The Drupal community has taken another step forward under the Starshot Initiative. Recently, the team concluded a survey aimed at pinpointing the most desired out-of-the-box features and contributed modules for the upcoming ‘Drupal CMS’. This survey targeted ambitious marketers as part of the broader Drupal Starshot strategy, resulting in 60 detailed submissions and over 100 feature suggestions. These insights, now available on Drupal.org thanks to Pamela Barone's announcement, will play a crucial role in shaping the platform’s future.

The feedback received from the survey highlights a strong community interest in several key areas. Among the most frequently mentioned were enhancements to page-building tools, SEO capabilities, improved form builders, and content management functionalities. The desire for better security, media management, and multilingual support also stood out as significant themes. Interestingly, while many of these suggestions align with existing development initiatives, the survey also introduced several fresh ideas that are now under consideration by the Drupal leadership team.

Particularly noteworthy are the suggestions for modules that could elevate Drupal’s out-of-the-box experience. Modules like Metatag, Webform, and Admin Toolbar were repeatedly mentioned and are now being evaluated for possible inclusion in future releases. These modules, known for their functionality and ease of use, could significantly enhance the user experience if integrated into the out-of-the-box Drupal CMS offering.

While the survey is not being treated as a direct vote, it serves as a powerful validation tool. The results ensure that the Drupal development tracks are closely aligned with the needs and expectations of its community. As the leadership team assesses these suggestions, they are keenly aware of the balance between innovation and the consistency of user experience that Drupal is known for.

Curious about the detailed findings and how they might shape the next generation of Drupal? You can dive deeper into the survey results here: Community Demands Enhanced Out-of-the-Box Features in DrupalCMS. As the Starshot Initiative continues to gather momentum, the community eagerly awaits the next steps in this exciting journey.

As we turn our attention to the latest from The Drop Times, the focus has been on the ongoing Drupal Association Board Elections. As part of their "Meet the Candidate" campaign, several candidates have shared their visions and plans for Drupal's future.

Matthew Saunders discusses his candidacy in an interview with Alka Elizabeth, a sub-editor at The Drop Times. Focusing on improving governance, fostering inclusivity, and supporting neurodiverse individuals, Matthew outlines his motivations for running for the Drupal Association Board. His ideas provide valuable insights for voters as the election progresses.

Kevin Quillen, Practice Lead at Velir, brings over 16 years of experience to his candidacy. In his interview with Alka Elizabeth, Kevin emphasizes the importance of modernizing Drupal.org, attracting new developers, and enhancing Drupal's global appeal. His vision for the future could significantly impact the platform’s evolution.

Albert Hughes, Product Owner at Stanford University, offers a unique perspective on expanding Drupal’s reach. His candidacy is grounded in his diverse experiences and a strong commitment to innovation. As the election continues, Albert’s ideas for growth and development resonate with many in the community.

In the final installment of The Drop Times' campaign, Alejandro Moreno Lopez, Partner Manager and Developer Relations at Pantheon, shares his journey within the Drupal community. Alejandro is passionate about reducing the Association's dependency on DrupalCon and fostering collaboration and innovation. His interview provides a compelling case for his candidacy as voting continues until September 5th.

Discover why Drupal's latest product will be called 'Drupal CMS' and not just 'Drupal.' An insightful article authored by Sebin A Jacob, Editor-in-Chief of The Drop Times, explore the strategic decision-making, community feedback, and future implications behind this significant naming shift that redefines the way we think about Drupal's evolution. 

The Drupal Decoupled project, also known as headless Drupal, has introduced a new feature to simplify the adoption and implementation of decoupled architecture. This project, which separates the back-end content management from the front-end display, now leverages "Recipes" and can be easily adopted as a Composer Project Template. Jesús Manuel Olivas, Co-Founder and CEO of Octahedroid and Composabase, recently announced this update.

Morpht has launched its "Content Recommendation Playbook," showcasing how personalized content recommendations using Recombee's service can enhance user experiences. The playbook explains how to integrate these systems into Drupal and GovCMS to deliver tailored content based on user behavior, boosting engagement. 

