drupal

Today we are talking about Drupal CMS Media Management, How media management has evolved, and Why managing our media is so important with our guest Tony Barker. We’ll also cover URL Embed as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/479

• What do we mean by media management in Drupal CMS
• How is it different from media in Drupal today
• Why is media management important
• How are you applying these changes to Drupal
• What phase are you in
• Will this be ready for Drupal CMS release in January
• What types of advanced media will supported
• Do you see it growing to replace some DAMs
• Are there future goals
• How did you get involved
• How can people get involved

• Track 15 Proposal for Media Management
• Issue to publish research on other CMS and the questionnaire results
• Vision for media management https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal_cms/issues/3488393
• Contributed module file upload field for media https://www.drupal.org/project/media_widget and these related modules
  • https://www.drupal.org/project/media_link
  • https://www.drupal.org/project/media_remote_embed
• Slack: #starshot-media-management and #starshot
• Drupal Core strategy for 2025-2028

Tony Barker - annertech.com tonypaulbarker

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Suzanne Dergacheva - evolvingweb.com pixelite

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted a simple way to insert oEmbed content on your Drupal site? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • URL Embed
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Sep 2014 by the venerable Dave Reid, though recent releases are by Mark Fullmer of the University of Texas at Austin
  • Versions available: 2.0.0-alpha3 and 3.0.0-beta1, the latter of which works with Drupal 10.1 or 11. That said, it does declare a dependency on the Embed project, which unfortunately doesn’t yet have a Drupal 11-ready release
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage technically, but needs a stable release
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation guide
  • Number of open issues: 63 open issues, 4 of which are bugs against the current branch
• Usage stats:
  • 7,088 sites
• Module features and usage
  • A content creator using this module only needs to provide a URL to the content they want to embed, as the name suggests
  • The module provides both a CKEditor plugin and a formatter for link fields. Note that you will also need to enable a provided filter plugin for any text formats where you want users to use the CKEditor button
  • Probably the critical distinction between how this module works and other elements of the media system is that this bypasses the media library, and as such is better suited to “one off” uses of remote content like videos, social media posts, and more
  • It’s also worth mentioning that the module provides a hook to modify the parameters that will be passed to the oEmbed host, for example to set the number of posts to return from Twitter
  • I could definitely see this as a valuable addition to the Event Platform that we’ve talked about previously on the podcast, but the lack of a Drupal 11-ready release for the Embed module is an obvious concern. So, if any of our listeners want to take that on, it would be a valuable contribution to the community

This week, all eyes are on DrupalCon Singapore 2024 — one of the most anticipated events in the Drupal community. Kicking off on Monday, the event has already garnered an enthusiastic response from attendees worldwide. Known for its engaging sessions, DrupalCon Singapore offers a unique opportunity to explore the present and future of Drupal. The Drop Times is here to provide comprehensive coverage with real-time updates, insightful news stories, and key highlights from the conference floor.  

DrupalCon is more than just an event; it's a pivotal moment in the Drupal community’s journey. It draws bright new talent while also sharpening the skills of seasoned contributors. This year’s event is especially significant, as it comes just weeks before the official launch of the all-new Drupal CMS on January 15, 2025. Attendees can expect exclusive insights into new developments and get a sneak peek at what’s on the horizon for Drupal.  

In addition to our DrupalCon coverage, we’re experimenting with a fresh, streamlined approach to our newsletter. Moving forward, you’ll receive a crisp, concise package of the most important stories from the past week. Our goal is to ensure you stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.  

So, let’s stay tuned for all the action from Singapore and beyond. Big changes are on the way for Drupal, and you won’t want to miss a thing!

