Today we are talking with Dries Buytaert.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/400

• Favorite improvement to Drupal in last 10 years
• Biggest opportunities and challenges facing Drupal
• Drupalcon Portland Driesnote Ambitious site builder
• Spoilers for the next Driesnote
• Static site generators
• 50,000 projects
• Impact of AI
• People just entering the development market
• Last thing you coded
  • For work
  • For fun
• Digital Public Good

• Drupal is for ambitious site builders
• Drupal Recognized as a Digital Public Good
• Claro episode
• DrupalCon Innovation Contest
• Drupal vs SSG
• 50K modules
• 50000 module
• Artificial Intelligence, the future of Content Management and the Web
• Dries Site Header Tool
• Getting 10/10
• Makers and Takers

Dries Buytaert - dri.es

Nic Laflin - www.nLighteneddevelopment.com @nicxvan John Picozzi - www.epam.com @johnpicozzi Stephen Cross - stephencross.com @stephencross Martin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu

Martin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu OpenAI Provides a suite of modules and an API foundation for OpenAI integration for generating text content, images, content analysis and more.

Each day in our life comes packed with different challenges. These challenges can sometimes be exciting and bring about a happy ending. But most of the time, challenges get coupled with difficulties. Difficulties in turn can get us stressed and even burn us out. As individuals, it is very important to convince ourselves that there seldom comes a day without a hurdle to cross. When we have such a prior understanding, challenges will fail to shock us.

I would like to put it another way. Just think about the last travel experience you had and try to remember the challenges faced. While traveling, there isn't much time available to solve a problem. We never wait for others to act first, instead we promptly go forward and find an alternative solution. A traveler is ready to seek advice from knowledgeable people without any inhibitions. Such a mindset helps to overcome any challenges on the road or anywhere. Because we know we will be stuck very badly if we do not find a solution. 

Life itself, in essence, is a journey. Nothing can help us better than to have a traveler's mindset. Now, let us journey through the important picks from the past week.

The Drop Times interviewed Margery Tongway on the sidelines of DrupalSouth. Margery Tongway is a Senior Consultant at Annex. Click here to read the interview. Read TDT's report on DrupalSouth Wellington 2023, where the Drupal community celebrated expertise and honored achievements.

A blog post published on gbyte.dev provides a detailed guide on hosting a Drupal 9 or 10 website using NixOS. In a blog titled "Disabling Twig Caching Made Simpler," Mike Herchel writes on how to disable Twig caching. Kanopi Studios has published an article explaining the benefits of a great website design. Srijan has published a new blog post on how to install Drupal 10 using Colima and DDEV on MacBook.

 An article published by StyleLib explains how Facdori theme is designed to provide a professional and modern look for industrial and manufacturing businesses. A new blog post published by Acquia discusses the capabilities and advantages of using Drupal content management system (CMS), for building e-commerce websites. A blog post published by Evolving Web explores Drupal 10 and its integration with Symfony 6.2 framework. the new PHP framework brings significant enhancements to the Drupal tech stack. 

Pantheon has introduced a new direct purchase path that allows web teams to access valuable WebOps features with ease. Follow this link to know more. See how developers can enhance the flexibility and extensibility of their Drupal-powered websites by integrating Symfony Components and Twig into Drupal Core. Selecting the right e-commerce platform can be challenging. Two popular options, Drupal Commerce and BigCommerce, stand out as top choices for businesses of all sizes. LN Webworks have published a blog post comparing both the options.

 Evolve Drupal is scheduled on 26 May 2023 in Montreal, Canada. This will be an in-person event. Click here to read more. The Drupal Bangalore User Group (D-BUG) will hold its monthly event on Saturday, 27 May, 2023. The event,  will be held at Valuebound's headquarters.

That is all for the week,
Your's truly,
Thomas Alias K, 
Sub-Editor, TheDropTimes

E-commerce businesses are pursuing opportunities to stand out, compete, and increase sales, regardless of their type or size. The proliferation of visitors to online marketplaces makes it challenging to distinguish oneself from the competition. That's where single-vendor e-commerce websites come in.

With a platform like Drupal Commerce, creating an empowering center for your online business has become a piece of cake. This article provides guidance on creating a memorable shopping experience using five e-commerce features, making sure they feel no regret when they choose to shop with you.

What is a Single Vendor E-commerce Website?

A single vendor e-commerce website is a platform exclusively owned and managed by a single seller, who directly offers their products or services to consumers. 

• Read more about How to Improve Drupal Website Performance

Posted on behalf of the Drupal accessibility maintainers and written by Mike Gifford.

Drupal is well known for its accessibility. While not perfect, Drupal made an early commitment to accessibility when Drupal 7 was released at the beginning of 2011. Its release was delayed several months because the core team was working to include accessibility releases for both front-facing and back-end user interfaces. This was a huge step for a general purpose content publishing tool like Drupal. Our community was one of the first to make accessibility accommodations for people with disabilities as not just users, but also as authors. 

At that time, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, announced that accessibility was going to be one of the core gates of accessibility. It is still rare to see a software project launch get delayed because of accessibility issues. In my experience, this demonstrates when a community really values accessibility.

So when Drupal was nominated for the 2022 GAAD Pledge (an initiative of the GAAD Foundation that works with one influential open source project annually), we knew we had already demonstrated commitment to this part of the pledge.

