Over the last few months, a group of Drupal community members from the Community Health Team have been working on updates to the Drupal Code of Conduct, with the assistance of a diverse group of community leaders and stakeholders from around the world.
The draft version of that updated Code of Conduct is now available for community review.
We are asking community members to provide constructive, actionable feedback in the Community Working Group's issue queue or share their thoughts privately via this form between now and November 30.
Feedback will be reviewed by the Code of Conduct committee to inform any changes to the draft document before it is finalized and shared with the Community Working Group prior to adoption.
The current Code of Conduct was adopted in 2010 and last revised in 2014. Over the last five years, the Community Working Group (CWG), which is responsible for maintaining the document, has received consistent feedback that the Code of Conduct should be updated so that it is clearer and more actionable:
This effort was led by a group of Community Health Team members:
This group also involved a number of community stakeholders in the process including the full membership of the Community Health Team, and over a dozen other community leaders including members of Drupal Diversity and Inclusion, the Event Organizers Working, the Drupal Security Team, and past and present Drupal Association staff members. These community members were asked to provide feedback based on their personal perspectives and experiences, not on behalf of their affiliated groups or teams.
The group also solicited feedback on draft versions of the document from community members based in different areas of the world, including North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
The group began with a chartering exercise to define shared goals, measures of success, opportunities, and constraints. A timeline was then created with key milestones, divided into two-week sprints.
The group then identified a set of existing open source codes of conduct to review along with the existing Drupal CoC. Different CoCs were assigned to different team members to identify their distinct elements (e.g., “examples of positive and negative behaviors”, “statement of scope”, “enforcement expectations”). The group met to discuss the different elements and voted on which ones they felt were “must haves” “should haves” and “nice to haves” for an updated Drupal CoC. The text of those elements was then collated into a single document and shared with community stakeholders for review and comment.
Following the initial review of that document, the group then worked to create an initial draft using clear and consistent language. This draft was shared with community stakeholders for review and went through multiple rounds of revision based on their feedback.
Updates were posted to the Drupal Community Working Group’s blog throughout the process.
Following the community review period, the group will meet to review all feedback and determine what changes need to be made to the draft document before it is finalized.
The finalized draft will then be shared with the CWG’s Conflict Resolution Team, which is responsible for maintaining the Drupal Code of Conduct and related documentation. They will consult with others and make any final changes before updating the Code of Conduct page on Drupal.org with the updated copy.
The Drupal and wider DXP community are embracing low-code development.
Low-code development is a broad topic, but at its core, it’s an approach to building digital applications that aim to reduce the gap between developers and non-developers. In other words, it lets you do more things while using less code.
Instead of writing code, compiling it, and running it to view the results, low-code development lets teams work the other way around: users manipulate elements via a visual interface, and the full code quietly adjusts itself behind the scenes.
Gartner estimates that by 2024, more than 65% of application development will follow a low-code approach, so here’s what you need to know about this fast-growing trend: who it’s for, what it looks like, and what pros and cons come with its adoption.
Low-code is everywhere, and it’s for everyone.
identifies two major audiences for these types of platforms:
One of the most recognizable examples of a low-code platform geared to the former audience is the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) website builder, which lets users manipulate visual elements as they would appear on the page, and the underlying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is generated accordingly. This means that marketers and designers can collaborate on landing pages without having to work with a front-end developer.
Common types of low-code platforms and apps include:
There’s a reason why low-code development is seeing a surge in popularity: it comes with a host of benefits for marketers, designers, developers, and entire organizations. It’s also a great way for self-taught people - who make up a growing part of the workforce - to quickly acquire new skill sets, as it greatly reduces the learning curve for complex technical concepts.
Low-code applications enable everyone in an organization to benefit from powerful workflows and capabilities that were once the sole realm of those with development or scripting knowledge.
For marketers, this could mean no longer relying on developers to build new landing pages and forms for a website; for designers, it might look like automatically exporting visuals as code rather than having to translate them manually before handing them over to the dev team.
Even if you know how to accomplish something via programming, it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t prefer a quicker way to go about it.
