Gamification is the integration of game elements into non-gaming environments like websites to enhance user experiences. Its purpose is to make the user's experience more fun, motivating, and rewarding. Like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where players explore a big landscape full of problems and prizes, gamification adds excitement and advancement to typical digital platforms.
Drupal provides an excellent setting for incorporating gamification elements because it can adapt to changing needs. Like in the game, developers using Drupal can encourage users with rewards such as badges, points systems, and interactive tasks that create a feeling of accomplishment while also promoting involvement within the community.
This article provides a detailed look into combining gamification with Drupal's strong features. Grab a coffee, and let's begin our adventure utilizing Drupal's gamification.
Do you deploy changes to production on Fridays?
Some people don't as they're worried about potential issues occuring over the weekend.
When's the last time you did a deployment which caused a issue 24 or 48 hours later?
In my experience, most issues are visible immediately or shortly after a deployment and not days later.
Deploying on a Friday may not be as risky as you think.
Backend Engineer
A graduate of the University of Costa Rica with a passion for programming, Yuvania is driven to constantly improve, study, and learn new technologies to be better every day.
January 1, 1970
Preparing for Drupal 11 is crucial to ensure a smooth transition, and we’re here to help you make it easy and efficient. This guide offers clear steps to update your environment and modules, perform thorough tests, and use essential tools like Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector.
Don’t fall behind! Making sure your site is ready for the new features and improvements Drupal 11 brings will make the upgrade work quick and easy.
Read on to learn how to keep your site updated and future-proof.
Upgrade to Drupal 10.3. Before migrating to Drupal 11, update your site to Drupal 10.3 to handle all deprecations properly. Drupal 10.3 defines all deprecated code to be removed in Drupal 11, making it easier to prepare for the next major update.
Update contributed modules. Use Composer to update all contributed modules to versions compatible with Drupal 11. The Upgrade Status module will help identify deprecated modules and APIs. Ensure all modules are updated to avoid compatibility issues.
Fix custom code. Use Drupal Rector to identify and fix deprecations in your custom code. Drupal Rector automates much of the update process, leaving “to do” comments where manual intervention is needed. Perform a manual review of critical areas to ensure everything functions correctly.
Run tests in a safe environment. Conduct tests in a safe environment, such as a local sandbox or cloud IDE. It’s likely to fail at first, but it’s essential to run multiple tests until you achieve a successful result. Use:
composer update --dry-run to simulate the update without making changescomposer why-not drupal/core 11.0 if there are issues, identify which dependencies require an earlier version of DrupalCompatibility tools. Install and use the Upgrade Status module to ensure your site is ready. This module provides a detailed report on your site’s compatibility with Drupal 11. Check for compatibility issues in contributed projects on Drupal.org using the Project Update Bot.
Back up everything. Before updating, ensure you have a complete backup of your code and database. This is crucial to restore your site if something goes wrong during the update.
You may wonder if you should upgrade your site to Drupal 11 as soon as it’s available. Here are some pros and cons to consider:
While Drupal 10 will be supported for some time, it’s advisable to stay ahead with these updates to use the improvements they offer and ensure a smoother, optimized transition.
By following these steps and considerations, your Drupal site will be well prepared for the transition to Drupal 11, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted experience. Get ready for the new and exciting features Drupal 11 has to offer!
The post Get ready for Drupal 11: An essential guide appeared first on Four Kitchens.
This week's big issue was building a prototype for "Axe Thrower" so we can "throw" multiple URLs at AXE at the same time.
Images are an essential part of a website. They enhance the appeal of the site and make the user experience a more pleasant one. The challenge is finding the balance between enhancing the look of your website through the use of images and not jeopardizing performance. In this guide, we'll dig deep into how to find that balance by going over knowledge, techniques and practices that will provide you with a solid understanding of the best way to serve images to your visitors using the latest technologies and taking advantage of the advances of web browsers in recent years.
Hi, I hope you are ready to dig into responsive images. This is a seven-part guide that will cover everything you need to know about responsive images and how to manage them in a Drupal site. Although the excercises in this guide are Drupal-specific, the core principles of responsive images apply to any platform you use to build your sites.
