Gizra.com: How We Made Drupal Starter 2X Faster for Authenticated Users

Drupal is usually perceived as a slow system, at least compared with frameworks like Laravel or Symfony. It is not that Drupal is slow, but that it does many things, usually very important, than a regular PHP framework. This is why a good use of caching is crucial. Caching reduces the time it takes to generate and deliver web pages by storing frequently accessed data in a temporary storage area. This leads to faster page load times and a smoother user experience.

Drupal Association blog: Drupal GAAD Pledge 2024 Update

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

Drupal has built a reputation around being standards compliant and accessible. Drupal made an early commitment to meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines when building Drupal 7. In Drupal 8 this was expanded to support the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. Both times the release was delayed to help make it more accessible. The Drupal community is always working to be more inclusive, and accessibility is a big part of this. 

The GAAD Foundation nominated Drupal for the 2022 GAAD Pledge. Accessibility is a cornerstone of quality open source projects. Other winners have included OpenFL, EmberJS, React Native, and most recently Joomla! 

The GAAD Pledge committed projects to formally update their guidelines to WCAG 2.1. Drupal is currently developing to WCAG 2.2 AA, which is the latest W3C WCAG Recommendation. 

We have published a draft Accessibility Coding Standards, and we are still working to enhance this guidance. The Accessibility Team has documented many of the best practices that we have built into Drupal. Our Accessibility Coding Standard document has been useful in educating our community about best practices.

We have been tracking accessibility issues in Drupal Core and Contrib (themes and modules) under the accessibility tag. This is already a long-standing practice, and we have a total of 1063 open issues in our issue queue. If we look just at Drupal 11 accessibility bugs, there are 510. For Drupal Core, this includes known accessibility issues, but also issues which could affect accessibility. Bringing it down to those which have been tagged against a WCAG SC, there are only 188 issues. Even these issues are mostly edge cases which do not affect most users. 

These are still too many errors, but it is about proving progress, over perfection. Drupal is still evolving, as our Starshot project demonstrates. Our community is constantly striving to improve the user, developer and author experience. 

Let’s reach for the stars and bring the Open Web to all.
    — Dries Buytaert, creator and project lead of Drupal

The WCAG Success Criteria (SC) which fail most often in Drupal are: 

This has also helped us create an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) using the US General Service Administration’s OpenACR. Our current process is outlined Drupal and ACRs. 

We always need more members of the Drupal community to become involved. The earlier we catch accessibility issues, the cheaper it will be to fix them, and the more robust our solutions will become.  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. 

DrupalEasy: Drupal needs new, young developers

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Image used with permission from Michael Richardson from Ironstar.io.

I took a lot away from DrupalCon Portland 2024, and while one of my lasting memories from the main keynote (the Driesnote) will be the introduction of Starshot, something that has occupied a good amount of space in my brain is what happened just prior to Dries’ Starshot announcement.

At the start of his presentation (the 21:15 mark of this video,) Dries asks everyone with at least one year of Drupal experience to stand up. He then asked everyone with less than three years of experience with Drupal to sit down. The results were scary. As Dries reacted:

Oh wow. Almost nobody sat down.

This really shouldn't surprise anyone who has been developing Drupal sites for more than a few years. Drupal 8+ (modern Drupal) was considerably more difficult to get started with, and definitely geared toward more experienced developers.

Another data point

The 2024 Drupal Developer Survey results were recently announced (thanks to Ironstar.io for the huge effort in making this happen) and while there's a ton of great data in there, I'd like to focus on the Age and Experience section, which shows that only 9.1% of the 648 respondents were under the age of 30, with no respondents under the age of 21 (insert standard disclaimer about survey size and sample and this not necessarily being a scientific survey.) This is troublesome.

Maybe we shouldn't be focusing on age, but rather experience. However; the How long have you been working with Drupal question results didn't make me feel any better. Only 9.6% of the respondents have been working with Drupal for less than 4 years. Yikes.

Is this as scary as it looks?

I really don't know the answer to this question. Both of the data points listed above are somewhat anecdotal. The first can be mitigated by the fact that you're probably much less likely to attend a DrupalCon if you're new to Drupal. The second can be accounted for by the assumption that only folks who are experienced enough with Drupal to be on the right mailing lists and/or follow the right social media accounts would know about the survey in the first place.

All that being said, I don't think the trend that the data is showing us is wrong: Clearly Drupal needs new developers.

What's the solution?

Obviously, there's not a single solution. I think there are a few things that we (yes you,) the Drupal community, can do to help entice new developers to Drupal.

