Welcome to the future of web development, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the game in ways we could never have imagined. AI presents web developers with a host of exciting opportunities, from enhanced user experiences to more efficient development processes. 
How do you like the previous paragraph? It was written with AI. Is that impressive? Let's talk about the role of AI and web development today. Are you wondering if AI will be able to replace programmers shortly? Read our new blog today for the latest news on machine learning, artificial Intelligence, and website development.

Drupal and Artificial Intelligence have now come together to create a powerful and irreversible impact on the world of Drupal services. From generating content ideas to translating content to optimizing its quality, AI has slithered into almost all spheres of Drupal services. This is something Drupal developers have been eagerly waiting for long. Now that their wait has finally been over, they are doing wonders by leveraging the power of AI for rendering futuristic Drupal development services.

In this blog, we’ll take a plunge into how AI has revolutionized Drupal services for good.

Moving Beyond the Basic Chatbot With ChatGPT Integration

The integration of Drupal Chatbot with ChatGPT came as a huge surprise for Drupal developers across the globe. ChatGPT is a fabulous AI chatbot. It was developed by OpenAI. Its release in November 2022 caused a widespread sensation worldwide. Around 1 million people signed up to try it out within the first five days.

Performing behavioural testing on a Drupal project allows you to make sure that all of your features work as they should do. This is especially important when you update code as this can introduce bugs that are otherwise time consuming or difficult to spot.

One aspect that is important to behavioural tests is the content of the site, which is often integral to many Drupal sites functioning correctly. Many Drupal sites have taxonomy terms that are used in views to filter content in one way or another.

There are also structure pages that are used as signposts to other parts of the site, and they are often important in navigation. Whilst you could just visit the pages directly, it's often useful to test the user journey end-to-end, which involves being able to navigate to the functionality being tested.

One approach to ensuring the site contains content is to copy the production database into the testing environment. Using the production database for testing has several disadvantages, not least of which is the complexity of copying the data across in the first place. Some production databases are very large and so importing this into the test environment can cause tests to take many hours to complete.

The biggest problem, though, is making sure that your development site doesn't contain any personal information as this is a security concern and can even cause problems like sending test emails to users. Whilst there are ways around this, teams can often spend quite a lot of time ensuring that there is no personally identifiable information at rest in your test environment.

A better approach to this is to use default content to create a Drupal site so that is in a known state before tests are run. This means that the site will function in the same way as the production site, just without all of the personal information. The idea behind this approach is that you create a known test environment for tests to run.

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At DXPR, we're always looking to learn more about Drupal, especially when it comes to how different languages are handled on the platform. We're starting a project to study this and we're inviting people with experience in this area to help us.

We've set up a 30-minute interview for Drupal practitioners who've had their hands on the ropes in setting up multilingual CMS or doing content translation. These conversations will add a lot to our study and they'll also help us all understand these important areas better.

The best part? If you take part in this, you'll get early access to DXPR's latest developments. Our team has been working hard to make improvements to the translation experience for Drupal content editors and translators. By being part of this project, you'll be among the first to check out these cool new features.

Interested in being part of this study? Reach out to us to set up an interview at a time that works best for you! Please also write a short introduction about your experience and/or ambitions with respect to web content translation.

Host Matt Kleve discusses a recent Lullabot Drupal project and its transformative impact on government websites. In this episode, we have an exciting conversation with a representative from the Office of the CIO from the state of Iowa and the Director of Strategy at Lullabot, as we explore the importance of structured content and its role in the groundbreaking work being done on Iowa.gov, powered by Drupal.

When you think of the most powerful tools in Drupal, it should come as no surprise that Views are always at the top of the list. Built into the Drupal core since 8.0.0, Views, together with their companion module Views UI, enable website administrators, site builders, and developers to display content listings on their websites in any format they need. 

My projects all use DDEV for local development. Regarding end-to-end testing, as part of my continuous integration process, I also use DDEV! This way, my scripts for running Cypress are the same locally and in my CI. Leveraging DDEV in your CI is especially useful if your project has multiple domains, which is harder to replicate using good old php -S 127.0.0.1:8080 -t web. Recently I wanted to speed up my end-to-end tests by avoiding full site installs for each job. A full site install could take a few minutes with the default content creation. But I knew a database restore could take a fraction of that time. Luckily, DDEV provides snapshots that can be used to restore your environment from a backup!

The approach was this:

Update your microsite and see the changes in real time without having to publish them.