During DrupalCon Portland 2022, concerns over the sustainability of free software led to the conception of Drupal Forge, a platform aimed at financially supporting project maintainers. The idea, sparked by Webform developer Jacob Rockowitz, was further developed by Darren Oh, who proposed adding a launch button for trial sites on project pages to generate recurring revenue. While the initiative has garnered interest, challenges remain in implementing and scaling this solution.

Sponsorship opportunities for BADCamp 2024, set for October 24-25 in Oakland, California, are now open, offering extensive visibility to organizations within the Drupal community. With packages ranging from $1,000 to $2,000, sponsors can gain exposure through speaking engagements, branding at summits, and hosting social events.

Chattanooga Open Source Camp, featuring DrupalCamp Chattanooga 2024, seeks sponsors for its November 2nd event at Chattanooga State Community College. Sponsorships range from $20 to $2,000, offering opportunities for businesses to gain visibility within the tech community. In-kind sponsorships are also welcomed, with a total event budget of $6,500.

The Drop Times has been named the official Media Partner for DrupalCamp Pune 2024, set for October 19-20 at Yashada, Pune. This partnership will ensure comprehensive coverage of the event, featuring sessions, workshops, and keynotes from industry leaders. Organized by the Drupalers Association Pune, the camp aims to foster innovation, learning, and networking within the Drupal community.

The Splash Awards will debut in Asia during DrupalCon Singapore 2024, with submissions open until September 27. The prestigious event, recognizing excellence in Drupal web development, will culminate in a ceremony on December 9 at the Garden Ballroom, PARKROYAL Collection Marina Bay.

The Drupal CEO Network and the Drupal Association have extended the deadline for the 2024 Drupal Business Survey to September 4th. This annual survey gathers crucial insights from Drupal business leaders, shaping an anonymized industry report to guide strategic decisions. The results will be unveiled at DrupalCon Barcelona 2024, with discussions set for September 25 and 26.

The Aten Design Group will host an online session on August 28, 2024, at 2:00 PM EDT to discuss the recent release of Drupal 11. Seth Hill, Senior Developer at Aten, will lead the session designed for Drupal site owners, content administrators, and developers who want to learn more about the new version and its potential benefits.

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also, join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you,
Sincerely
Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

Talking to Preston So is easy. 

I was nervous before our conversation simply because on paper there are things about the man that are frankly intimidating. Author of Content Strategy for Mobile Karen McGrane named Preston “the smartest guy in the field” in 2024. He was called “probably the smartest person working in this industry right now” by Deane Barker, author of Web Content Management. 

But Preston So one-on-one is so personable, so engaging, that he instantly put me at ease. We talked about some aspects of his life and career, his experiences working in Drupal and other content management systems, what his keynote will be about, as well as his love of travel and learning languages.

Preston, you work at dotCMS. Can you talk a bit about what your job is and what it is you're doing?

Many of the folks who know me from the Drupal world are probably a little surprised to see that I've gone over to a Java-based CMS. But I used to work at Oracle also, which was a Java-based CMS. I don't really have a lot of opinions about Java versus PHP, but I know there's some strong opinions on both sides.

But dotCMS is really interesting as a company. We're an open source CMS. You can see all of our code, all of what we do. You can contribute if you want to. So in that case, it's very similar to Drupal. 

I joined dotCMS about five or six months ago as our new VP of product. And in that role, I basically oversee all of our sort of product or product-related functions. And that means our product team, our design team, our data function, our developer relations function. And also, I work on our analyst relations functions as well. So I wear a lot of hats at dotCMS.

And it's very similar to what I was doing before. I mean, my background has always been in software, in the actual engineering … in coding.

I read in your bio about your interest in voice interface and voice content. Can you talk a bit about your interest in non-traditional interfaces like voice?

This ties into the writing I've done in the past around what I call the “channel explosion”…. These days, content needs to go to a lot of different places. One of the things that we often forget, especially those of us who have primarily worked with web content, is that content isn't just read, right? It's also spoken. It's also aural. It's visual. It's spatial. There are so many things about content that aren't really … tied to that rectangular box that we call the website or the screen or the web browser.

