Discover Why DrupalCon Portland 2024 Is the Must-Attend Event of the Year

If you're part of the Drupal community or interested in Drupal, you won't want to miss DrupalCon Portland 2024! The conference is set to be the most exciting and informative event of the year, catering to developers, marketers, content editors, content publishers, and anyone else who interacts with their website. In this blog post, I'll outline the top five reasons why attending DrupalCon Portland in 2024 is a must.

Immerse Yourself in the Ultimate Drupal Experience

DrupalCon Portland 2024 promises an entire week dedicated to Drupal and the vibrant Drupal Community. It's your chance to connect with some of the most brilliant minds in the industry, engage in discussions, build lasting friendships, and simply have a fantastic time. Key highlights of the event include:

1. Foster Community Through In-Person Connections: Experience the warmth and synergy of the Drupal community by connecting face-to-face with fellow Drupal enthusiasts. This is a unique chance to share your passion for Drupal with like-minded individuals in a vibrant, engaging setting.

2. Driesnote & Eminent Speakers: Gain insights from the Drupal founder during the much-anticipated Driesnote and learn from a lineup of distinguished speakers. These sessions promise to be thought-provoking, offering deep dives into various aspects of Drupal, its ecosystem, and future directions.

3. Contribution Opportunities: Participate in contribution sprints where you can tackle real-world problems, contribute to the project, and interact with key project contributors and maintainers. This is your chance to make a tangible impact and glean insights from the guardians of the Drupal codebase.

4. Social Gatherings and Welcome Party: DrupalCon isn't just about learning; it's also about having a great time. The Welcome Party and other social events provide perfect settings to unwind, celebrate, and build friendships in a more relaxed atmosphere. View the social events or submit yours now.

5. Birds of a Feather Sessions: Engage in "Birds of a Feather" (BoF) sessions, where small groups gather to discuss hot topics and share knowledge on specific areas of interest within Drupal and technology. These small gatherings encourage open dialogue and are a great way to dive deep into subjects you care about with peers.

Rediscover the Thriving Drupal Community

After years of remote work and lockdowns, DrupalCon Portland 2024 provides a refreshing opportunity to step out of your home office and connect with passionate Drupal enthusiasts. Meet the faces behind your favorite modules and engage with like-minded individuals who share your love for Drupal.

Unparalleled Learning Opportunities

DrupalCon offers unparalleled opportunities for learning and growth. From inspiring keynotes and informative sessions to hands-on training and contribution sprints, this event is the ultimate platform to expand your knowledge and expertise. Break out of your routine and explore the full potential of Drupal.

This year will be filled with broader topics to help you drive your digital experiences forward. Some of the new highlights this year include:

1. A new marketing track dedicated to driving your business goals forward.
2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Learning how AI is being incorporated into Drupal and how it can help you improve your day to day and achieve your goals.
3. Birds of a Feather - More structure and planning going into our BOF sessions to drive higher levels of engagement and inform stronger conversations.

Be Inspired by Innovations

Witness the transformative power of Drupal and be inspired by the innovative and talented Drupal community. Attendees at DrupalCon Portland are focused on:

1. Crafting cutting-edge content management systems.
2. Delivering groundbreaking customer experiences.
3. Mastering their craft and pushing boundaries.

Forge Valuable Connections

DrupalCon Portland is the perfect environment to connect with individuals who share your passion for Drupal, open-source technology, and delivering top-notch digital experiences. Building relationships here can significantly impact your career, opening doors to exciting opportunities.

There are countless reasons to join us at DrupalCon Portland 2024, and we can't wait to welcome you! It's a unique opportunity to connect with the Drupal community, discover the incredible work happening within Drupal, and spend quality time with friends and colleagues from around the world who share your common passion. We look forward to seeing you there!

Register now for DrupalCon Portland 2024.

The TalkingDrupal podcast had Alexey Korepov on to talk about Test Driven Development. Alexey has written the Test Helpers module, a development package that provides many useful utility tools for writing unit tests for your Drupal code.