Low-code development speeds up processes on multiple levels: not only are fewer people needed to create a given asset, but the ability to create flexible, reusable components eliminates considerable effort from recurring tasks.
Manually writing code is a task that’s particularly prone to mistakes, and anyone who’s had to parse through dozens upon dozens of lines of code to pinpoint a problem will agree that those mistakes often take quite a bit of time to fix.
By automating code generation based on visual inputs and reducing the amount of “hand-written” code required, low-code applications take things like typos and open tags out of the equation entirely. Another advantage of working with low-code solutions is the enhanced security that comes with large-scale, extensively tested, and monitored platforms. Comparatively, entirely custom-built solutions tend to be at a higher risk for vulnerabilities.
Thanks to all the aforementioned benefits, adopting low-code solutions is often the most cost-effective move for businesses. It’s a great way to make operations more efficient while saving time and effort for everyone involved. It also eliminates many of the more minute aspects of quality assurance and streamlines the testing process.
It also gives teams the means to take their skills further, so what might previously have required expensive third-party consulting can now be accomplished in-house.
Nothing is perfect. While their benefits outweigh their downsides in many, if not most, cases, low-code platforms do have certain disadvantages when compared to fully custom solutions.
One of the areas where low-code solutions really shine is streamlining website development thanks to user-friendly visual tools. Content management systems such as Drupal offer increasingly intuitive ways to build complex information architectures and data retrieval systems without the knowledge of PHP or SQL. When it comes to user-facing elements, DXPR provides a low-code solution that empowers marketing teams to unlock the full potential of Drupal sites. If you’re interested in building better sites, faster (and really, why wouldn’t you be?), check out the DXPR demo to see how easy it can be.
One of the reasons I love going to DrupalCon is that it’s a way to absorb everything new coming out of the Drupal community, and all the good things we have to look forward to in upcoming versions of Drupal. Here’s a summary of what I’m excited about right now!
Content editing features have been a focal point for Drupal in recent years. CKEditor 4 (the WYSIWYG editor that ships with Drupal) will soon be replaced by CKEditor 5. This new version provides improved editing features for content creation and editing features. These include track changes and revision history, intelligent text predictions and the ability to export to PDF. CKEditor 5 is now stable in Drupal 9.5 and undergoing testing so it’ll be ready when Drupal 10 is released.
The Drupal community has also made massive improvements to Localize.Drupal.org. This website, which is a means of incorporating languages into Drupal Core, promises to better translate the Drupal admin UI, which will result in a better UI for people who edit Drupal in other languages.
There is also an initiative underway to overhaul the Drupal toolbar in a way that is beneficial for content editors. The existing toolbar lacks submenu navigation and takes up too much space on the page in vertical mode. The goal is to adapt the toolbar so that it’s easier to use and more accessible for both content editors and site builders by introducing an up-to-date UI navigation pattern, adapting the information architecture and opening the possibility to include multiple menus that are built for the needs of different types of users.
DrupalCon Prague also brought news from the distribution and recipes initiative. Another tool that promises to make site building easier, recipes represent a more granular way of adding configuration to your site, allowing for a mix and match of a sort that you can’t do with distributions.
The current goals of the Distribution and Recipes initiative are to improve distribution discovery, allow for multiple distributions to be used on the same project, be installable at any time in a project's life cycle, provide for easier updates and enable distributions to ship demo content. A patch that can install modules, create and update configuration and apply other recipes is ready to use. More information is available at https://drupal.org/project/distributions_recipes.
Another exciting new initiative for site builders is the new project browser tool under development. This will enable site builders to search for contributed modules more easily through Drupal’s admin UI. Currently site builders are presented with an overwhelming selection of 55-plus categories of modules on Drupal.org. The new browser will simplify this with a more limited set of categories (which were brainstormed at DrupalCon), featuring useful information to help builders select modules that are good fits for specific projects.
