Join us TOMORROW, Thursday, July 20 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, for our regularly scheduled call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)

In this month's informal chat, we'll be continuing last month's discussion about the Drupal 10 upgrade. Feeling stuck? Got successes or challenges to share? Got something else entirely 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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  • Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kpV1o65N

• Follow along on Google Docs: https://nten.org/drupal/notes

View notes of previous months' calls.

A new open source editor to streamline content workflows and enable realtime peer-to-peer collaboration

For Drupal developers, it’s no secret that there aren’t many options for text editors. Traditional picks favor out-of-the-box support over customizability, and those with robust functionality can command high prices.

This poses a paradoxical problem for our clients, many of whom operate within higher education and government spaces. These institutions embrace Drupal for its open source model, as its community-driven framework decreases long-term operating expenditures that are often difficult to approve on a multi-year basis. Additionally, Drupal offers a wealth of options for managing complex workflows across many users. However, these options seldom extend to the node edit form, leading our clients to look towards Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other collaborative editing suites to facilitate the early stages of content development. This can create a cumbersome editorial workflow.

In late 2022, we began work on a project to migrate a content revision workflow into Drupal. Our client’s current workflow involves up to twenty editors and reviewers, each of whom create or review content drafts and revisions , make inline comments and suggestions, and push content through multiple disparate systems in order to publish and version their content. Most importantly, the entire process begins with concurrent editing in Microsoft SharePoint.

Though we could integrate versioning and reviewal processes using modules such as Content Moderation, in order to fully consolidate this workflow into Drupal, we needed to find a solution for collaborative editing. At first, we looked toward the tools used in Drupal core. The premium version of CKEditor5 offers collaborative editing, but its subscription-based model is a prime example of the recurring costs our clients wish to avoid. Additionally, CKEditor5 collaboration is limited to the editor pane itself, meaning that users cannot collaborate across different field types.

To combat these limitations, we are creating a new text editor for Drupal 10. Built on the ProseMirror rich-text editor framework, the editor will support node-level collaboration, enabling us to develop complex editorial workflows that start and end in Drupal.

By building a collaborative editor in Drupal, we are addressing key issues in current Drupal editorial workflows: 

• Editors will collaborate within the node edit form, eliminating the need for third-party services in order to perform editorial tasks. 
• The node edit form will save in real time, meaning that content will no longer be susceptible to data loss due to page timeouts. 
• Editorial workflow efficiency will improve drastically by affording content editors a unified space in which to collaboratively edit, review, publish, and revise content.

Most importantly, this editor will be released as open source and available to the Drupal community, making it easier for us to implement the customizations our clients require. We’ve opted to implement peer-to-peer collaboration for this reason, as it will make collaboration more widely accessible than traditional client-server models. Since our editor leverages the Drupal plugin system, it will be easier for developers to create and contribute new functionality. By sharing this tech with the community, we hope to empower Drupal developers to create robust, seamless editing experiences for their users.

We expect to release the editor in mid-2024 and will be publishing updates on this work as development continues. If you have any questions, please let us know. 
 

Industries

Reminder: As we get ready for the End-of-life (EOL) of Drupal 7 in January 2025, changes are coming to the Drupal 7 ecosystem.

Drupal 7 branches of unsupported modules and themes will no longer be eligible for new maintainership

Community support for contributed modules and themes will continue as it has to date. However, beginning August 1, 2023, once the Drupal 7 branch of a contributed module or theme is marked unsupported, it will not be eligible for new maintainership and will not be marked supported again.

This will occur if an existing maintainer marks the module or theme unsupported, or if the Security Team marks it unsupported for lack of response. If there are Drupal 7 modules or themes that you or your clients rely on, then we strongly encourage you to proactively adopt these projects.

The Drupal Security Team will not issue security advisories for any unsupported third-party libraries that Drupal 7 contributed modules or themes rely on, such as CKEditor 4.

Other Drupal 7 support changes

For a full list of upcoming Drupal 7 support changes, see End-of-life (EOL) Drupal 7 in January 2025.

Dries talked about our vision and strategy for Drupal 11 in DrupalCon Portland 2022. The vision Dries laid out was that we want to make Drupal the tool of choice for ambitious site builders on the open web. In order for us to accomplish this goal, we believe that Drupal needs to provide:

• Easy-to-use tools that guide site builders on the right path
• Site building tools for providing an enjoyable experience for content editors
• An inexpensive, easy, and secure way to maintain digital experiences over time

New features will be built in the current major version of Drupal. This means that components of this plan will be released gradually in Drupal core minor releases, not in a big bang with Drupal 11.

Ongoing efforts

We have several ongoing initiatives, but we are doubling down our efforts on these three tracks:

Reduce the time it takes for site builders to become proficient with Drupal

Drupal is the most powerful digital experience platform when it is well-configured. We want more people to be able to leverage the power of Drupal. Therefore, our goal is to reduce the time and steps it takes to realize the full potential of Drupal.

We are working on:

• A simplified way to assess and install modules with the Project Browser
• Tooling to deliver Drupal starter kits without locking sites into specific distributions (known as 'Recipes')
• Improvements to the user experience for Drupal's administrative user interface, including content modeling enhancements (Field UI) and administrative navigation

Empowering site builders to deliver engaging editorial experience

Our goal is to make it easier for site builders to meet the requirements of content editors, who are accustomed to using flexible and easy-to-navigate tools. We will also evolve Drupal into the top choice for ambitious site builders and content creators who need advanced layout or landing page building features.

We are working on:

• Improvements to Layout Builder that makes creating and editing pages easier
• A modernized page building experience that combines the strengths of structured content with modern page building tools

Reduce the cost of keeping Drupal applications secure

Keeping Drupal 10 sites up-to-date can be labor-intensive and require specialized knowledge to assess security releases and potential regressions caused by updates. Our commitment is to make the upkeep of Drupal and its modules less complex, risk-free, and affordable.

We are working on:

• Automatic application of security and patch updates for core and contributed modules via an 'Automatic Updates' feature
• Improvements to our contributed module tooling, processes and documentation to address known friction points that site administrators are facing in the update process

Moreover, we recognize that a significant number of Drupal sites are still on Drupal 7. The upgrade to Drupal 10 can be labor-intensive and requires specialized expertise.

We are working on:

• Documentation and tooling to make migrating from Drupal 7 easier

Let's build together!

We are excited about the road ahead as we are making Drupal the tool of choice for ambitious site builders on the open web. We invite you to join us on this journey, where your expertise, insights, and contributions are invaluable in shaping the future of Drupal.

Thank you to Gábor Hojtsy, catch, xjm, yoroy, Dries, and effulgentsia for their feedback on this post.

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