Choosing Drupal as your CMS is a great place to start. Drupal has always been ahead of the game when it comes to managing images by providing features such as image compression, image styles, responsive images styles and media library to mention a few. All these features, and more, come out of the box in Drupal. In fact, most of what we will cover in this guide will be solely out of the box Drupal features. We may touch on third party or contrib techniques or tools but only to let you know what's available not as a hard requirement for managing images in Drupal.
It is important to become well-versed with the tools available in Drupal for managing images. Only then you will be able to make the most of those tools. Don't worry though, this guide will provide you with a lot of knowledge about all the pieces that take part in building a solid system for managing and serving responsive images.
Let's start by breaking down the topics this guide will cover:
<picture> HTML elementsrcset and sizes attributesA responsive image is one whose dimensions adjust to changes in screen resolutions. The concept of responsive images is one that developers and designers have been strugling with ever since Ethan Marcotte published his famous blog post, Responsive Web Design, back in 2010 followed by his book of the same title. The concept itself is pretty straight forward, serve the right image to any device type based on various factors such as screen resolution, internet speed, device orientation, viewport size, and others. The technique for achieving this concept is not as easy. I can honestly say that over 10 years after reponsive images were introduced, we are still trying to figure out the best way to render images that are responsive. Read more about responsive images.
So if the concept of responsive images is so simple, why don't we have one standard for effectively implementing it? Well, images are complicated. They bring with them all sorts of issues that can negatively impact a website if not properly handled. Some of these issues include: Resolution, file size or weight, file type, bandwidth demands, browser support, and more.
Some of these issues have been resolved by fast internet speeds available nowadays, better browser support for file tyes such as webp, as well as excellent image compression technologies. However, there are still some issues that will probably never go away and that's what makes this topic so complicated. One issue in particular is using poorly compressed images that are extremely big in file size. Unfortunately often times this is at the hands of people who lack the knowledge of creating images that are light in weight and properly compressed. So it's up to us, developers, to anticipate the problems and proactively address them.
If you are responsible for creating or working with images in an image editor such as Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, and others, you have great tools at your disposal to ensure your images are optimized and sized properly. You can play around with the image quality scale as you export your images and ensure they are not bigger than they need to be. There are many other tools that can help you with compression. One little tool I've been using for years is this little app called ImageOptim, which allows you to drop in your images in it and it compresses them saving you some file size and improving compression.
Depending on your requirements and environment, you could also look at using different file types for your images. One highly recommended image type is webp. With the ability to do lossless and lossy compression, webp provides significant improvements in file sizes while still maintaining your images high quality. The browser support for webp is excellent as it is supported by all major browsers, but do some research prior to start using it as there are some hosting platforms that do not support webp.
To give you an example of how good webp is, the image in the header of this blog post was originally exported from Photoshop as a .JPG, which resulted in a 317KB file size. This is not bad at all, but then I ran the image through the ImageOptim app and the file size was reduced to 120KB. That's a 62% file size reduction. Then I exported the same image from Photoshop but this time in .webp format and the file size became 93KB. That's 71% in file size reduction compared to the original JPG version.
By now it should be clear that the goal for serving images on any website is doing it by using the responsive images approach. The way you implement responsive images on your site may vary depending on your platform, available tools, and skillset. Regardless, the following CSS rule should always be available within your project base CSS styles and should apply to all images on your site:
img {
display: block;
max-width: 100%;
}
Easy right? That's it, we're done 😃
The CSS rule above will in fact make your images responsive (images will automatically adapt to the width of their containers/viewport). This rule should be added to your website's base styles so every image in your website becomes responsive by default. However, this should not be the extend of your responsive images solution. Although your images will be responsive with the CSS rule above, this does not address image compression nor optimization and this will result in performance issues if you are dealing with extremly large file sizes. Take a look at this example where the rule above is being used. Resize your browser to any width including super small to simulate a mobile device. Notice how the image automatically adapts to the width of the browser. Here's the problem though, the image in this example measures 5760x3840 pixels and it weights 6.7 MB. This means, even if your browser width is super narrow, and the image is resized to a very small visual size, you are still loading an image that is 6.7 MB in weight. No good 👎
In the next post of this series, we will begin the process of implementing a solution for handling responsive images the right way.