Today we are talking about Test Driven Development, Why it’s important, and How it improves development with guest Alexey Korepov. We’ll also cover Test Helpers as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/446

• What does the term Test Driven Development (TDD) mean
• Does Drupal make use of TDD
• What makes TDD different from other methods of Development
• Do you have to change your way of thinking
• What are some good resources to learn TDD
• Do you have any pointers for teams looking to get started
• Are certain kinds of projects better suited to TDD
• How have dev teams adapted to TDD
• Any advice on environment setup
• Any special tools

• Open telemetry
• QA Engineer
• Kent Beck Test Driven Development: By Example
• Needs tests tag
• Local unit tests
• PHPUnit

Alexey Korepov - korepov.pro Murz

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu Matt Glaman - mglaman.dev mglaman

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted an API that could dramatically simplify the process of writing Drupal unit tests? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Test Helpers
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Sep 2022 by today’s guest, Alexey Korepov
  • Versions available: 1.3.0 compatible with versions of Drupal 9.4 or newer, right up to Drupal 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release less than 3 months ago
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage, would be ironic if it didn’t
  • API Documentation is available, linked from the project page
  • Number of open issues: 2 open issues, which are actually feature requests
• Usage stats:
  • 5 sites officially, but modules or sites can leverage Test Helpers without enabling it, and this usage is recommended, so the number is actually higher
• Module features and usage
  • Provides a new container that automated tests can leverage to perform common tasks with much less code.
  • For example, you can create a user or a node with a single line of code
  • You can also mock more complex operations like an entityQuery or loadMultiple call, again with a single line of code
  • Traditionally, writing unit tests is more complicated because by design they run without fully bootstrapping Drupal
  • That means that your test needs to mock functions or services in the code you’re testing which can result in units tests being much longer than the code they’re testing
  • Test Helpers also allows your tests to leverage existing mocks and stubs for popular services
  • The project page also links to the recording and slides for a talk Alexey gave about Test Helpers at DrupalCon Pittsburgh last year, if you want to do a deeper dive

In 2024, technology has reached new heights, impacting our lives like never before. With AI becoming more common and exciting updates on the horizon, technology is shaping our world significantly.

Technology continues to redefine the way we live, work, and connect. New features, updates, and innovations emerge daily, shaping our world remarkably. At the heart of this transformation lies Drupal, the dynamic content management system that empowers individuals and businesses to navigate the digital realm easily and confidently. Drupal opens limitless possibilities in website development, offering a platform where creativity knows no bounds.

Drupal streamlines the process of creating and managing websites, putting the power of customization and control at our fingertips. With its intuitive interface and robust features, Drupal allows users to craft online experiences that are not just functional but truly exceptional.

Technology is advancing rapidly, and Drupal is here to make it accessible and beneficial for everyone. With its user-friendly features and adaptability, Drupal simplifies website creation and opens doors to endless possibilities.

Let's review the latest news covered by The Drop Times (TDT) last week.

In an Interview with Alka Elizabeth, sub-editor, TDT, Irina Zaks, Co-Founder and CTO at Fibonacci Web Studio, discusses her transition from a background in physics to web development, emphasizing the importance of clear, simple solutions in complex projects. She highlights the Fibonacci sequence's role in her design philosophy, advocating for harmony and simplicity in web development. Zaks also reflects on the unique challenges of academic websites and her efforts to promote open-source software within academia, particularly through her work at the Stanford Open Source Lab. The interview is a precursor to Stanford Web Camp. 

Head to the concluding part of our series, "Drupal Page Builders—Part 4: Distributions," crafted by André Angelantoni, Senior Drupal Architect, HeroDevs. The article discusses the practicalities and considerations of using Drupal distributions for page building. It emphasizes that while distributions can simplify the setup process, especially for non-technical users, they often involve complex maintenance and may slow down upgrades due to dependency on the distribution maintainers. The piece advises conducting a proof-of-concept for the most complex page layouts to ensure the chosen solution can handle the requirements, highlighting that many teams opt for minimal module use to maintain flexibility and control.

