On today's show we are talking with Nic. This is our chance to learn more about our beloved Talking Drupal show host.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/XXX
TopicsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
HostsStephen Cross-@stephencross
January 5, 2025, marks the end of an era in web development— Drupal 7's final End of Life (EOL). Since its release in early 2011, Drupal 7 has reigned as the most widely used version of Drupal worldwide, powering millions of websites and leaving a lasting legacy in the open-source community.
With over 14 years of service, Drupal 7 demonstrated exceptional stability and flexibility. It introduced game-changing features like the Entity API, Views in core, and a modernized admin interface that appealed to developers and content creators alike. These advancements enabled users to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise-grade websites with ease.
Drupal 7's reach was unmatched. At its peak, it powered over 1.3 million websites, including high-profile organizations, educational institutions, and government platforms. Its vibrant community of contributors and extensive library of contributed modules made it a powerhouse for innovation and customization.
However, as technology evolved, the Drupal ecosystem shifted toward a more modern architecture. While Drupal 8 and subsequent versions introduced significant advancements, the transition required a complete reimagining of how Drupal sites were built, leaving Drupal 7’s legacy to shine as a testament to its time.
Now, as Drupal 7 officially bows out, it leaves us with a sense of pride for its role in shaping the web as we know it. This milestone coincides with the anticipation surrounding the launch of the Drupal CMS, signaling an exciting new chapter for the community.
To all who have built, maintained, and relied on Drupal 7, we thank you for being part of its incredible journey. Its impact will not be forgotten.
Let's have a look the important stories from the past week.
Pantheon Content Publisher: Working Back to the Roots of Innovation - The Drop Times in conversation with Chris Yates and Roland Benedetti
To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.
Thank you,
Sincerely
Thomas Alias K
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.
For your Drupal website, the OpenAI module is a sophisticated solution that supports a wide range of OpenAI/ChatGPT functionalities. It has an API basis for smooth integration and an amazing collection of submodules.
Notably, the module was among the first to use ChatGPT for Drupal, with its initial release being in January 2023. The module is called OpenAI / ChatGPT / AI Search Integration in its entirety. Although it is still in the alpha stage, it is being developed constantly from the best drupal development company. It won't function on older versions of Drupal because it was made especially for Drupal 10, the most recent major version.
Here are some of the submodules included:
Drupal is incredibly flexible and scalable. Thanks to this, you can ensure the efficient operation of websites, personal online blogs, web applications, and other online projects.
That's where the latest Drupal ECA module comes into play. It can be easily adapted to Drupal e-commerce and takes advantage of the vast possibilities of collaboration.
Wouldn't it be great if your Drupal website could respond to events in a personalized way? One of the ideas is sending a special discount after a customer's fifth purchase or automatically adjusting stock levels when a product is added to a cart. That's where the ECA module comes in! It's a powerful Drupal module that lets you create custom "rules" for your site based on triggers, checks, and results.
Experience the much anticipated new Drupal CMS by testing the Release Candidate now—whether you're a developer, marketer, content editor or designer there's now an option for you too!
The Event Organizer Working Group marked two major milestones in 2024. First, it’s been 5 years since our charter was established in 2019. Second, 2024 is the final year of service for the last two of our founding board members.
Community events have changed drastically in this relatively short period, but our mission has not.
The Event Organizers Working Group supports community-led teams to grow Drupal through local events. Our vision is to establish a worldwide network of Drupal experts who organize events and aid one another to do the same.
This year, the group has focused on three major initiatives - growing our central source for promoting community events, building a reusable platform for running community events, and continuing to get the word out about our resources.
Launched in 2020, the Drupal Community Events page is intended to serve as a consolidated listing of Drupal events across the world to facilitate promotion, encourage collaboration, and give the community more data about what’s happening in the space.
In 2024, almost 300 events were posted in over 30 countries, bringing the total number of events posted in 4 years to over 1100! We saw a surge in Local Meetup postings, with many events shifting their postings from other platforms.
Download a PDF of this data and events broken down by country.
At DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023, we began an effort to refine the display of the Drupal Community Events listing - the data was good, but the display had become cluttered.
During Drupalcon we iterated on some ideas but lost momentum during the post-DrupalCon/summer slump. With support from b_man and drumm, we were given access to a Drupal.org dev environment and were able to mock up changes to /community/events’ Panels and styles. These changes consolidated the page into a single list of events, with a legend providing access to events filtered by type.
At DrupalCon Portland 2024, we gathered our forces once again and completed a review of the changes. The Drupal Association team committed them soon after. Community members are welcome to review the new design for /community/events and share any other feedback you might have on the meta-issue.
After a major development push in 2023, the Events Platform continues to move forward thanks to mandclu. Two minor releases have been pushed this year, including one major minor that introduces Drupal 11 support! Martin did a presentation on the Events Platform at the DrupalCon Portland 2024 Community Summit and documentation has also been greatly improved.
DrupalCamp NJ and PNW Drupal Summit both spun up new sites with the platform, as did DrupalCamp Berlin, who also wrote up a fantastic blog post about their build. If you know of another site using the Events Platform, please let us know.
We’ve continued making connections between event organizers virtually and in person. Our monthly open meeting via Slack on the 2nd Tuesday of the month starting at 16:00 UTC / 12:00 pm ET (listed on a Google Calendar) has been a great way for organizers to share information and catch up on what’s going on.
Other ways to get in touch:
With leslieg and I (froboy) rolling off the board after two full terms and a new slate of board members and advisors joining, the EOWG has a bright future ahead of it. Volunteer-driven events need all the support we can give them in the best of times, and the power of community continues to drive the Drupal project forward.
Thanks to everyone participating in Drupal community events and the Event Organizer Working Group this year. We’re all important in keeping “... stay for the community” alive.
File attachments: 2024 Events by type.png EOWG 2024 Year in Review - Pie chart 1 - Pie.pdfWhen writing data to the queue database system Drupal will convert the information to a string using the PHP serialize() function. When the information is pulled out of the database the queue system will unserialize() the data to convert it back into the original information.
When you first start using the queue system you will probably use an array or the PHP stdClass object to store the information on your queue. Whilst this works, the information they contain is pretty free form and makes testing or working with the data a little cumbersome.
A much better way of storing data is by creating an object of a known type and using that as the storage medium for the queue.
This technique of using an object to pass data around different parts of your system is known as Data Transfer Objects (DTO). This allows you to present data in a unified way across your application. This is a design pattern that standardizes how a particular bit of data is passed around, without having to resort to using arrays to accomplish the same job.
In this article we will look at creating a DTO for use in the queue API in Drupal, and how the use of DTOs can protect our queue processing from errors by rejecting items from the queue.
All of the code seen in this article is available on the accompanying GitHub repository that shows a few examples of running the Queue API in Drupal.
A DTO in PHP is just a normal class, the key difference is that we use the readonly class (since PHP 8.2) syntax, which means that all properties can only be written once (in the constructor). We do this to prevent the data in the object from being altered after it is created.
It is generally a good idea to create interfaces for our objects so that we can check to make sure that