DrupalCon Singapore 2024

• DrupalCon Singapore 2024: Spotlight on Sponsors Driving Innovation and Community Growth
• Meet the Speakers: DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Part 1
• Meet the Speakers: DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Part II
• Meet the Speakers: DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Part III
• Contribution Day at DrupalCon Singapore 2024: A Day of Collaboration and Innovation
• Networking Opportunities at DrupalCon Singapore 2024: Maximise Your Experience

Discover Drupal

• The New Drupal.org Homepage is Live!

Events

• Drupal Sapporo Meetup to Explore Integration with Open Source Applications on 26 December
• DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 T-Shirt Design Contest: Submit Your Entries by Dec 31
• TDT Is the Official Media Partner for DrupalCon Singapore 2024
• Banking on Open Source: Webinar Explores Open Source Success in Finance Sector

Organization News

• ImageX Recognized as a Great Place to Work for 5-Year in a Row
• Axelerant’s IDMC Digital Overhaul Earns Splash Awards Asia Nomination
• GovFlix: DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Splash Awards Finalist
• QED42’s ADA Project Finalist at Splash Awards 2024
• Transforming Digital Luxury Experience: Aqua Expeditions’ Website Revamp Journey

Strengthening your SEO game is essential! But are you taking all the proper measures to accomplish that? If not, then this blog is here to help you. With the help of a multilingual SEO, switching to your preferred language in a global website with just a prompt has become easy. 

But that's not all, there is more to it than what appears. In order to make your website content accessible to everyone, it is essential to be clear about what kind of SEO technicalities to use. And if ignored it might adversely affect your website's ranking. 

What Is Multilingual SEO?

Multilingual SEO is a technique that improves the accessibility of your website by getting rid of the language barrier. This process is based on the language to localize your website content into different languages by preference. In short, allowing you to reach more and more audiences beyond your region or country.

Welcome back to the ninth day of Drupal Advent Calendar, and behind today’s door we find the Media track of Drupal Starshot. Media Management is an area where Drupal has traditionally not been strong compared to other content management systems, yet it has a lot of very powerful features that Drupal CMS will hopefully refine to make it one of the best media management platforms on the web.

In the Track Leads keynote at DrupalCon Barcelona, Tony Barker, the Track Lead for Media Management in Drupal CMS, outlined how he is building the track to help marketers tell their story and connect with…

Tags

• media
• media management
• Drupal Starshot

Endorsed by Dries Buytaert in his keynote at DrupalCon Singapore, the Search Track is driving improvements in how users navigate and interact with content. Read the full interview with the Search Track Leads as they share their achievements, challenges, and future plans.

• Read more about Show a mix of future and past events
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Another automation we did for Programming Librarian, a site for librarians to plan educational programs, involved events. They wanted to always feature 3 events on the home page, and the most important events were in the future.

Today we are looking at another aspect of Drupal Starshot that may not generate a lot of excitement, but will make it a lot easier for the average marketer or Drupal site builder to make their site perform well and be easy to find.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has often been treated as something of a dark art. Any number of self-proclaimed masters of this art will promise to take your site to new levels, their ability to deliver varies greatly.

Drupal CMS aims to provide ready-to-use tools to help improve search engine performance, and “SEO Tools” is one of the “goals” offered during the…

Tags

• SEO
• search engine optimization
• Drupal Starshot

Your organization may use Drupal as a CMS, application framework, site builder, or all of the above. Within the context of this article about new features in the latest version, I'd like you to think about Drupal as a system.

It provides some standard pieces—things like content types, users and roles, taxonomies—and standard ways of connecting them to one another. But out of the box, it's sort of a jumble of pieces, and requires putting those pieces together for it to be meaningful.

A lot of the features that you'll see in Drupal 11.0 are developer-focused, and mostly benefit people who are building or maintaining sites, and your end users won't necessarily notice anything different. But there are some new features that can impact content administrators.

Content Admin

There's a new admin menu available using the Navigation module, which was brought into Drupal core as an experimental module. It's been a long time coming, and I think it's wonderful. It works well with the default Claro admin theme, and makes working in Drupal admin UI feel more modern and friendly. If you've used the Gin admin theme, the new menu will feel familiar, because it shares many of the same ideas.