  1. Keep Drupal's code modern - we do a pretty good job of this, but we can definitely do better by better integrating with front-end developer/designer tools like Storybook and whatever the cool Javascript front-end tools are this month (mostly kidding, of course.) These efforts are critical, but these types of solutions tend to be longer-term.
  2. Get more people using Drupal - the more people using Drupal, the more likely they'll become invested in the platform and likely to become full-time Drupal developers. We don't need to convert all Drupal users to developers, just a portion. Clearly, Drupal Starshot is a well-placed effort to do this, but again, I think it'll be a bit of time before this has a significant effect.
  3. Create programs that introduce Drupal to students - as a Drupal trainer who is active in the community, I've heard about a few attempts at this in local communities, but nothing at scale. This is definitely a long-term goal, and will take time, money and leadership from the Drupal Association, including a hopefully re-imagined and more ambitious Discover Drupal program. 
  4. Entice organizations that build Drupal sites to hire new developers - Money (in this case job opportunities) talks. If there are entry-level jobs in Drupal, then new developers will come. Of course, there are plenty of jobs in Drupal, but not the kind of entry level positions that are going to provide an on-ramp for aspiring Drupal developers. If jobs for those new to Drupal aren't there, then the effect of the first two items above will be muted. There is an exciting, thoughtful short-term solution to this called the Drupal IXP community initiative, which will (hopefully later this year) begin to incentivize organizations to hire new, inexperienced ("IXP") Drupal developers in exchange for Drupal community contribution credits. You can get involved with IXP today by completing this survey to help us figure out which skills a new Drupal developer should have (survey closes June 1, 2024). 
  5. Attract good Drupal developer candidates with a leg up  - Companies (like Palantir.net,)  who have become involved in scholarship programs, including (the currently dormant) Discover Drupal (which aimed to not just build the Drupal talent pool, but do it with an eye toward diversifying our ranks,) and providing their own training scholarships, initiating internship programs and providing mentors for newbies have had success in building their talent benches over time by training up the people that are a good fit their organizations. It takes a bit of investment and patience, but the returns are usually worth it.  

How can you help?

If this nagging issue of too few new Drupal developers is becoming a growing concern for you, like it is for me; then perhaps you’d like to get involved in one of the above efforts to help move things forward and, maybe even spread the word to help inspire others to get involved as well.   

The Drop Times: Enhancing Drupal 11: Transitioning Deprecated Modules to Contributed Alternatives

Drupal 11 will remove several deprecated modules from its core, including Actions UI, Activity Tracker, Book, Forum, Statistics, and Tour. These functionalities remain accessible through contributed modules, ensuring a leaner, more efficient core while allowing community-driven enhancements. Site owners should review dependencies and install necessary modules for seamless migration to Drupal 11.

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: Acquia SEO Content Insights powered by Conductor

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Acquia’s partnership with Conductor marks another milestone in our journey to deliver the best-of-breed digital experiences for our customers. The collaboration between Conductor and Acquia will concentrate on incorporating the advanced SEO insights of Conductor's premier organic marketing platform into both Acquia's Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and its Drupal CMS. 

As part of this partnership, Acquia has developed a new Drupal module called Acquia SEO Content Insights powered by Conductor. Creating compelling content requires leveraging SEO insights and content intelligence, and the subsequent publishing and administration of this content are contingent upon a strong content management system (CMS). 

The Drop Times: Acquia Engage London 2024: Insights from Featured Speakers

Experience the vibrancy of Acquia Engage London, where digital innovation converges with industry expertise. From May 21-22, this dynamic event heralds the European debut of the 2024 Digital Freedom Tour, sparking conversations on transforming customer experiences. In our article, delve into exclusive insights from industry leaders like Tom Bianchi and Deanna Ballew from Acquia. Explore the diverse agenda, featuring tailored sessions at the Partner Summit, hands-on workshops for Drupal developers and Acquia users, and a rich lineup of keynote speeches and breakout sessions led by esteemed experts and practitioners. Get ready to be inspired, informed, and empowered at Acquia Engage London!