And a really good example of that is voice interfaces and voice bots or voice assistants. About seven or eight years ago, I was part of a really amazing team at Acquia, [that] worked on the first ever Alexa skill for the state of Georgia, building an Amazon Alexa skill that would allow people to ask questions: like, how do I register to vote or how do I enroll my child in pre-K?

Content needs to come from a single source of truth. You're seeing a lot of these new use cases emerge where people want to serve content to a mobile app, people want to serve content to a Roku device, people want to serve content to an AR overlay, for example, in your Vision Pro.

One of the reasons why I've been so interested in voice is because it really throws out a lot of the prescriptions and a lot of the ideas that we have about content, a lot of those biases that we have towards written, visual online content…. Web content is actually more abstracted away from natural human language and natural human biology than is speech-based interfaces or how we actually converse.

So I wrote a book about five years ago called Voice Content and Usability. In that book, I talk about voice content strategy, voice content design, how do you actually get content ready for a voice interface? And how do you actually implement an end-to- end voice interface that needs to consume content from a CMS?

When that book came out, there weren't a whole lot of Alexa content-driven implementations. It was basically just Capital One balance checking and Domino's Pizza ordering. And that was about it. No one had ever done a content-driven voice interface that was more informational rather than transactional.

Unfortunately, a lot of the things that have happened over the last few years with generative AI have really thrown those approaches out the window, because oftentimes with AI, you don't really feed it content. You're looking at content that is being reconstituted … by the AI as opposed to something that you're actually serving. But for governments, it's a much, much bigger concern for that content to stay up to date.

[You want] to help somebody learn how to get health insurance, or how to file a death certificate, [and that] cannot be mucked up by AI hallucinations or incorrectness. This is one of the reasons why voice content strategy and voice content still remains so relevant.

Your bio says that you're interested in “endangered and underserved languages”. Where else does your interest in learning languages come from?

My biggest passion outside of work, outside of professional pursuits, is travel and languages. A lot of it comes from my background. I spent a good amount of time in Brazil when I was younger, so I'm fluent in Portuguese because I did an exchange program there. I taught English there in college as well. I also spent time in Wales.

Some of the richest interactions and some of the richest experiences I have when I travel are when I'm able to converse in a language that is a very seldom learned language, a very atypical language. It's a language that people don't really often take the time to learn or have much of an interest in learning. But [these languages are the way] in which you can get to know the culture, get to know the food, get to know just the way that people interact in these other environments and in these other languages. 

Languages are entire universes unto themselves. Especially those languages that have that rich, rich tradition of oral language traditions or rich literature that stretches back for centuries. I love to focus on languages that I can speak right now with people today.

Right now, I'm focusing on three languages – two of them are incredibly difficult. The third is a little bit easier, and it's all towards a vacation I've got planned with a friend coming up in November. We're headed to South Africa, and so I'm learning Afrikaans, which is obviously at the center of Middle Dutch, the sort of colonial language in South Africa, but I'm also learning Xhosa and Zulu, which are two of the Nguni languages spoken in South Africa.

Can you say a little more about the keynote presentation that you're going to be giving at Twin Cities Drupal Camp?

Over the past four to five years, I've been tracking sort of dissatisfaction on both sides of CMS. 

I think one of the things that's really unique about the content management system is that it occupies a very unique ecological niche in the software world. Whereas a lot of other software products have a focus on individual personas, like Salesforce for salespeople. CRM tools tend to be for those kinds of folks. 

The CMS has always been very unique in software because it brings together people with very different skills and very different priorities. Two of those personas that are probably the chief personas that the CMS deals with are, number one, the CMS developer. And then number two, the sort of content practitioner or content team or content architect or compliance reviewer or accessibility reviewer, everyone who has a stake in making sure that content is successful.

But we know based on just hearing from folks around the CMS industry that we're starting to see a bit of a schism right now, which is that there is, number one, a trend for developers to go towards headless CMSs, like Contentful, Sanity, some of those, and really go in that direction. But the problem with that is that it kind of leaves content teams with their hands tied behind their back. They can't really do drag and drop layout management anymore. They can't do preview of all of their different sites anymore. There's a lot of issues that come up with headless CMS.

