Component-based web development has become the de facto approach for new Drupal projects. Componentizing your UI has multiple advantages, like modular development, improved automated testing, easier maintenance, code reusability, better collaboration, and more.

This is the first episode of Skills Upgrade, a Talking Drupal mini-series following the journey of a Drupal 7 developer learning Drupal 10.

• Chad and Mike's first meeting
• Chad's Background
• Chad's goals
• Tasks for the week

Chad's Drupal 10 Learning Curriclum & Journal Chad's Drupal 10 Learning Notes

AmyJune Hineline - @volkswagenchick

Chad Hester - chadkhester.com @chadkhest Mike Anello - DrupalEasy.com @ultamike

Authored by: Nadiia Nykolaichuk.

Managing customer interactions touches on many aspects. Luckily, instead of using endless spreadsheets, notes, emails, chats, and form fills, you can rely on just one application — a CRM, or customer management system. A CRM will help you easily consolidate, manage, track, and analyze all customer interactions at every step of their journey throughout your sales funnel. 

Wanting to follow up on our work at MidCamp 2023 with the Development Settings form, Mike Herchel wanted to jam on another issue to improve the life of frontend developers. Drupal provides a way to generate themes from starterkit themes. Drupal core provides the Starterkit theme, and contributed themes can also mark themselves as a starterkit theme. All a theme has to do is have starterkit: true in their info.yml file. And that's it! Optionally, a specifically named PHP file can be provided in the theme for specific processing to finish generating the new theme. Unfortunately, the experience of creating starterkit themes currently involves writing a lot of PHP code to make the required file alterations.

To give users a true power tool in their daily work, the most important thing is, that editors must be able to see at all times, what their content will look like in real life. At the same time, the interface must be intuitive and easy to understand.

blökkli offers exactly that. The content looks exactly as it will ultimately appear on the website. With a click on the respective sections, they can be edited and improved immediately.

Liip developed the blökkli editor for the relaunch of bs.ch, the website of the Canton of Basel-Stadt, and published it as an open-source project.

Live editing of the site

In the blökkli editor, editors can place the page sections directly on the page using drag & drop and insert the content. You can immediately see what the content looks like.
To change a title, simply click on it and change the text.

In addition, the editor offers many functions that support the content creation and editing process. Images can be inserted directly from the computer, a mobile preview can be displayed or accessed directly via a QR code on the smartphone.
In addition, a search function can be used to link directly to other pages or insert images and documents.

There is also a function for viewing a live preview on the smartphone. This can be opened via a QR code and dynamically displays the current status of the page.

Flexible and clear design options

The appearance of the page sections can be changed directly in the page. This makes it easy for editors to design versatile pages and see directly how they look. The display follows the defined design, but at the same time offers editors the flexibility to design their content in a visually appealing way.

In many page builders or editors currently available on the market, users have too many options. They can change colors and font sizes, which unfortunately often leads to content becoming confusing or even illegible. blökkli solves this problem with pre-defined design options that are easy to find. This gives editors flexibility, but the content is still consistent and fits the brand.

blökkli also supports drag & drop of images. Images can therefore simply be dragged into the page and are placed directly in the content. In addition, links (for example to YouTube) can be inserted directly. blökkli recognizes these and embeds the corresponding content directly into the page.

Efficient team processes and easy onboarding of new users

With its comment function, the blökkli editor offers an optimal basis when content is edited by multiple people. blökkli also offers a visual timeline that allows the last changes to be undone.

For websites with many editors, it is always a challenge to introduce new people to a system. At blökkli, the most important functions are explained interactively with a 'tour'. This helps editors to quickly find their way around and reduce their anxiety.
Numerous keyboard shortcuts are available for editors who frequently edit content on the site. This makes work even faster and more intuitive.

Compatible with Drupal and any other CMS

blökkli already works excellently with the open-source CMS Drupal. The Paragraphs blökkli module is available for Drupal. Based on Nuxt.js, however, blökkli can be used with any CMS system if an appropriate adapter is available.

