DDEV Blog: DDEV 2025 Plans

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Every year we try to clarify goals early, and here we go for 2025! We'd love to have your thoughts and opinions! Some of the things we planned in 2024 aren't quite done yet, but we're working and planning and responding to your needs.

At the DDEV Advisory Group's 2-hour annual review/planning meeting on March 4, 2025, we'll talk about plans and priorities for 2025. You are invited!

We'd love to have your input as daily users as we work through these this month.

(I expect to edit this blog post several times as people express their opinions.)

Community

  • Continue outstanding user support even with growth of our user base. This remains a key priority from last year, but we still need to involve the entire community (meaning you!) in all the places.
  • Begin formal governance for the DDEV Foundation. We've been talking about this in the Advisory Group for years, but this year I'll propose a 3-person board for the DDEV Foundation, where I retain operational control, but we have at least one other board member fully enabled on financial controls and payments. Future years can bring future refinements.

Sustainability and Finance

  • Improve our Marketing CTA and information: The ddev.com "Support DDEV" page says lots of things, but the financial CTA gets lost there. We need to make it completely clear that for the project to be sustainable, the community will need to support the two developers who are working full-time on it, and make clear the many ways that this can be done.
  • Continue to develop contributors and maintainers: As the project grows, we need more skilled contributors and maintainers. (The only difference between those is that maintainers typically have a higher level of direct access to project resources, but as a wide-open source project, almost all interested contributors can accomplish almost anything without enhanced privileges.) In the last two years, we've had quite a lot of contributor trainings, and anecdotes indicate that people are using those recordings and blogs for training, but the actual attendance at them was not impressive. I'm thinking that this year these topics should probably be addressed with screenshare recordings and updated blogs instead of calendar-scheduled events. Given the financial struggles in our contributors' world, I doubt that we'll be able to add paid maintainers in 2025, I'm most interested right now in the reasonable goal of retaining and paying the two amazing maintainers we currently have.

Features and Initiatives

Funded and Work-In-Progress Initiatives

Proposed Features and Initiatives

  1. Implement mDNS as an alternate name resolution technique in addition to DNS and hosts file manipulation. Our traditional use of DNS and hosts-file manipulation have been successful, but mDNS might allow avoiding hosts-file manipulation, especially with non-ddev.site URLs and when internet DNS is not available. This has been submitted for funding to the TYPO3 Community Q2 Community Budget Ideas
  2. Allow Add-ons to include other add-ons: Add-ons can already require other add-ons, but they should be able to automatically result in a download.
  3. Go-based Upsun Add-on like ddev-platformsh. (This would pioneer golang-based add-ons; Go is probably a much better language for complicated add-ons of this type.)
  4. Rewrite ddev-platformsh Add-on in Go: Assuming success of the Upsun add-on, it would be great to backport that work to ddev-platformsh. It's even possible that the two add-ons could be combined into one and maintained in one place.
  5. Develop a replacement for "Gitpod Classic", which has EOL in April, 2025. This may not need much more than improved GitHub Codespaces support, but we have loved Gitpod and hope to have something to replace it.
  6. Improve self-diagnose capability . We currently have ddev debug test but it would be great to implement something that was readable and actionable for ordinary mortals.
  7. DDEV's Message-of-the-day and ddev.com should show current funding status and need. We now have an automatically updated JSON feed that can make this possible.
  8. DDEV Windows/WSL2 packaging and installation: The traditional Windows installer needs work, and the WSL2 install scripts are written in hard-to-maintain PowerShell. This work can be consolidated and improved, including improving the Windows hosts-file escalation technique.
  9. Rewrite ddev launch in Golang instead of as script.
  10. Rework configuration system using Viper.

In addition to prioritizing these initiatives, we have applied to the Google Summer of Code, hoping that we can mentor contributors in that program and see work on one or more of these be successful through GSoC. We'll also be looking for community mentors (is that you?), and maybe some of you would like to sign up for being mentees via Google this summer!

Do you see other important things in the issue queue or elsewhere that are important to you? Are there frictions that impact your work that DDEV could fix? Please let us know.

We would dearly love to have your input on these as the planning process goes forward. You can respond so very many ways in all of the support venues.

Want to keep up as the month goes along? Follow us on

DDEV Blog: DDEV February 2025 Newsletter

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Happy February!

DDEV v1.24.2 was released with MySQL 8.4 support and improved ddev composer create making it nearly compatible with composer create-project.

