatically. But it won’t support all deprecations. You can upgrade some sets of deprecations from Drupal 9 deprecated code.

If my website is still on Drupal 7 (or 6!), what should be my next move?

Michael: The good news is that you waited so long that most of the wrinkles have been worked out. And most contributed modules have now been moved over to 8, 9, and 10, and they have alternative upgrade paths. So, it makes it relatively easy. And if you start now, you probably go to Drupal 9 first and then go up to Drupal 10. The idea is to plan the migration, give yourself plenty of time to fully understand your own content and what your options are. You want to consult with a developer with experience in Drupal migrations, specifically from 6 or 7 to 8 plus, and work with them to fully understand those contributed module upgrade paths.

If my website is on Drupal 8, can I skip Drupal 9 and directly upgrade to Drupal 10?

Jigish: Yes, directly migrating from Drupal 8 to Drupal 10 is possible. But there may be a lot of deprecated code as there’s a major version upgrade from Drupal 8 to 10 and the PHP version is also having a major release update. So, it isn’t recommended to rush the upgrade to Drupal 10 without understanding the proper approach. The migration process from Drupal 8 to 9 and then Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 is seamless, and upgrading in a correct manner will save you a lot of time and effort.

Watch the full video now:

Drupal 10 is up and alive!

The great news about the big Drupal 10 release is that there are so many new and exciting features that we have always been looking forward to. Developers, site editors and authors can work more efficiently with greater tools to compliment their workflow.
And the best part is that with modules like Upgrade Status, Rector and Drupal check, upgrading to Drupal 10 from the older versions is very easy.

Whether you want to make an easy upgrade/migration to Drupal 10 or reap the benefits of using the new Recipes tool, along with Symfony 6, or front-end developers want to work with the New Starterkit Theme, Drupal 10 makes it 3x easier for non-code and code developments on a website.

So, are you prepared for Drupal 10? We can help you get there in the most efficient way possible. Talk to us!

Author: Priyanka Phukan

Meet Priyanka, a Junior Content Writer and Marketer at Specbee. Priyanka’s a Grammar-Freak with a knack for creating impactful content with ‘words’ being her weapon of choice. A foodie who likes all things chicken. When not writing, she likes to play the Uke and sing. On blue days, you’ll find her binge-watching Asian dramas.

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