Explore the articles curated by Kazima Abbas regarding the featured speakers who presented their sessions at EvolveDrupal Atlanta. The first part features Michael Herchel, Mary Blabaum, Allison Vorthmann, Andy Waldrop, and Jesse Dyck.  Topics range from an Inclusive Design Approach to Drupal 7's End of Life on website security and from leveraging Drupal for scalable software products to insights on migrating to Drupal 10. The second part shifts to topics including The Fourth Decade of Website Deployments, the Crossroads of Website Evolution, and the updates from WCAG 2.1 to 2.2. John Cloys, Penny Kronz, and Steve Persch are featured in this segment. 

The upcoming Drupal Developer Days in Burgas, Bulgaria, from June 26-28, 2024, at Burgas Free University, has announced Suzanne Dergacheva and Frederik W. as keynote speakers. DrupalCamp Iberia 2024 has officially announced its schedule for the upcoming gathering on May 10 and 11 at PACT in Évora, marking a significant event in the Drupal community's annual calendar. The Network of European Drupal Associations (NEDA) has scheduled a meeting on April 24, 2024, led by Esmeralda Tijhoff. This meeting aims to foster connections among Drupal Associations globally, sharing experiences and discussing support strategies.

DrupalCon Portland 2024 extends a special offer to students, recent graduates, and individuals with Drupal Training Certification obtained since 2022, providing an opportunity to purchase tickets for the event at a discounted rate of $50. The DropTimes has been announced as the official media partner for The LagoonCon Portland 2024. DrupalSouth has made their talks from DrupalSouth 2024 accessible online via their YouTube channel! Now, you can catch up on all the insightful discussions and presentations from the comfort of your home. A particularly engaging story narrated at the event is the talk by Dallas Ramsden, a story of human resilience. The Eclipse Foundation has initiated a collaborative effort to establish common cybersecurity standards in response to the upcoming European Union's Cyber Resilience Act. This initiative involves multiple open-source organizations and aims to harmonize secure software development practices across the industry, addressing both regulatory requirements and the broader challenge of securing open-source software. The Greek Drupal Community celebrated a resurgence with the Greece Spring Sprint 2024, where experienced developers across Athens, Thessaloniki, and Patras collaborated to address numerous issues. We have received pictures via Georgios Andreadis of the event, take a look here.

Jesus Manuel Olivas, Co-Founder and CEO at Octahedroid, announced the initial release of two significant Drupal modules—Visual Editor and Decoupled Preview Iframe. A recent update from Drupal.org saw Gábor Hojtsy outlining the forthcoming release plans for Drupal 11, noting significant dependency updates and two potential release windows later this year. Obviously, this has created discussions in the community. Paul Johnson, a long-time participant and photographer at Drupal events, has announced an initiative by the Promote Drupal team to create the first official Promote Drupal Image Library. The team calls for submissions from photographers within the Drupal community who are willing to contribute their work under a Creative Commons license. 

While there are undoubtedly more stories to share, our current constraints may necessitate a temporary pause in our coverage.

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

Thank you,
Sincerely
Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor, The Drop Times

One of Drupal's strengths is its ability to create communities of users who contribute towards the content of the site. Whether you have an open forum, where users can create their own accounts, or a closed magazine site with just a few editors, you need to take the security of your users seriously.

Out of the box, Drupal has a number of account protection features that assist in making sure that users are authenticated correctly.

For example, the user login page is protected by a brute force system and will lock accounts after a number of incorrect password attempts in a short amount of time.

There are a few other things you can do to protect your site users that can be applied to any Drupal site. In this article we'll look through a number of different modules and techniques you can use to protect the user accounts on your site. We'll look at some of the pros and cons of each approach.

Flood Control

Drupal's login forms have built in brute force projection that will block any user account that fails to enter the correct password more than 5 times per IP address within an hour. This prevents automated bots from just guessing the password of a user account thousands of times until it hits the right combination.

The Flood Control module allows these settings to be tweaked to make them more (or less) restrictive.

