drupal

Top 10 presentations from DrupalCon Barcelona 2024

Hansa Pandit

20 employees from Ramsalt Lab had the opportunity to attend one of the most awaited Drupal events of the year, DrupalCon 2024 in the beautiful city of Barcelona.

It was a great event with inspiring sessions and hands-on workshops. Our team have made this list of the top 10 session from Barcelona:

1. Driesnote: DrupalCon Barcelona 2024
   Our top recommendation is Driesnote, where Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, presents the revolutionary Drupal CMS (being built under the Starshot Initiative). This will be a new era in Drupal with AI-enabled website building for non-developers.
2. Drupal Recipes Initiative Update
   This session gives an update on Drupal’s Recipes initiative, and how you can contribute to it. You'll also learn about recipes that you can start using right away!
3. Building Safer Digital Communities - The Mission of "Defend Iceland"
   In this keynote, Theódór Gislason shares his journey, ignited by a life-altering accident thirty years ago, and discusses the vision for the "Defend Iceland" hacker platform. He addresses the challenges of democratizing cybersecurity and highlights how a united community of responsible companies and ethical hackers could enhance our collective cyber resilience.
4. Running a fleet of websites with ease via LocalGov Drupal Microsites Platform
   Learn how to create and manage a fleet of websites, all hosted within a single Drupal installation, the "LocalGov Drupal Microsites" module.
5. Implementing AI solutions for the French government
   This session gives you an insight into how an Artificial Intelligence system can be integrated into a Drupal website and, more broadly, into any digital experience platform.
6. Drupal LMS: A new, modern, easy-to-use Learning Management System
   Explore the structure of a Learning Management System (LMS), the ongoing work on the project, key structural differences from Opigno and ANU, and opportunities for contributing to its development.
7. Drupal AI: Once again leading the way with the new golden era of the web - The AI Module and Starshot
   Watch this session to discover how AI is transforming Drupal site building in Starshot and how to utilize the Drupal AI module to create advanced web applications.
8. Everything you need to know about cookies but are afraid to ask!
   This beginner-level session will help you learn about cookies, their purpose, and emerging alternatives. You will also explore how to optimize user experience, insights, and marketing strategies while maintaining privacy and compliance.
9. Practical exploitation of Drupal security vulnerabilities
   This session aims to understand the importance of addressing web application vulnerabilities, moving beyond the typical "alert" XSS pop-up scenario. It also covers various approaches for detecting, mitigating, and preventing these vulnerabilities to ensure stronger overall security.
10. Supply Chain Security in Drupal and Composer
    This session provides a foundational understanding of supply chain security, with a deeper focus on Composer's features and their impact on it. Learn best practices for securing Drupal sites from supply chain attacks and explore how the Drupal Association is developing solutions to safeguard the entire community.

The Ramsalt team at our favorite tapas restaurant.

We hope you enjoy these sessions as much as we did! You can find all of the sessions from DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 on the official YouTube channel of the Drupal Association.

The Drupal Association has published this guest blog on behalf of HeroDevs.

The official end-of-life (EOL) date for Drupal 7 is January 5, 2025. However, as outlined in the PSA issued on June 7, 2023, the Drupal Security Team announced a change in their support strategy that would take effect before the official EOL date. Starting August 1, 2023, they implemented a reduced support structure for moderately critical Drupal 7 issues.

Why the Reduced Support Structure Matters

When a Drupal 7 module is marked as unsupported, it means that no further updates or security patches will be provided. This situation can leave your site vulnerable to potential security risks and negatively impact performance. As highlighted in the PSA, the Drupal Security Team follows a structured process: they first notify maintainers and provide them with a two-week window to respond and address the issue. If maintainers do not act within this timeframe, the module may be marked as unsupported, and support will cease altogether. This can create significant challenges, particularly for sites reliant on these modules. 

HeroDevs’ Proactive and Comprehensive Approach  

At HeroDevs, we understand the urgency of this issue. We’ve proactively stepped in to bridge the gap by forking and maintaining modules that are no longer supported by their original maintainers, with Drupal 7 Never-Ending Support. Our approach means that even as official support dwindles, your modules continue to receive the necessary updates and fixes. By taking over security maintenance, we help keep your site secure and operational, allowing you to focus on what matters most without worrying about vulnerabilities or disruptions.

Forking and Maintaining Unsupported Modules: HeroDevs has already begun forking and maintaining modules that have been dropped by their original maintainers in the last year. This approach makes sure that essential functionality remains intact and that any emerging security vulnerabilities are promptly addressed. By doing so, we help maintain the security and integrity of your site even as support from the Drupal community wanes.

Guidance for Custom and Legacy Modules: While custom modules and unique code are not covered under the standard SLA, HeroDevs provides guidance and support to help you integrate and maintain these solutions. We collaborate with you to ensure that your custom developments are compatible and functional with our Drupal 7 NES offering.

Maintaining Compatibility and Functionality: Beyond just security patches, HeroDevs works to test the compatibility of your modules with the evolving web landscape. We address compatibility issues and provide a seamless experience for developers working with legacy systems. This comprehensive support approach helps you avoid disruptions and maintain smooth operations.