Specbee: Starstruck by the Drupal Starshot Initiative

DrupalCon Portland ‘24 seemed to fly by, but its impact was so profound and memorable that every Drupal community member will remember this for a long, long time. Last week, Specbee proudly sponsored and hosted a booth at DrupalCon Portland '24. Our VP of Sales and Marketing, Jim Barnthouse, and Head of Operations, Michael Weaver, attended. Before Michael left, he asked if I had any questions for Dries (if he got a chance to talk to him, which he did by the way). I had a question about the future of Drupal. I wanted to know how Drupal plans to compete with other competitors like WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager, and Sitecore. As it turned out, Dries already had everything figured out! And in his Driesnote, he dropped the announcement of the Drupal Starshot initiative. While watching Driesnote, I was fascinated by the fact that Drupal predates a lot of prominent applications like Safari, Instagram, & WordPress. This makes Drupal special since it has been around for a whopping 23 years. But the innovation has never stopped. From the adoption of Symfony components to build Drupal 8 to supporting OpenAI within months of its release. This constant strive for innovation makes Drupal a great CMS. All thanks to the contributions and efforts of thousands of dedicated people, making Drupal better every day. What is Drupal Starshot? Since its inception, Drupal has been pitched as a CMS that can build web applications using various core components and contributed modules. Often while building a Drupal website, we need various features like setting up patterns for clean URLs for the contents, adding meta information, spam protection, a form-building UI, etc. The Drupal Starshot initiative aims to be the new default Drupal installer (maybe called as “Drupal CMS”) that will include these various common features packaged in it incorporating the best-used contributed projects and best practices. Apart from this, Starshot is also built on top of recent new Drupal initiatives like Project Browser, Automatic Updates & Recipes for faster innovation and execution. Drupal Starshot will introduce a new version of Drupal with great out-of-the-box experience. This doesn’t mean that Starshot will replace Drupal Core. The traditional Drupal core will still exist as it is for people to use and build applications with it. However, the “Drupal CMS” will be the recommended downloadable option over the traditional Drupal core to get started. Do we need Drupal Starshot? Drupal core provides a solid foundation for building a high-performance and innovative website. However, there is a steep learning curve when it comes to building a website using only Drupal Core. It often becomes overwhelming for new developers to get started because of the lack of certain general and common features in the strong foundational Drupal core. This significantly reduces the adoption and appeal of Drupal among beginners. Though this factor improves as people progress in the game and become more proficient, they learn how to leverage the different contributed modules and best practices to build a website using it. But still, this remains a downside factor for Drupal for new people coming in; the adoption and ease of use. To keep up with the highly competitive market of growing CMSes Drupal has to grow to compete with them. This is where the Drupal Starshot initiative comes in that aims to ensure that a strong foundational Drupal core, combined with the refined common features with contributed projects, utilizing the best practices in the industry and new innovative initiatives, is easy to use out-of-the-box and make a lasting first impression on people who are trying it out for the first time. Drupal Starshot Highlights A recommended Drupal CMS The recommended option to get started with the “Drupal CMS” will come packaged with default and pre-configured modules and configuration for basic setup of functionalities. This can include: Drupal SEO functionalities like Pathauto for pretty URLs of contents, Metatag to add meta information for pages, and XML Sitemaps Content authoring features like the Linkit module that provides an autocomplete interface for internal and external linking in rich-text editors Content schedulers to schedule publishing and unpublished contents Improving the authoring experience by adding Simple Add More or Type Tray A further improved administrative theme like Gin Spam protection using Honeypot or ReCaptcha These modules can highly improve the out-of-the-box experience of a user to start building websites using Drupal. This significantly decreases the development time and cost to launch a Drupal website. Not another Drupal distribution Starshot is NOT another Drupal distribution or an installation profile. Although Drupal distributions are a great starting point for building a Drupal website for a purpose, there were certain challenges that came along with it. For example, they are difficult to keep updated, can’t be removed easily, and cannot be added after starting your project. To overcome this, the Drupal Recipes initiative was introduced to developers & site builders to incorporate Drupal functionality from predefined packages quickly and easily that can be added at any point of a project lifecycle. Starshot will be built using Recipes that provide more flexibility and robustness to the Drupal CMS including various functionalities using contributed projects. Using recipes doesn’t lock you in like a distribution does. So, users will have the liberty to choose and include the functionalities that are required for a project. Experience Builder The “Experience Builder” is the new initiative to further enhance the page-building capabilities of Drupal replacing the Layout Builder page builder. The out-of-the-box experience of the page builder that Drupal core provides that is the Layout Builder lacks heavily in the authoring experience. Though it can be improved, it requires several modules and tweaks to make it user-friendly. This poses a huge bottleneck for the adoption of Drupal. The new Experience Builder addresses this issue by stitching in the best of Layout Builder, Paragraphs, In-Browser theming & SDC (Single Directory Component) with a JavaScript framework like React to provide a seamless experience for authors and site builders to build landing pages. Future of Drupal With the announcement of Starshot, Drupal cements its place to compete with the big names in the marketplace, making it easy to adopt and build beautiful web applications. This is definitely a big initiative that will change the paradigm of how Drupal is being seen and utilized. Since Starshot is not tied to the Drupal core release cycle it opens up opportunities for faster innovation and new features incorporating contributed projects to release more often. New to Drupal? Check out this article to help you decode some of the Drupal jargon we have used in this article (like recipes, distributions, SDC). Final Thoughts Dries made a great point in his Driesnote: if we want to be a part of the web race, which is going to happen anyway with or without Drupal, we need our Moonshot moment. And that moment is now. Drupal needs your help in bringing this initiative to life. Specbee has pledged to contribute to the Starshot initiative as much as possible to reach its goal. You can do so too by taking the Starshot pledge here.
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