But by the same token, developers today really don't want to work with the sort of monolithic or traditional CMS anymore. I love Twig. I love PHP template. There's a lot of folks who don't. There's a lot of folks, especially who are coming into front-end development nowadays, that really, really don't like to work with those paradigms. 

One of the things that I think is really important is that as we contend with this huge influx of new JavaScript frameworks like Astro, SELT, so on and so forth, and also new delivery channels like we were talking about earlier, Blaine, around AR, VR, voice, AI, so on and so forth, it becomes a really big concern.

How do we actually collaborate effectively in a CMS that works for everybody and not just one half of the back office? One of the struggles that we see very often is that oftentimes headless CMSs will say, well, hey, content is just the data. Let us handle the presentation. Let us handle the front-end. Let us handle how things look.

But what that does is it severs all those linkages with how content authors want to preview, with how content editors want to be able to look at and review or schedule content or review things for compliance or review things for accessibility, so on and so forth. But developers also don't want to be held back.

The topic of my talk is really what I call the universal CMS, which is a new pair and I am really quickly getting a lot of traction. It really is about restoring the balance that characterized the early static web CMS era. Basically saying, hey, we could do all these really cool things with the website, but we had a handshake where we agreed that, hey, developers, if you hand over control over layout and control over all of these visual components, I will give you obviously control over how to code the whole thing.

But this unique grand compromise that we forged is something that is starting to come back. We are starting to see headless CMSs build in visual editing features which violate the peer headless architectural prescription. We are also seeing a lot of the old traditional CMSs or monolithic CMSs begin to build a lot more APIs and SDKs for JavaScript developers or mobile app developers to build on top of. And so I think what we are going to start to see here is a convergence between both the headless CMSs and the traditional CMSs towards a new equilibrium which I call universal CMS.

And here in just a few years, I think we are going to get rid of this full distinction between headless and monolithic and all of those tired terms that have a lot of baggage with them.

[Short bio]

Preston So (he/they) is a product executive with over 25 years in software, 17 years in content technologies, and 9 years leading product, design, engineering, and developer relations functions at organizations such as Oracle, Acquia, dotCMS, Time Inc., and Gatsby. He is Vice President, Product at dotCMS and the author of Immersive Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2023), Gatsby: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly, 2021), Voice Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2021), and Decoupled Drupal in Practice (Apress, 2018).

Named “the smartest guy in the field” by Content Strategy for Mobile author Karen McGrane in 2024 and “probably the smartest person working in this industry right now” by Web Content Management author Deane Barker in 2020, Preston is a globally recognized authority on the intersections of content, design, and code. He is an editor at A List Apart and former top-read columnist at CMSWire. Preston is a frequent presenter with 17 years of speaking engagements spanning over 50 conferences, including SXSW Interactive (2017, 2017 encore, 2018) and An Event Apart (2020–22) and keynotes in three languages. He is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved.

I've been spending some time recently trying to get the Umami demo message from toolbar into the navigation module.

React can rightfully be called a game-changer JavaScript library for Drupal developers, as it can completely change the way interfaces are built. By integrating it into Drupal themes, we can enter a completely new world full of creativity and convenient functions, thus improving user experiences significantly. 
With the help of React, interfaces of websites built on Drupal will no longer be static and boring: they become real, interactive, and fast. Less words, let's learn more details about how you can benefit from using React in Drupal themes.

Whenever a new major version of Drupal is released, we update Drupal's GitLab CI testing templates to automatically update the versions being tested. Here's an outline of our plan:

Where we are now

Drupal 11 was released on August 6th. You can learn more about it on the Drupal 11 landing page.

This means that we are in the middle of a transition period where many sites and modules will want to be in Drupal 11, whereas some others might still want to stay in Drupal 10.

From a GitLab CI point of view, testing for both Drupal 10 and 11 simultaneously has been available for months, providing module maintainers with a great tool to test their code before Drupal 11 was launched.