DDEV Notes and News

Ongoing DDEV Work

  • Node.js improved support: People have asked for some time for Node.js to be the primary web server (instead of Nginx+php-fpm, etc), and now it can be done in a number of ways. This is now in DDEV HEAD and there are Quickstarts for Simple Node.js and SvelteKit. Incidentally, this also provides experimental support for FrankenPHP and provides a Quickstart for it as a demonstration of the "generic" web server type.
  • Web-based Add-on Registry: As add-ons have become so very popular it's hard to sort them out and understand which ones are meaningful for a particular need. This long-term goal is nearing completion as Stas has a proof of concept and now has to push it through to a maintained production status.
  • Automated Tests for Quickstarts: You won't see these, but it's a big step for us. Because our Quickstarts are so dependent on the behavior of the upstream projects, it's always been hard for us to know when the target project has had a change that invalidates them. Now we have automated tests for the quickstarts of number of project types, and will add others as maintenance is done. Thanks to Ralf Koller for extensive work on the Drupal, WordPress, and TYPO3 quickstarts.
  • Funding situation data feed: Aiming for ever-increasing transparency in the DDEV funding situation, we now have an automatically-updated feed showing our funding situation from all sources. You can see the exact situation at any time. We expect to use this feed in the message-of-the-day on DDEV, as well as ddev.com and the DDEV README.
  • New contributors and maintainers: As DDEV's community grows, we always need new contributors and maintainers. We love to get contributors trained and get privileges to maintainers as needed! We already have lots of Contributor Training material, and docs on how to contribute but we'll do anything you ask for! Need help with something? Need updates? Join us in Discord or make an appointment with me.

Funding DDEV and especially to help both maintainers go full-time on DDEV: We need your help and your organization's help! Let me know if you need help getting this into your 2025 budget! Our key financial goal is to fully fund @stasadev so he can work exclusively on DDEV. We've slipped back in recent months. We need about $3700/month in increased pledges from organizations and individuals. See Full information about supporting DDEV. We’re happy to invoice you, happy to do a call discussing this, and would love it if you’d include DDEV in your 2025 budgeting process. (Our current status: We receive about $3000/month, have been spending about $3000-$4000/month. Bank balance is about $6,000, down from $8,600 last month.)

THANKS to all of you who are supporting DDEV’s path to sustainability and who have gotten your organizations to do so.

Want to keep up as the month goes along? Follow on

Happy February from Randy Fay, DDEV Project Lead. It's a delight to collaborate with you!

Liip: See you at Drupal Mountain Camp 2025

Join us 11 - 13 March 2025 in Davos at Drupal Mountain Camp if you are interested in learning about Drupal CMS and how AI technology will shape the future of the open web.

Open Source on Top of the World

As a co-organizer I am particularly excited about the keynotes speakers of this year:

The program brings you a good variety of expertise, exchange opportunities and fun in the swiss mountains:

  • (Sunday - Monday: Pre-conference)
  • Tuesday 11th March: Workshops & Contribution, Business Talks, Keynotes, and Splash Awards Night
  • Wednesday 12th March: Keynotes, Sessions & Contribution then Social Event: Fondue & Sledding
  • Thursday 13th March: Keynotes, Sessions, Contribution and then Social Event

Liip is proud to participate in the program in various ways:

We expect more than 100 participants, with a good mix of folks from Switzerland and abroad.

Thanks to sponsors like agiledrop, amazee.io, varnish, Hostpoint, MD Systems, Happy Coding, soul.media, iqual, tag1, the 3 days conference is brought to you at a comparably low price, with tickets available for CHF 100 per ticket.

Celebrating the best Drupal projects in Switzerland

Nominees are just being selected and communicated for the Splash Awards Switzerland. The winning projects will be announced at the award ceremony Tuesday afternoon.

We are excited to be nominated with the following entries:

Drupal Mountain Camp wouldn’t be possible without a team of dedicated volunteers.

See you at drupalmountaincamp.ch.

Aten Design Group: Drupal 11 is Here! How to Approach an Upgrade

Drupal 11 is Here! How to Approach an Upgrade Image removed.jenna Thu, 02/06/2025 - 14:23 Drupal

Drupal 11 is here! In part one of this two-part blog series, I walked through its new features that will benefit developers and content editors alike. Now that we know what we have to look forward to, let’s talk about how and when to upgrade to Drupal 11. 

How to prepare for the upgrade process

While every Drupal site is unique and has its own requirements and complexities, I’m going to explain the general steps of a Drupal upgrade. And even though an upgrade from Drupal 10 to 11 is relatively less effort than going from Drupal 6 to 7, you still need to plan it out.

If you have a site that has a lot of contributed modules, modules that aren't well supported, or complicated custom modules, both planning the upgrade and actually doing the upgrade will take longer.

The Upgrade Status module will help with this process. With it you can assess if your modules have D11 versions, identify changes needed in custom code, and make recommendations on what to do with modules that lack D11 support. This is also a really great time to look at the modules you're using and identify any that can be removed or replaced with something newer.

How to perform the upgrades

Then you'll have to perform the upgrades. I wrote upgrades in plural here because I think it works best as a set of at least two upgrades, maybe more in some cases.