The GAAD Pledge committed projects to formally update their guidelines to WCAG 2.1. WCAG 2.0 is still the default for many organizations, and Drupal was no exception. WCAG 2.0 was released in 2008, 18 months after the first iPhones were available for sale. Members of the Drupal Accessibility Team started looking at how they would implement WCAG 2.1 AA before it was released. The Accessibility Team has embraced 2.1 informally for a long time. We could have left it there, but we knew WCAG 2.2 and WCAG 3.0 were being developed. As such we updated our commitment to follow the latest W3C WCAG Recommendation. 

We do not have a formal adoption of the Accessibility Coding Standards, but we are close. The Drupal Standards team may want a few additional changes, but we have documented many of the best practices that we have built into Drupal. We looked at other Accessibility Coding Standards, and felt we were able to create a project specific accessibility standard that was going to be helpful in educating people who are new to either Drupal or Accessibility.

This was tied to the important step of cleaning up our documentation. The instructions built into most open source projects are out of date, or incomplete, yet they are so important. This is especially true for accessibility. People new to accessibility, need an entry point that allows them to access the information that is relevant to the latest versions of the project. We’ve worked to improve this for Drupal. 

We have been tracking accessibility issues in Drupal Core and Contrib under the accessibility tag. This is already a long-standing practice, and we have a staggering 2817 open issues. 

How can we be a leader in accessibility, and have so many open issues? Ultimately, it is really a factor of how complex the user interface is, and how actively people are addressing issues. We have an active developer community with lots of modules and themes. 

We recently started tagging issues for WCAG Success Criteria. Going this extra distance helps aggregate issues. With Drupal Core we can better understand the impact of particular issues on populations we care about. It also helps us create an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR). I’ve outlined the process that we put together for Drupal and ACRs. 

We are hoping to be able to provide a machine-readable ACR into every release of Drupal Core in the form of a simple OpenACR file. 

We’d love to have members of the Drupal community become involved in helping Drupal continue to lead on accessibility. Help us take the next steps to ensure that we are catching accessibility errors earlier. We also hope that everyone takes time to engage in Global Accessibility Awareness Day, where we can share best practices and learn from each other. 

Break down barriers to communication with clear and concise writing

When it comes to web accessibility, a lot of attention gets paid to how to present and structure content. Text size, color contrast, and use of headers are all vital parts of accessibility. Just as important, however, is making sure that the content itself is written in an accessible way.

One of the best ways to do this is by adopting the use of plain language. Plain language is the art of writing clearly and concisely to communicate your message to your audience. It makes information and content easier to read and understand. It helps bridge communication gaps, simplify complex concepts, and promote clearer understanding.

You can find plain language everywhere in society. Medical and legal professionals, educators, and others use it to communicate complex ideas. Federal agencies are required to use plain writing when communicating with the public. Businesses use it to reduce errors and enhance customer service.

Plain language serves as a powerful tool for fostering inclusivity and accessibility. It can help address educational and social inequities. It makes information accessible to wider, more diverse audiences, including:

• Individuals with cognitive and learning differences
• Older adults experiencing a reduction in cognitive skills
• Non-native language speakers

Nearly everyone benefits in some way from the use of plain language. It's a crucial tool for effective communication in virtually any field or context.

Using Plain Language to Update Drupal’s Code of Conduct

Last year, I worked with a group of Drupal community members to update the project’s code of conduct. As part of our process, we created draft language drawn from other open source codes of conduct. We then asked community members from around the world to review and share their feedback. The top piece of feedback we received was to make the language easier to read and understand.

The other codes of conduct we used to create our draft was written at a college graduate reading level. This made it hard to understand, especially for an international audience. Our goal was to simplify the text without losing its meaning and nuance.

• Adopted a more conversational and less formal tone
• Replaced legal and technical jargon
• Removed English-language idioms
• Replaced large words with ones that had fewer syllables
• Broke up large sentences into smaller chunks
• Replaced passive sentences with active ones
• Used tools like the Hemingway Editor and Readable to test for readability
• ChatGPT was not yet available at the time of our project, but if it had been we would likely have used it as well

Despite our best efforts, we were not able to remove every long word or complex sentence. However, we were able to make the text much clearer and more direct. As a result, community members should find the new code of conduct easier to understand and follow.

This experience helped me better understand and appreciate the value of plain language. I learned that it takes a lot of hard work to communicate complex ideas in an accessible way. That work is worth it though, if it helps make the Drupal community more inclusive for more people.

Getting Started with Plain Language

A good starting point for learning more about plain language is Plainlanguage.gov. The site offers resources to help federal agencies follow the Plain Writing Act of 2010.

Guides on how to use plain language to communicate health information can be found at:

• CDC Plain Language Materials & Resources
• Plain Language at NIH

The Center for Plain Language provides plain language resources, training, and advocacy.

While mastering plain language takes effort and practice, its benefits are considerable. It can help break down barriers, improve comprehension, and facilitate better decision-making.

I tend to scribble a lot by Nic McPhee, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Industries

The upgrade from Drupal 8/9 to Drupal 10 is considered to be one of the easiest major upgrades in Drupal's history. This is because Drupal 10 is built on the same codebase as Drupal 8/9 and focuses on removing deprecated code and dependencies.