Read more

Building a custom Drupal theme nowadays is a more complex process than it used to be. Most themes require some kind of build tool such as Gulp, Grunt, Webpack or others to automate many of the repeatitive tasks we perform when working on the front-end. Tasks like compiling and minifying code, compressing images, linting code, and many more. As Atomic Web Design became a thing, things got more complicated because now if you are building components you need a styleguide or Design System to showcase and maintain those components. One of those design systems for me has been Patternlab. I started using Patternlab in all my Drupal projects almost ten years ago with great success. In addition, Patternlab has been the design system of choice at my place of work but one of my immediate tasks was to work on migrating to a different design system. We have a small team but were very excited about the challenge of finding and using a more modern and robust design system for our large multi-site Drupal environment.

Disclaimer: Due to technical restrictions and project requirements, we were not able to use Single Directory Components or SDC, nor the Storybook module. Our front-end environment was custom built from the ground up.

Enter Storybook

After looking a various options for a design system, Storybook seemed to be the right choice for us for a couple of reasons: one, it has been around for about 10 years and during this time it has matured significantly, and two, it has become a very popular option in the Drupal ecosystem. In some ways, Storybook follows the same model as Drupal, it has a pretty active community and a very healthy ecosystem of plugins to extend its core functionality.

Storybook looks very promising as a design system for Drupal projects and with the recent release of Single Directory Components or SDC, and the new Storybook module, we think things can only get better for Drupal front-end development. Unfortunately for us, technical limitations in combination with our specific requirements, prevented us from using SDC or the Storybook module. Instead, we built our environment from scratch with a stand-alone integration of Storybook 8.

Our process and requirements

In choosing Storybook, we went through a rigorous research and testing process to ensure it will not only solve our immediate problems with our current environment, but it will be around as a long term solution. As part of this process, we also tested several available options like Emulsify and Gesso which would be great options for anyone looking for a ready-to-go system out of the box. Some of our requirements included:

1. No components refactoring

The first and non-negotiable requirement was to be able to migrate components from Patternlab to a new design system with the least amount of refactoring as possible. We have a decent amount of components which have been built within the last year and the last thing we wanted was to have to rebuild them again because we are switching design system.

2. A new Front-end build workflow

I personally have been faithful to Gulp as a front-end build tool for as long as I can remember because it did everything I needed done in a very efficient manner. The Drupal project we maintain also used Gulp, but as part of this migration, we wanted to see what other options were out there that could improve our workflow. The obvious choice seemed to be Webpack, but as we looked closer into this we learned about ViteJS, "The Next Genration Frontend Tooling". Vite delivers on its promise of being "blazing fast", and its ecosystem is great and growing, so we went with it.

3. No more Sass in favor of PostCSS

CSS has drastically improved in recent years. It is now possible with plain CSS, to do many of the things you used to be able to only do with Sass or similar CSS Preprocessor. Eliminating Sass from our workflow meant we would also be able to get rid of many other node dependencies related to Sass. The goal for this project was to use plain CSS in combination with PostCSS and one bonus of using Vite is that Vite offers PostCSS processing out of the box without additional plugins or dependencies. Ofcourse if you want to do more advance PostCSS processing you will probably need some external dependencies.

Building a new Drupal theme with Storybook

Let's go over the steps to building the base of your new Drupal theme with ViteJS and Storybook. This will be at a high-level to callout only the most important and Drupal-related parts. This process will create a brand new theme. If you already have a theme you would like to use, make the appropriate changes to the instructions.

1. Setup Storybook with ViteJS

ViteJS

• In your Drupal project, navigate to the theme's directory (i.e. /web/themes/custom/)
• Run the following command:

• When prompted, select the framework of your choice, for us the framework is React.
• When prompted, select the variant for your project, for us this is JavaScript

After the setup finishes you will have a basic Vite project running.

Storybook

• Be sure your system is running NodeJS version 18 or higher
• Inside the newly created theme, run this command:

• After installation completes, you will have a new Storybook instance running
• If Storybook didn't start on its own, start it by running:

TwigJS

Twig templates are server-side templates which are normally rendered with TwigPHP to HTML by Drupal, but Storybook is a JS tool. TwigJS is the JS-equivalent of TwigPHP so that Storybook understands Twig. Let's install all dependencies needed for Storybook to work with Twig.

