drupal

Next week I'm headed to DrupalGovCon 2024 to present on a brand new technique I created for hosting fast and reliable preview/test environments using DDEV and GitHub Actions.

DDEV supports what they call "Casual Hosting". With the right config tweaks, you can run multiple DDEV sites on a server for hosting sites on the internet.

Drupal 11 was released on August 2nd, 2024. A lot has changed since Drupal 10, and a lot of preliminary work has been done that will help with Drupal Starshot. Besides improvements made to CKEditor integration, a revamp of the Field UI, performance improvements, and revisions for taxonomy terms, several big changes have been included to help the ambitious site builder.

In the previous article, we began migrating configuration from Drupal 7 example site to our Drupal 10 instance, specifically content types. In today's article, we will continue with two more D7 entities: taxonomy vocabularies and field collections. The latter will be imported as Paragraphs in Drupal 10. Along the way, we will review the content model and the migration plan. This will help us determine what parts of the migration should be automated and what can be performed manually.

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.

Drupal Starshot aims to attract mid-market marketers by offering out-of-the-box marketing best practices, user-friendly tools, AI-driven site building features, all while maintaining the many advantages of Drupal Core.

I'm excited to share the first version of Drupal Starshot's product strategy, a document that aims to guide the development and marketing of Drupal Starshot. To read it, download the full Drupal Starshot strategy document as a PDF (8 MB).

This strategy document is the result of a collaborative effort among the Drupal Starshot leadership team, the Drupal Starshot Advisory Council, and the Drupal Core Committers. We also tested it with marketers who provided feedback and validation.

Drupal Starshot and Drupal Core

Drupal Starshot is the temporary name for an initiative that extends the capabilities of Drupal Core. Drupal Starshot aims to broaden Drupal's appeal to marketers and a wider range of project budgets. Our ultimate goal is to increase Drupal's adoption, solidify Drupal's position as a leading CMS, and champion an Open Web.

For more context, please watch my DrupalCon Portland keynote.

It's important to note that Drupal Starshot and Drupal Core will have separate, yet complementary, product strategies. Drupal Starshot will focus on empowering marketers and expanding Drupal's presence in the mid-market, while Drupal Core will prioritize the needs of developers and more technical users. I'll write more about the Drupal Core product strategy in a future blog post once we have finalized it. Together, these two strategies will form a comprehensive vision for Drupal as a product.

Why a product strategy?

By defining our goals, target audience and necessary features, we can more effectively guide contributors and ensure that everyone is working towards a common vision. This product strategy will serve as a foundation for our development roadmap, our marketing efforts, enabling Drupal Certified Partners, and more.

Drupal Starshot product strategy TL;DR

For the detailed product strategy, please read the full Drupal Starshot strategy document (8 MB, PDF). Below is a summary.

Drupal Starshot aims to be the gold standard for marketers that want to build great digital experiences.

We'd like to expand Drupal's reach by focusing on two strategic shifts:

1. Prioritizing Drupal for content creators, marketers, web managers, and web designers so they can independently build websites. A key goal is to empower these marketing professionals to build and manage their websites independently without relying on developers or having to use the command line or an IDE.
2. Extending Drupal's presence in the mid-market segment, targeting projects with total budgets between $30,000 and $120,000 USD (€25,000 to €100,000).

Drupal Starshot will differentiate itself from competitors by providing:

1. A thoughtfully designed platform for marketers, balancing ease of use with flexibility. It includes smart defaults, best practices for common marketing tasks, marketing-focused editorial tools, and helpful learning resources.
2. A growth-oriented approach. Start simple with Drupal Starshot's user-friendly tools, and unlock advanced features as your site grows or you gain expertise. With sophisticated content modeling, efficient content reuse across channels, and robust integrations with other leading marketing technologies, ambitious marketers won't face the limitations of other CMSs and will have the flexibility to scale their site as needed.
3. AI-assisted site building tools to simplify complex tasks, making Drupal accessible to a wider range of users.
4. Drupal's existing competitive advantages such as extensibility, scalability, security, accessibility, multilingual support, and more.