Navigate posts within this series
Building a custom Drupal theme nowadays is a more complex process than it used to be. Most themes require some kind of build tool such as Gulp, Grunt, Webpack or others to automate many of the repeatitive tasks we perform when working on the front-end. Tasks like compiling and minifying code, compressing images, linting code, and many more. As Atomic Web Design became a thing, things got more complicated because now if you are building components you need a styleguide or Design System to showcase and maintain those components. One of those design systems for me has been Patternlab. I started using Patternlab in all my Drupal projects almost ten years ago with great success. In addition, Patternlab has been the design system of choice at my place of work but one of my immediate tasks was to work on migrating to a different design system. We have a small team but were very excited about the challenge of finding and using a more modern and robust design system for our large multi-site Drupal environment.
After looking a various options for a design system, Storybook seemed to be the right choice for us for a couple of reasons: one, it has been around for about 10 years and during this time it has matured significantly, and two, it has become a very popular option in the Drupal ecosystem. In some ways, Storybook follows the same model as Drupal, it has a pretty active community and a very healthy ecosystem of plugins to extend its core functionality.
Storybook looks very promising as a design system for Drupal projects and with the recent release of Single Directory Components or SDC, and the new Storybook module, we think things can only get better for Drupal front-end development. Unfortunately for us, technical limitations in combination with our specific requirements, prevented us from using SDC or the Storybook module. Instead, we built our environment from scratch with a stand-alone integration of Storybook 8.
INFO: At the time of our implementation, TwigJS did not have the capability to resolve SDC's namespace. It appears this has been addressed and using SDC should now be possible with this custom setup. I haven't personally tried it and therefore I can't confirm.In choosing Storybook, we went through a rigorous research and testing process to ensure it will not only solve our immediate problems with our current environment, but it will be around as a long term solution. As part of this process, we also tested several available options like Emulsify and Gesso which would be great options for anyone looking for a ready-to-go system out of the box. Some of our requirements included:
The first and non-negotiable requirement was to be able to migrate components from Patternlab to a new design system with the least amount of refactoring as possible. We have a decent amount of components which have been built within the last year and the last thing we wanted was to have to rebuild them again because we are switching design system.
I personally have been faithful to Gulp as a front-end build tool for as long as I can remember because it did everything I needed done in a very efficient manner. The Drupal project we maintain also used Gulp, but as part of this migration, we wanted to see what other options were out there that could improve our workflow. The obvious choice seemed to be Webpack, but as we looked closer into this we learned about ViteJS, "The Next Genration Frontend Tooling". Vite delivers on its promise of being "blazing fast", and its ecosystem is great and growing, so we went with it.
CSS has drastically improved in recent years. It is now possible with plain CSS, to do many of the things you used to be able to only do with Sass or similar CSS Preprocessor. Eliminating Sass from our workflow meant we would also be able to get rid of many other node dependencies related to Sass. The goal for this project was to use plain CSS in combination with PostCSS and one bonus of using Vite is that Vite offers PostCSS processing out of the box without additional plugins or dependencies. Ofcourse if you want to do more advance PostCSS processing you will probably need some external dependencies.
Let's go over the steps to building the base of your new Drupal theme with ViteJS and Storybook. This will be at a high-level to callout only the most important and Drupal-related parts. This process will create a brand new theme. If you already have a theme you would like to use, make the appropriate changes to the instructions.