• If Storybook is still running, press Ctrl + C to stop it
• Then run the following command:

• vite-plugin-twig-drupal: If you are using Vite like we are, this is a Vite plugin that handles transforming twig files into a Javascript function that can be used with Storybook. This plugin includes the following:
  • Twig or TwigJS: This is the JavaScript implementation of the Twig PHP templating language. This allows Storybook to understand Twig.
    Note: TwigJS may not always be in sync with the version of Twig PHP in Drupal and you may run into issues when using certain Twig functions or filters, however, we are adding other extensions that may help with the incompatability issues.
  • drupal attribute: Adds the ability to work with Drupal attributes.
• twig-drupal-filters: TwigJS implementation of Twig functions and filters.
• html-react-parser: This extension is key for Storybook to parse HTML code into react elements.
• @modifi/vite-plugin-yaml: Transforms a YAML file into a JS object. This is useful for passing the component's data to React as args.

ViteJS configuration

Update your vite.config.js so it makes use of the new extensions we just installed as well as configuring the namesapces for our components.

Storybook configuration

Out of the box, Storybook comes with main.js and preview.js inside the .storybook directory. These two files is where a lot of Storybook's configuration is done. We are going to define the location of our components, same location as we did in vite.config.js above (we'll create this directory shortly). We are also going to do a quick config inside preview.js for handling drupal filters.

• Inside .storybook/main.js file, update the stories array as follows:

• Inside .storybook/preview.js, update it as follows:

Creating the components directory

• If Storybook is still running, press Ctrl + C to stop it
• Inside the src directory, create the components directory. Alternatively, you could rename the existing stories directory to components.

Creating your first component

With the current system in place we can start building components. We'll start with a very simple component to try things out first.

• Inside src/components, create a new directory called title
• Inside the title directory, create the following files: title.yml and title.twig

Writing the code

• Inside title.yml, add the following:

• Inside title.twig, add the following:

We have a simple title component that will print a title of anything you want. The level key allows us to change the heading level of the title (i.e. h1, h2, h3, etc.), and the modifier key allows us to pass a modifier class to the component, and the url will be helpful when our title needs to be a link to another page or component.

Currently the title component is not available in storybook. Storybook uses a special file to display each component as a story, the file name is component-name.stories.jsx.

• Inside title create a file called title.stories.jsx
• Inside the stories file, add the following:

• If Storybook is running you should see the title story. See example below:
• Otherwise start Storybook by running:

With Storybook running, the title component should look like the image below:

The controls highlighted at the bottom of the title allow you to change the values of each of the fields for the title.

I wanted to start with the simplest of components, the title, to show how Storybook, with help from the extensions we installed, understands Twig. The good news is that the same approach we took with the title component works on even more complex components. Even the React code we wrote does not change much on large components.

In the next blog post, we will build more components that nest smaller components, and we will also add Drupal related parts and configuration to our theme so we can begin using the theme in a Drupal site. Finally, we will integrate the components we built in Storybook with Drupal so our content can be rendered using the component we're building. Stay tuned. For now, if you want to grab a copy of all the code in this post, you can do so below.

Download the code

Resources

• Storybook docs
• How to write stories
• Single Directory Components
• Storybook Drupal module

In closing

Getting to this point was a team effort and I'd like to thank Chaz Chumley, a Senior Software Engineer, who did a lot of the configuration discussed in this post. In addition, I am thankful to the Emulsify and Gesso teams for letting us pick their brains during our research. Their help was critical in this process.

I hope this was helpful and if there is anything I can help you with in your journey of a Storybook-friendly Drupal theme, feel free to reach out.

DrupalCon Portland 2024 is coming up next month! The event provides good opportunities to get help with three major transitions of Drupal in 2024. Drupal 7's end of life is near, while Drupal 11 is released this year. Finally, DrupalCI testing is superceeded by much improved GitLab CI pipelines shortly after DrupalCon. Here are some highlights of related events to not miss at DrupalCon!