What about ambitious site builders?

In the past, we used the term ambitious site builders to describe Drupal's target audience. Although this term doesn't appear in the product strategy document, it remains relevant.

While the strategy document is publicly available, it is primarily an internal guide. It outlines our plans but doesn't dictate our marketing language. Our product strategy's language purposly aligns with terms used by our target users, based on persona research and interviews.

To me, "ambitious site builders" includes all Drupal users, from those working with Drupal Core (more technically skilled) to those working with Drupal Starshot (less technical). Both groups are ambitious, with Drupal Starshot specifically targeting "ambitious marketers" or "ambitious no-code developers".

Give feedback

The product strategy is a living document, and we value input. We invite you to share your thoughts, suggestions, and questions in the product strategy feedback issue within the Drupal Starshot issue queue.

Get involved

There are many opportunities to get involved with Drupal Starshot, whether you're a marketer, developer, designer, writer, project manager, or simply passionate about the future of Drupal. To learn more about how you can contribute to Drupal Starshot, visit https://drupal.org/starshot.

Thank you

I'd like to thank the Drupal Starshot leadership team, the Drupal Starshot Advisory Council, and the Drupal Core Committers for their input on the strategy. I'm also grateful for the marketers who provided feedback on our strategy, helping us refine our approach.

With all the news and activities happening around Starshot, you may have missed this, but the Drupal Association has launched the Starshot Contribution Credits. This consists of credits granted to a series contributions, in particular:

• contributions to any modules, themes, etc that are designated as part of Starshot, 

• 50 credits per week for each FTE (full time employee) equivalent dedicated to starshot, 

• 1 credit per $100 invested for financial contributions and finally,

• Special credit bounties for individual issues of exceptional importance.

You can read more about the contribution bonuses https://www.drupal.org/about/starshot/contribution-credit

The last point, special credit bounties, opens the door to a contribution coming from the Bounty Program.

What are we trying to do?

Given the success of the previous phase, we thought it was the moment to announce a few new issues that would carry extra credits, supporting the Starshot initiative. These issues are targeted at improvements to Drupal core that would reduce the number of contrib modules required in Starshot.

These are the issues that the period involved have identified:

• Improve the linking experience in CKEditor 5. Why? Because this integration provides a critical site feature and improves the editorial experience in a significant way.

  • https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3317769

• Fixed maximum number of field values, but use «add more» similar to when cardinality «unlimited» is used. This is a great UX improvement for Drupal that makes forms much more usable where fields have a set cardinality.

  • https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/1156338

• Views handler loading should respect configuration. Fixing this bug will enable more flexible configuration of Views.

  • https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3458099

• Configurable views filters to allow for different widgets. Once the bug above is fixed, we can provide a UI for selecting the views handler, supporting more robust filtering options.

  • https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3438054

And, as in the previous edition, the reward will be 50 credits for contributing to resolving these issues (5x the standard credit amount). Sounds good?

While these issues are not good candidates for a user or organization's first time contribution, they are a great opportunity for more senior contributors to have an impact.

Special thanks to: Tim Lehnen, Pamela Barone, Gábor Hojtsy, Nathaniel Catchpole and everyone that I am missing in and out of the core team for their help and support in identifying candidate issues for these bounties.
 

Note: What is the Bounty program?

The Bounty program started as a proof of concept to validate that we can help align the goals of the Drupal Association and Drupal itself, with the goals of individuals, companies, and the rest of the community, and hence, accelerate Drupal Innovation.

You may remember that this started during my tenure with the Drupal Association, and although my contract and direct involvement reached to an end at the beginning of the year, I committed myself, even before I left, to continuing the work I started with the Drupal Association, but especially with Drupal as a project, and the community. That’s why I’m still committed to helping run and coordinating this and other innovation programs, and that’s why I’m running as well for the Board of Directors (more on this soon).

I have a small window of time available if you'd like to get credits for sponsoring Drupal contributions.