The first upgrade is to ensure that the new platform requirements are satisfied. This could mean some extra work if you're responsible for maintaining your web servers. So make sure you are aware of those.

It works well to first update your modules and test to make sure everything is working as expected. Module changes are where regressions or errors are going to come up. Upgrading those to versions that are compatible with both D10 and 11 will give you plenty of time to test and isolate variables. 

And then do a separate deployment to update Drupal core itself. This will depend heavily on the complexity of your code and operations, but I think it's reasonable to expect that the development timeline will be measured in hours to days.

If you have an e-commerce site where the risk and impact of downtime is high, or you have a super complicated custom codebase, it could take days, or even weeks. But if you have a very simple site, it could be done in an afternoon.

When you should upgrade to Drupal 11

The Drupal life cycle

So here we are in early 2025. Drupal 10.4 is out and is in “maintenance support,” which means that select changes from Drupal 11 will be backported down, but at this point Drupal 11 has development priority. Around the end of 2025, Drupal 10 will enter a period where it only receives security updates, and it will reach end of life in mid-2026 when Drupal 12 is released.

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What happens at Drupal end of life 

When any given Drupal version reaches end of life, your site will continue to function. It's not like a license that expires and suddenly your site stops working, but there are no more bug fixes to your installed Drupal core, and most critically there are no more security updates. Contributed module maintainers have focused on newer versions, so they're not really getting regular updates.

All of this means that upgrading later takes more effort because there's more and more that has to be addressed as time goes on.


Looking at Drupal 11

11.0 was released in summer of 2024, and Drupal 11 will be receiving active development support until around 2027, when it goes into maintenance support like I described earlier.

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Putting this together and adding in the Drupal 12 cycle, I think the second half of 2025 is going to be the right time for most people to upgrade to Drupal 11 with some caveats.

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For instance, if you have a simpler site and all of your contributed and custom modules are ready to run on Drupal 11, there's no harm in doing it sooner. But I think for most larger sites, it's best to let contributed modules catch up with Drupal 11 development, let some of the kinks get worked out in the community, and then upgrade.

Now that Drupal is on a more steady and predictable release schedule, we can start looking forward to new features in Drupal 12 in 2027.

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Wim Leers: XB week 23: PageTemplate

Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri and Jesse Baker fixed a funny bug: the component inputs form was unscrollable, which meant that using Experience Builder (XB) in small viewports (or with complex components that have many inputs), you just couldn’t reach them 😅🙈

Dave “longwave” Long and I simplified the way XB represents Component config entity IDs, a small next step towards supporting multiple component types. It will now feel more familiar for anybody used to dealing with Drupal’s configuration.

Ted “tedbow” Bowman and Dave introduced basic auto-saving (much future work left to be done):

Basic auto-saving in XB: navigating away and back does not lose changes the author made.
Issue #3478299, image by Dave.

The Drupal Association started defaulting to version 1.6.3 of the GitLab CI template on October 15, as they announced in GitLab CI templates will make Drupal 11 the default version to run back in August. Cool! Except … any contrib module with more complex testing needs will have customized the CI, and that was now automatically broken too, because the 1.6.x CI template changed CI job names 😬
Yay for versioning, because Dave fixed this by simply pinning XB’s CI template to extend the 1.5.x one instead.

Some minor bug fixes by Atul “soaratul” Dubey and Travis Carden also landed.

Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.

Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!

For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!

This week’s big leap forward was led by yours truly 1 (and reviewed by Dave) to pave the path towards XB product requirement 19. Modify the page template (i.e. global sections), which Lauri “lauriiii” Timmanee captured as:

As a builder, I want to modify the page template (i.e. page.html.twig). When I modify the page template, I can place components globally to global regions like navigation, header, footer, etc.

In other words: the ability to not use Drupal core’s existing “Block Layout” (/admin/structure/block) functionality, but to instead use XB to achieve the same.

That will mean not using Drupal’s default page variant (BlockPageVariant), but an XB-provided one.
Fun fact: I helped a decade ago to finalize exactly this infrastructure ahead of Drupal 8’s release,  created the official Drupal 8 render pipeline diagram, and talked about it! The part XB will be using for this functionality is RenderEvents::SELECT_PAGE_DISPLAY_VARIANT 🤓

XB needs to know what component tree to show in each theme region, so those need to be stored somewhere. For that, I introduced the PageTemplate config entity, which:

  • exists 1:1 per theme (so: one such config entity per installed theme)
  • can store multiple component trees (one per theme region)
  • is thoroughly validated:
    • every region must be have a component tree in the config entity (or be null if it’s empty)
    • every of the 3 special blocks must be present exactly once:
      • a block that implements MainContentBlockPluginInterface — to display the result of the matched route’s controller
      • one that implements TitleBlockPluginInterface — to display the title returned by that same controller
      • and finally, a MessagesBlockPluginInterface one — to display messages
    • plus more details 2
  • is used by XB’s new PageTemplateDisplayVariant to render the stored component trees.