Conclusion

As the Drupal 7 ecosystem transitions into its extended support phase, HeroDevs is committed to delivering robust and proactive support for unsupported modules. Our dedication to maintaining security, functionality, and compatibility means you can rely on us to safeguard your Drupal 7 site and navigate the end-of-life transition with confidence. With HeroDevs by your side, you can focus on planning your migration or upgrades while we handle the challenges of unsupported modules. Contact us to learn more about Drupal 7 NES.

Today we are talking about Freemium Drupal Modules, The WordPress hub-bub, and Drupal, Now with AI with our hosts. We’ll also cover FullCalendar as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/471

• Freemium Drupal
• Wordpress controversy
• Drupal CMS and AI

• Dries Wordpress Blog Post
• Non-Code Contribution: Using your passion and skills to power open source.
• DrupalCon Barcelona Driesnote
• Drupal AI

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Aubrey Sambor - star-shaped.org starshaped Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted an interactive calendar to display your Drupal events with drag-and-drop rescheduling, and without using jQuery? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • FullCalendar
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Sep 2010 by ablondeau, though I’ve been behind the most recent releases
  • Versions available: 7.x-2.0 and 3.0.0-beta2 versions available, the latter of which supports Drupal 10 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release was this morning
  • Security coverage, though technically the 3.0.x branch will have it once it’s stable
  • Test coverage, minimal but on the roadmap
  • Documentation - does have a user guide, but created for the D7 version, so newer documentation is needed
  • Number of open issues: 337 open issues, none of which are bugs against the 3.0.x branch
• Usage stats:
  • 3,388 sites, though the vast majority of those are for the D7 version, since the 3.0.x branch is very new
• Module features and usage
  • No jQuery!
  • Lots of configurability plus some extras specifically for Drupal
    • Drag-and-drop to alter events
    • Option to require confirmation
    • Can display toast-style notifications when updates are save
    • Double-click on a day or time to create an event at that time
    • Can display events from different content types, even if they use different fields to store dates, and yes, even different kinds of fields, so a mixture of core and Smart Date fields will work
    • You can set default colors and output type (block or the newer, list-item display), and the ability to override color based on content type or a taxonomy reference
  • This module had been essentially dormant for over 4 years, but I decided to work with Jürgen Haas on reviving it after a similar and popular project called Fullcalendar View was not only marked as “Minimally maintained” and “Maintenance fixes only”, but the project page directed users to contact the maintainer to pay for a premium version, in order to use the current version of the Fullcalendar JS library, or to load events via AJAX, which as been an often-requested feature because Fullcalendar View has had common reports of performance problems on sites with lots of event data.
  • Worse, the maintainer has closed as “won’t fix” issues that had community-provided patches, because he only wanted to provide said improvements in the paid, premium version
  • In my work on the Events recipe for Drupal CMS, I knew that having a solid calendar would be important, and I didn’t feel good about relying on a module that seemed to be pushing users more and more towards a paid model. I’m grateful to Jurgen and everyone who worked on FullCalendar before us for creating such a robust and extensible code base

Tags

• Drupal
• OpenSource

• Read more about Community Driven Development
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In this era where websites are like storefronts for many businesses, there is an increasing need for strong and flexible CMS. More than 2.3 million websites worldwide, including some of the biggest and most complex digital platforms, use Drupal!
But, handling large Drupal projects for enterprises is a twist. As the need for complex digital experiences grows, managing such setups comes with many difficulties. You have to make certain that everything works smoothly together, from integrating well with current systems to keeping high-level safety measures intact while also optimizing performance to handle heavy traffic.

This is the fifth article in a series of articles about the Batch API in Drupal. The Batch API is a system in Drupal that allows data to be processed in small chunks in order to prevent timeout errors or memory problems.

So far in this series we have looked at creating a batch process using a form, followed by creating a batch class so that batches can be run through Drush, using the finished state to control batch processing and then processing CSV files through a batch process. All of these articles give a good grounding of how to use the Drupal Batch API.

In this article we will take a closer look at how the batch system processes items by creating a batch run inside an already running batch process. This will show how batch systems run and what happens when you try to add additional operations to a running batch.

Let's setup the initial batch operation.

Setting Up The Batch

The setup for this batch process is similar to the batch processes on the other articles. This will kick off a batch process that will process 1,000 items in chunks of 100 each.

Read more

With Drupal 7's end-of-life date of the 5th of January 2025 quickly approaching, I've recently seen again a number of companies offering support for Drupal 7 after its end-of-life date.

I've seen the same in corporate IT environments where they're running versions of software post their EOL date, so it's only Drupal 7, but I wonder if this is a good thing?

Is this deterring companies from upgrading if they know this is an option, or should everyone upgrade and we can move forward from Drupal 7 and other end-of-life software?

According to https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal, there are still 281,000 active Drupal 7 installations.

It's considerably less than before - this time last year, it was over 380,000 installations - but it's still a lot of Drupal 7 being used.

Drupal 7 reaches its end of life on January 5, 2025, creating an urgent need to upgrade to Drupal 10 to ensure your business success. Discover the benefits of migrating to Drupal 10, the challenges it presents, and a unique alternative to costly and labour-intensive traditional Drupal upgrades!