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!
DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 was one of our busiest yet. We were a platinum sponsor, sponsored the contribution room, had numerous social activities (including Trivia Night), and Annertechies took to the mic at least seven times.
This week as part of my "Editor Experience" work for LocalGov Drupal, I worked on creating a feature to allow editors to clone pages of their sites.
Drupal CMS (formerly known as Drupal Starshot) is set to revolutionise how non-technical users engage with Drupal, enabling them to get started with just a few clicks. From installing Drupal directly in the browser to swiftly selecting Recipes that tailor the site to their specific needs, along with utilising AI-driven site-building tools, Drupal CMS is transforming the introduction of non-developers to the platform.
Unsurprisingly, Drupal CMS was a hot topic at DrupalCon, where an entire track of talks was dedicated to the various initiatives that constitute one of the most ambitious changes in Drupal's history. Dries Buytaert, the co-founder of Drupal and an influential leader in the open-source community, provided invaluable insights in his keynote presentation, showcasing the latest enhancements in Drupal CMS.
This year, DrupalCon took place in Barcelona, and we were proud to be Platinum Sponsors. DrupalCon is a vibrant celebration of the Drupal community, bringing together developers, designers, marketers, and business leaders to share ideas, collaborate and innovate. This year we thoroughly enjoyed connecting with other Drupal users and makers.
Upgrading from Drupal 7 to the latest version opens up a range of benefits, allowing you to leverage a modern CMS. By enhancing areas like content structure, SEO, and security during migration, you can maximize the impact of your investment. But, without Drupal expertise, deciding what to change and improve can be overwhelming during the migration process. Our free checklist, built on Droptica’s experience with clients, helps you explore common migration improvements and decide which ones fit your needs.
The Technical Working Group (TWG) is announcing one coding standards change for final discussion. Feedback will be reviewed at the meeting scheduled for 23 October 2024 UTC.
The Coding Standards project page outlines the process for changing Drupal coding standards.
Join #coding-standards in Drupal Slack to meet and work with others on improving the Drupal coding standards. We work on improving our standards as well as implementing them in the core software.
Maps on websites are a useful addition, allowing users to reach, for example, your company headquarters in a simple way. Depending on the requirements, you can implement them in many different ways. This article will show you how to embed Google Maps in a Drupal website.
DrupalCon week! On Monday, we landed the last issue to achieve the 0.1 milestone: The XB annotations and labels should not change size when zooming — thanks Utkarsh “utkarsh_33”, Atul “soaratul” Dubey and Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri for guiding it across the finish line!
That was the only noteworthy commit of the week, because of Acquia’s team working full-time on Experience Builder (XB), Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins, Jesse “jessebaker” Baker, Lauri “lauriii” Timmanee and Bálint (he helped us achieve 0.1 on Monday and traveled on Tuesday!) were attending DrupalCon. Also at DrupalCon was Dave “longwave” Long, who we’re sponsoring part time.
So it was with a lot of satisfaction that I tagged the 0.1.0-alpha1 release on the morning of the DriesNote :)
With roughly half of the team at DrupalCon this week, and with 0.1.0 done, the rest of us pivoted to preparing for the next milestone: 0.2.0. Many technical details need to be figured out for the next batch of product requirements that Lauri prioritized (together with Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein).
We started research on:
During DrupalCon, Lauri, Ted, Alex, I met with with core committers Alex Pott, catch and Dave met to discuss XB’s JSON-based data storage model that XB currently implements. We’re not yet fully aligned (catch pointed out the search index aspect is important to support — the question is how to support that without compromising the UX Lauri envisions), but the discussion is much clearer today than it was in June, because there’s now concrete code to point to. That removed a lot of confusion on both “sides” (we’re all on the same side: we want the brightest future for Drupal!).
The meeting we had during DrupalCon led to:
{type: array, …} prop shapes issue and pushing it forward. First making this work would help prevent #3477428 (see prior point) going in a direction that would make it impossible to support type: array Single Directory Component (SDC) props, which should be represented by multi-value fields (fields configured for multiple cardinality). I made the back-end pieces work during DrupalCon, but to make it work end-to-end additional infrastructure on the client side is needed first. For that: see the last “research” bullet above.Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.
Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!
For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!
Of course, Dries included and demonstrated Experience Builder 0.1.0 during the DriesNote:
The XB section of the DriesNote starts at 50:44.
Lauri talked about what’s been happening with XB and what will happen next:
Many of the things Lauri shared with all of you had only been seen by Lauri, not by anybody else! :D
After his session, Lauri had many hallway conversations that increased our conviction that we’re on the right track with XB! :)
And in my humble opinion the most inspiring — Ben’s session about how XB uses parts of the JSX theme engine and Redux:
Ben walks you through how XB leverages React and Redux to achieve the UX we need, while using existing Drupal field widgets. This will become even more important once we integrate the content entity form, with field widgets for base and bundle fields.
You have to watch the 20 seconds starting at 1:37 — pure genius: not the predictable AI-generated images to illustrate his talk, instead … his son’s drawings! :D
I hope to follow in his footsteps at a future DrupalCon, because I too am becoming a dad, very soon! :D I’ll be working at a very reduced rate during my paternity leave, but will be keeping these weekly blog posts going — it’s my way of keeping myself in the loop as well as all of you. That is also why I’ve shifted attention to meta things, to ensure the right expertise is present in areas that need to keep moving during my upcoming paternity leave :)
Week 20 was September 23–29, 2024.
We’re asking Dave to weigh in on a number of areas, to point his critical, independent core committer eye to key decisions early on. ↩︎