It leaps ahead of where the rest of the XB codebase is at, because it assumes there’ll be Block-sourced components, whereas currently XB only supports SDC-sourced components! And that’s where the path that we paved last week (and improved this week) already is being trodden! 🥳

That’s how I was able to write a test that proves in <100 LoC that XB’s page variant works as expected, despite a lot of other infrastructure not yet existing. Hence I was confident that the rest of the team could build all the necessary UI pieces and blocks-as-components infrastructure while I’d be out! 😊

Week 23 was October 14–October 20, 2024.

  • 1

    I was trying to get ahead of the rest of the team in anticipation of my upcoming paternity leave, little did I know it’d already be next week 😅

  • 2

    Full detail in the config schema if you’re interested!

The Drop Times: Making the World Take Notice of Drupal Through Innovation: Owen Lansbury

Owen Lansbury, Chair of the Drupal Association Board and Founder of PreviousNext, discusses the challenges and opportunities shaping Drupal’s future. In this interview with Alka Elizabeth from The DropTimes, he highlights the importance of contribution, the role of the Drupal Certified Partner program, and the financial sustainability of open source. He also shares insights on community-driven initiatives like DrupalSouth and the need for businesses to invest in Drupal’s long-term success.

Golems GABB: Containerization and DevOps: with Docker and Kubernetes

Containerization and DevOps: with Docker and Kubernetes Editor Fri, 02/07/2025 - 09:47

Drupal is a great development system, but it needs extra solutions for certain tasks. Docker and Kubernetes are powerful tools that help with automation. You can use them for various purposes, including testing, development, deployment, and managing web applications in production.
If you want to improve DevOps through automation, these two tools will be very useful in reaching your goals. The world of DevOps is changing fast, which is why automation and integration are crucial for high efficiency and scalability. 
Today, the Golems Drupal development team will look into DevOps automation and deployment using Docker and Kubernetes.

Drupal Starshot blog: Join us at DrupalCon Atlanta for all things Drupal CMS

Drupal CMS 1.0 was released on January 15. People at 65+ parties celebrated around the globe in Milan (Italy), Zaragoza (Spain), Delhi (India), Lutsk (Ukraine), Bogota (Columbia), Boston (USA), Budapest (Hungary) just to name a few locations. More than 700 people celebrated on the online Zoom party. But what's next?

Join us at DrupalCon Atlanta for two keynotes, more than 20 sessions, contribution opportunities, a dedicated training and even a game show providing deeper insights into Drupal CMS! And this is just a slice of the whole conference!

Two Drupal CMS keynotes and an overview session

  • The Driesnote on Tuesday provides a premier look at the latest developments and future plans of Drupal CMS, including updates on Experience Builder.
  • Wednesday afternoon the Drupal CMS Spotlights keynote (page to come) will feature key leaders providing in-depth looks at their respective areas from AI site building through user experience, documentation and of course Experience Builder.
  • Drupal CMS Product Lead Pamela Barone and UX Lead Cristina Chumillas will present Drupal CMS now and beyond to review the roadmap we went on so far and what is ahead.

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Experience Builder sessions

A huge part of Drupal CMS will be Experience Builder (XB). Coming later this year, there is a lot to cover.

Drupal CMS AI sessions

Sessions on even more building blocks of Drupal CMS

Drupal CMS research insights

What Do Marketers Really Want? Unpacking the User Research for Drupal CMS with Bruna Siqueira-Davis and Suzanne Dergacheva will cover the research they did with volunteers on CMS users across platforms and industries. The findings provide insights into the priorities, frustrations, and opportunities that inform how marketers select and use CMS platforms, and specifically what we should prioritize when designing Drupal CMS for marketers. 

Drupal CMS at summits and trainings

DrupalEasy is running a Drupal CMS Preview training to provide a hands-on introduction to some of its key features, including installation, Project Browser, recipes, AI integration, and Experience Builder. The agenda includes demos, practical exercises, and a developer Q&A, helping attendees gain confidence in launching future Drupal CMS sites.

Emma Horrell from the Drupal CMS UX team will also present at the Non-Profit Summit. 

Drupal CMS Game Show!

Drupal CMS: The Exciting Parts lead by Steve Persch is promising to be a fun "part panel discussion, part game show". If you've been to any of Steve's sessions before, you know this will be good.

Drupal CMS contribution

Last but definitely not least, teams, tracks and initiatives coming together in Drupal CMS will represent at the contribution events at DrupalCon Atlanta. Meet throughout the week at Birds of a Feather discussions about ongoing work and join in at the General Contribution area especially, but not only on the last day. See you there! Not too late to get your ticket!

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