There are some cool things in CKEditor 5 like markdown shortcuts similar to those we’re used to in Slack and Google Docs. For example, if you start typing something like 1-period-space, those tools automatically start creating a numbered list for you. It also supports other shortcuts like asterisks for bold, underscores for italics, or number-signs for heading levels. I prefer keyboard shortcuts wherever possible, and this makes working within CKEditor significantly faster. 

Recipes

Recipes are a way of packaging up configurations and settings that deliver a certain kind of functionality. In Drupal 11 core, there are recipes for things like the basic page content type, document media type, and editorial workflow. These are site features that previously were created during site installation using the Standard profile, which then became a permanent part of your project.

Recipes are applied rather than installed, so they don't end up becoming a dependency of your site, and therefore, you don't get locked in. You can remove modules or update configuration without changing the original recipe. And if the recipe changes, it doesn't change your site unless you reapply it.

Unlike configuration management, recipes aren't all-or-nothing – meaning you can make a recipe for broad, general functionality or something super specific. Because recipes are so flexible and don't create dependencies to themselves, they can be easily combined and shared, or adapted to fit your own needs.

For site owners, recipes will be really useful because it will make adding new features considerably faster because you can apply one or more recipes, rather than having to build everything up yourself. Because recipes are easily shareable, you'll also be able to find recipes created by others. In fact there's already a “Recipes Cookbook” on drupal.org with various site starters and functionality-specific recipes.

At Aten, our Drupal developers will be able to use recipes to quickly recreate commonly-needed features that our projects require. For example: installing Aten's Mercury Editor module, standing up our default Single Directory Components, configuring our QA service and module, or setting up search functionality. And they'll allow us to share our work with others in a way that doesn't bind them to all the parts of our standard processes.

Single Directory Components

Speaking of Single Directory Components, that module is now stable in Drupal 11.

Here we're using the term component as a piece of a web page that's modular and needs to be reusable. These are generic building blocks of pages that will appear throughout your site such as an accordion, call to action, banners, and slideshows.

Single Directory Components (SDC) are a way of organizing the files needed to display a single component (the Twig template, CSS, and JavaScript) into a folder. If you follow the naming conventions, Drupal will automatically generate a library to combine all of these for you. When you add an SDC to a page, Drupal will load the CSS and JavaScript for the components automatically.

Because SDCs are essentially self-contained, it's fairly easy to reuse them across different projects and entity types—things like Paragraphs or custom block types.

SDCs make the implementation of component libraries or design systems much easier because you can change Drupal's output to match whatever structure is needed.  Aten makes heavy use of Single Directory Components for projects using Mercury Editor, our drag-and-drop content authoring experience that allows editors to preview content changes in real time. 

Workspaces

The Workspaces module is stable in Drupal 11. Workspaces allow you to create multiple copies of your live site and within these copies, you can work on changes like content edits or structural changes, and then deploy those changes to the live workspace.

It can allow you to do things like test out menu changes, completely reorganize a section of your site; or maybe you have seasonal content that all needs to go live at the same time. You could work on those within a new workspace (or in multiple workspaces). And then when those changes are ready to go live, they all happen at once.

Currently, we can do that with individual pages using content moderation and workflow, but it's always been hard to work on a big set of changes over time and preview them. 

I've experimented with Workspaces in the past and with this stable release. Although I think it's a fantastic idea, because it's a different way of handling content changes, it may be incompatible with your content model or modules you're using.

If you're already doing anything with content moderation, layouts, or translations, Workspaces is going to add a new layer of complexity. It may require a lot of training and continued support before content administrators are comfortable with a new workflow. 

Time to upgrade

Now that I’ve laid out all of the new features of Drupal 11, it’s time to determine when and how to best upgrade your Drupal site. Get in touch with us for upgrade help.