Try it yourself!

You can try blökkli yourself on the website:
https://blokk.li/

Today we are talking about the cost around Drupal, common misconceptions, and how you get what you pay for with guest Jeff Robbins. We’ll also cover Module Instructions as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/440

• What is new!
• How did you get started with Drupal
• Selling Drupal and the cost
• How much is the technology vs the complexity of projects that lend themselves to Drupal
• Value of Drupal
• What can the Drupal community do to make it more widely attractive
• Versionless Drupal marketing

• Drupal.org README.md Documentation
• Drupal versioning discussion
• Talking Drupal #390 - Employee Owned Companies
• Talking Drupal #429 - The Drupal Association Board
• Talking Drupal #439 - Drupal 7 Long-Term Support
• Visibox
• Jeff Robbins
• MySQL
• PHP

Jeff Robbins - jjeff.com jjeff

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Ivan Stegic - ten7.com ivanstegic

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to have easy access to the README, CHANGELOG, and INSTALL files for the contrib modules on your Drupal site? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Module Instructions
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2012 by Ales Rebec of Slovenia
  • Versions available: 7.x-1.0 and 2.0.3 versions available, the latter of which works with Drupal 9 and 10
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained?
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: 4 open issues, none of which are bugs against the 2.0.x branch
• Usage stats:
  • 1,238 sites
• Maintainer(s):
  • Current maintainer of the 2.0.x branch is Viktor Holovachek a.k.a Aston Victor of the Ukraine Drupal Community
• Module features and usage
  • The usage of the module is pretty straightforward. Once the module is installed, anyone who has access to the Modules page on a Drupal site will see links on that page to any README, CHANGELOG, or INSTALL files that are available for the contrib modules in the codebase
  • It also provides a cron job and drush command to generate the links, stored in the site state, so the application isn’t doing all the work of parsing through all your contrib modules looking for the files every time someone wants to load the Modules page
  • It does override the template for the module page to add those links, so be aware that if you’re doing something very custom and have overridden that template in something like a custom admin theme, you may need to manually add some extra markup to see the links
  • The module does also define new permissions, to manage the settings for these links, or to view them
  • The settings really consist of specifying which of the links you want to appear, if the relevant files are available. By default it will show all three, but you could, for example, only have it show README links

We have made a recent update on drupal.org that you haven’t probably noticed. In fact, although it's a meaningful and important section, I bet you have not seen it in months or even years. It's something you would have only seen when you registered on Drupal.org for the first time. I’m talking about the welcome email for new registered users.

One of the goals we have had recently is improving the way our users register and interact with drupal.org for the first time. Improvements to onboarding should improve what I call the long tail of the (Open Source) contribution pipeline (a concept, the long tail of contribution, that I will explain further in the next few days).

For now, let’s have a look at one of the first things new users in our community saw first:

This is what I called the huge wall of text. Do you remember seeing it for the first time? Did you read any of it at all? Do you remember anything important in that email? Or did you just mark it read and move on?

Fortunately, we've taken a first, incremental step to make improvements. As I said before, this isn't something our existing userbase will see, but the new welcome email to Drupal.org has changed and been simplified quite a bit. Here is the new welcome email:

We have replaced a lot of the wall of text with a simpler set of sections and links, and landing pages on drupal.org. This simplifies the welcome email, but is also going to allow us to track which links are most useful to new users, how many pages they visit on drupal.org, where do they get stuck, what interests them most, etc - and use that to make further refinements over time.

The other section I wanted to include is something that is very important for the Drupal Association, but also for the whole community. I wanted to highlight the contribution area, something that was not even mentioned in the old email. Our hope is this is an opportunity to foster and promote contribution from new users.

A few weeks ago I also launched a poll around contribution. This poll combined with the updates on these few changes in the user registration are aimed towards the same goal: improving contribution onboarding. You can still participate if you’d like to, just visit https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XRTNNM3

Now, if you are curious about what I am calling the long tail of the contribution pipeline, watch this space.