This was available by setting one variable in the .gitlab-ci.yml like this:

Many maintainers have leveraged this already and we can see many modules already claiming full Drupal 11 support within days of the release. To be more specific, as of August 20th, 2870 projects have no compatibility errors anymore, and 1720 have made Drupal 11 compatible releases.

Where we want to be

We are preparing to update the default testing configuration for the GitLab CI templates, but we want to make sure to continue to support maintainers who still need to test against Drupal 10 and 11. We've outlined the changes we'll be making and the timeline below.

As of today:

• Current version (default) is Drupal 10
• Next major version is Drupal 11
• Previous major version is Drupal 9

When we do the shift, this will change to:

• Current version (default) is Drupal 11
• Next major version will be Drupal 12 (when development starts) - see note below.
• Previous major version is Drupal 10

For modules that were testing Drupal 10 and Drupal 11 simultaneously, the change will be as easy as this:

Instead of opting in to test the next major, all you need to do is opt into the previous major.

Note: Drupal 12 development branch does not exist yet. Enabling this version might not do anything until this branch is created.

Steps

We are actively working on making the above switch in this issue: Update templates so 11.0 is the default/current branch.

We are going to be taking the following steps in the coming days / weeks.

Step 1: Make all modules start testing against Drupal 11

We will set the default value for OPT_IN_TEST_NEXT_MAJOR to 1 temporarily, and release version 1.5.6 of the templates. This will automatically become the default for all Contrib.

Modules that have not yet tested their code against Drupal 11 will now see "Next Major" test jobs in their pipelines, in addition to the "current" Drupal 10 variant. These new jobs have allow_failure: true, so the overall result of the pipelines should not change. This should show a good sense of where the module is at in relation to Drupal 11. Maintainers can still override the variable to be 0 if they don't want this behavior.

The expected date for this change is: August 26th, 2024 (next Monday)

Step 2: Roll out the shift and make it available for Contrib

When the issue Update templates so 11.0 is the default/current branch and all its dependencies all sorted, we will deploy the changes and create a new release 1.6.0. This will be available to Contrib projects using "gitlab ref" main or 1.x-latest

The expected date for this change is: September 5th, 2024 (2 weeks from now)

Step 3: Make the shift default for all Contrib

Then we will make this new release be the default for all contrib projects automatically.

However, we have provided several alternatives for modules that don't want to do the shift at this point. Any of the following can be used:

• You can pin the version of the templates for your module to 1.5.6. This is the latest version released before the switch. Learn more about pinning the templates version in this page. Note that this means you will not get any updates to the templates for new features or bug fixes, until you un-pin the release.
• You can set OPT_IN_TEST_PREVIOUS_MAJOR to 1 and OPT_IN_TEST_CURRENT to 0 to continue testing Drupal 10 and not Drupal 11.
• You can configure your own variants as described on this page.
• You can tweak the key variables used when creating variants so they have the versions that you desire. Check the above link for that information.

For those wanting to do the shift, you will not need to do anything at all.

The expected date for this change is: September 12th, 2024 (3 weeks from now)

After the shift is made

Onwards and upwards, that means that Drupal 11 is the default version to be tested for all new issues, merge requests, and pipelines for all contrib projects, allowing us to keep the Drupal ecosystem up to date and relevant.

There are some issues that are not blockers for this change, but are related, so we encourage you to see the issue list before reporting anything new, but otherwise create a new issue if you discover a problem and don't find it in the queue.

This week I built a LocalGov Drupal dashboard, so we can better keep track of all our projects.

We talk with Janez Urevc from Tag1 Consulting about Gander, an open-source automated performance testing framework.

URLs mentioned

• Gander (includes many helpful links!)
• 40-minute video presentation introducing Gander (including a demo)
• Drupal.org docs page for performance testing with Gander 
• https://gander.tag1.io - dashboard that Tag1 hosts for the Drupal community
• Two-hour Gander workshop at DrupalCon Barcelona on September 24, 2024

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Credits

Podcast edited by Amelia Anello.