A major piece of news from DrupalCon Prague of relevance to developers was the introduction of GitLab as a standard tool for developers to use to manage code and keep track of changes. This replaces the development tools offered on Drupal.org with a more complete set of tools (such as more streamlined merge request processes) and a whole product behind it. GitLab integration has already been added to Drupal, now it is now being added to all modules.
Automatic updates for Drupal Core were a major theme at DrupalCon Portland earlier this year and were again discussed at DrupalCon Prague. The Portland event featured considerable beta testing of the new update system, which brought this important feature closer to completion and ready for inclusion in Drupal 10. This is one of Drupal's most frequently requested features and will ensure that all Drupal websites stay secure throughout their lifecycle.
At DrupalCon I had the opportunity to give a presentation on the future of content management and how Drupal has evolved beyond simply being a content management system. It still functions as this, but it is also a digital experience platform and a platform that’s optimized for implementing your content strategy, whose strengths lie in its flexibility in terms of layering functionality on top of content in a way that actually integrates with your content.
I discussed how one of Drupal’s core strengths is its flexibility in creating structured content that matches your content strategy. This means you can create a strong strategy and build your Drupal platform to support it. Drupal can also integrate with other data sources and marketing tools in an open way, giving you choice as to what technology and marketing stack you want to use.
To sum up, I made a case for Drupal as an open digital experience platform. Focusing on content strategy first typically yields better results in terms of how you structure your content and the functionality, technology and marketing stack you layer on top of it. I also made the case that you need a strong content governance plan to keep your content strategy in place and in use in order to leverage Drupal in this way.
One source of information for what’s coming down the line in the Drupal project is the twice-yearly Driesnotes, presented at each DrupalCon. In his customary keynote speech at DrupalCon Prague in September, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert expressed a certain frustration that his company doesn’t promote itself as well as it could. He began by discussing his discomfort with social media platforms and other forms of proprietary software while lauding Drupal as an open web champion, citing the freedom it provides to users to own their own content and code.
In his keynote, Dries spoke at great length about the many initiatives underway as part of the Drupal project, including the introduction of GitLab, which he cited as a major step towards making it easier for people within the Drupal community to contribute to the platform. He also noted that since his previous DriesNote in Portland, Drupal has achieved stability for Olivero and CKEditor 5, made preparations for the introduction of PHP 8.2, upgraded to Symfony 6 and made Drupal Core smaller – all of which will be included in the Drupal 10 launch at the end of 2022.
Dries also touted project browser and automatic updates as major initiatives that, while not set to be ready for Drupal 10, will probably factor into Drupal 10.2 or beyond. He cited these as features that enable average users to be part of Drupal and the open web (and will facilitate upgrading to Drupal 10). These features also help promote the great work done by Drupal developers, making that work more accessible to all Drupal users.
Have a migration project in mind? Join our migration workshop to learn more about moving your content and configuration into Drupal 9. This course takes Drupal 10 readiness into account, so you’ll also be ready for Drupal 10’s release or to migrate directly to Drupal 10, depending on the timing of your migration project.
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I am pleased to announce that Dave Long (longwave) has accepted our invitation to become a provisional Drupal core release manager!
Dave is based in the UK and has been contributing on Drupal.org for over fourteen years. He has been especially active in the development of Drupal 9 and 10, and is credited on over a thousand core issues. He is also a provisional member of the Drupal Security Team and has contributed significantly to core security advisories over the past six months. Dave is also a regular contributor to the Bug Smash Initiative which aims to improve Drupal by fixing known bugs, and was previously a maintainer of the Ubercart shopping cart for Drupal 7.
Dave first discovered Drupal in 2006 with version 4.7 and has used it ever since for numerous web projects as a freelancer and since 2014 as a senior developer at Full Fat Things.
Dave's leadership, patience, responsiveness, communication skills, and deep technical expertise in the Drupal core issue queue make him ideally suited to the role of a provisional core release manager. Dave will collaborate with the core release management team (catch, xjm, and quietone) on Drupal core releases, and with the Drupal Security Team on keeping core secure.
Please join me in welcoming Dave to the committer team!
When working with open-source technologies and software, it is even more important to simplify the effort needed to read and understand your code. A good naming convention helps you solve larger problems rather than focusing on syntax and style preferences during code reviews. Seasoned developers understand the significance of well-written and organized code when working with larger websites with tons of style elements.
BEM (Block, Element, Modifier) methodology is a widely used naming convention for CSS classes that is gaining popularity because of the ease of use it offers. The fundamental concept of BEM is component-based web development. BEM makes interface development easy and fast, especially when you’re handling large projects with complex UI. Let’s explore more on BEM and how it can work with the Drupal Emulsify Twig module.
The BEM methodology was introduced to help make CSS classes easier to access, understand and scale. It can accelerate the development process and helps build reusable components.
BEM includes three parts:
Blocks are the outermost and functionally independent component and are reusable. Examples: header, footer, sidebar, menu, content, etc.
Elements are child items of a Block. Each element can have only one block and cannot be used outside of it. Examples: menu items, list items, input field, etc.
Icon Image
A class name through which you can define the appearance, state, or behavior of a block or element. Examples: red, large, disabled, fixed, etc.
Icon Image
1. Boolean
You can check the condition of the boolean value and set it in a variable. This variable can pass as a modifier value.
2. Key-value
The structure of the modifier's full name with key-value will follow one of these patterns:
There are different naming schemes. All schemes have some common rules like:
The classic naming scheme is the default naming scheme of BEM.
Block-name__elem-name_mod-name_mod-val
block-name__elem-name--mod-name--mod-val
blockName-elemName_modName_modVal
BlockName-ElemName_modName_modVal
In Drupal, we can use the BEM Twig function with the help of the Emulsify Twig module. The BEM function lets you create BEM classes on elements in the components. Below mentioned are some BEM Twig extensions and their usage.
This creates:
If you want to add multiple modifiers, you can do so using an array.
This creates:
This creates:
This creates:
This creates:
This creates:
The Add attributes Twig function allows you to add HTML attributes to the elements of your components. Take a look at some Add Attributes functions below:
{% set additional_attributes = {
"class": ["icon-button", "icon-button__title"]
} %}
{% set additional_attributes = {
"class": bem("icon", ["small", "red"], "icon-button"),
} %}
BEM methodology is extremely useful to developers who want to write and maintain better quality code that can be easy to be handed over and understood. Every element has a purpose which can be easily identified by its name and which block it is coming from. When used right, you will see that using BEM can boost development speed. If you liked what you read, sign up for our weekly newsletter where we'll send you fresh, piping-hot insight right to your inbox!
Author: Ravikant
Meet Ravikant Kumawat, a front-end developer who loves to keep up with the latest technologies. When not working, he dives into his books and fancies a great vacation with his family from the hills of Kashmir to the beaches of Kanyakumari. Also, Ravi can be a great bank for exclusive secrets!
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Upgrading the web presence of IEEE Information Theory Society, the most trusted voice for advanced technology
Great Southern Homes, one of the fastest growing home builders in the United States, sees greater results with Drupal 9
View all Case StudiesToday we are talking about CKEditor 5 with Wiktor Walc & Piotrek Koszuliński.
For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/372
TopicsWiktor Walc - ckeditor.com @w_walc Piotrek Koszuliński - ckeditor.com @reinmarpl
HostsNic Laflin - www.nLighteneddevelopment.com @nicxvan John Picozzi - www.epam.com @johnpicozzi Randy Oest - randyoest.com @amazingrando
MOTW CorrespondentMartin Anderson-Clutz - @mandclu Metatag
Previously discussed in episodes: 70 as MOTW (8y ago!) and mentioned in 31, 46, 137. And 185 Brief description: Allows your Drupal site to provide meta tags on content to implement SEO best practices and maximize online findability Brief history
Over the past few months, I've fielded a lot of minor styling requests, and as I work through each problem, I've almost always ended up with substantially less code than was there before. When I look through our portfolio of sites, most of them use tons of CSS to style all the various parts of a site -- and in many cases, the same styling reappears a bunch of different places. This leads to inconsistent styling, slow page loads, and more effort needed to make minor changes.