/web/themes/custom/)npm create vite@latest storybook
After the setup finishes you will have a basic Vite project running.
npx storybook@latest init --type react
npm run storybook
Twig templates are server-side templates which are normally rendered with TwigPHP to HTML by Drupal, but Storybook is a JS tool. TwigJS is the JS-equivalent of TwigPHP so that Storybook understands Twig. Let's install all dependencies needed for Storybook to work with Twig.
npm i -D vite-plugin-twig-drupal html-react-parser twig-drupal-filters @modyfi/vite-plugin-yaml
Update your vite.config.js so it makes use of the new extensions we just installed as well as configuring the namesapces for our components.
import { defineConfig } from "vite"
import yml from '@modyfi/vite-plugin-yaml';
import twig from 'vite-plugin-twig-drupal';
import { join } from "node:path"
export default defineConfig({
plugins: [
twig({
namespaces: {
components: join(__dirname, "./src/components"),
// Other namespaces maybe be added.
},
}),
// Allows Storybook to read data from YAML files.
yml(),
],
})
Out of the box, Storybook comes with main.js and preview.js inside the .storybook directory. These two files is where a lot of Storybook's configuration is done. We are going to define the location of our components, same location as we did in vite.config.js above (we'll create this directory shortly). We are also going to do a quick config inside preview.js for handling drupal filters.
stories: [
"../src/components/**/*.mdx",
"../src/components/**/*.stories.@(js|jsx|mjs|ts|tsx)",
],
/** @type { import('@storybook/react').Preview } */
import Twig from 'twig';
import drupalFilters from 'twig-drupal-filters';
function setupFilters(twig) {
twig.cache();
drupalFilters(twig);
return twig;
}
setupFilters(Twig);
const preview = {
parameters: {
controls: {
matchers: {
color: /(background|color)$/i,
date: /Date$/i,
},
},
},
};
export default preview;
With the current system in place we can start building components. We'll start with a very simple component to try things out first.
---
level: 2
modifier: 'title'
text: 'Welcome to your new Drupal theme with Storybook!'
url: 'https://mariohernandez.io'
<h{{ level|default(2) }}{% if modifier %} class="{{ modifier }}"{% endif %}>
{% if url %}
<a href="{{ url }}">{{ text }}</a>
{% else %}
<span>{{ text }}</span>
{% endif %}
</h{{ level|default(2) }}>
We have a simple title component that will print a title of anything you want. The level key allows us to change the heading level of the title (i.e. h1, h2, h3, etc.), and the modifier key allows us to pass a modifier class to the component, and the url will be helpful when our title needs to be a link to another page or component.
Currently the title component is not available in storybook. Storybook uses a special file to display each component as a story, the file name is component-name.stories.jsx.
/**
* First we import the `html-react-parser` extension to be able to
* parse HTML into react.
*/
import parse from 'html-react-parser';
/**
* Next we import the component's markup and logic (twig), data schema (yml),
* as well as any styles or JS the component may use.
*/
import title from './title.twig';
import data from './title.yml';
/**
* Next we define a default configuration for the component to use.
* These settings will be inherited by all stories of the component,
* shall the component have multiple variations.
* `component` is an arbitrary name assigned to the default configuration.
* `title` determines the location and name of the story in Storybook's sidebar.
* `render` uses the parser extension to render the component's html to react.
* `args` uses the variables defined in title.yml as react arguments.
*/
const component = {
title: 'Components/Title',
render: (args) => parse(title(args)),
args: { ...data },
};
/**
* Export the Title and render it in Storybook as a Story.
* The `name` key allows you to assign a name to each story of the component.
* For example: `Title`, `Title dark`, `Title light`, etc.
*/
export const TitleElement = {
name: 'Title',
};
/**
* Finally export the default object, `component`. Storybook/React requires this step.
*/
export default component;
npm run storybook
With Storybook running, the title component should look like the image below:
The controls highlighted at the bottom of the title allow you to change the values of each of the fields for the title.
I wanted to start with the simplest of components, the title, to show how Storybook, with help from the extensions we installed, understands Twig. The good news is that the same approach we took with the title component works on even more complex components. Even the React code we wrote does not change much on large components.
In the next blog post, we will build more components that nest smaller components, and we will also add Drupal related parts and configuration to our theme so we can begin using the theme in a Drupal site. Finally, we will integrate the components we built in Storybook with Drupal so our content can be rendered using the component we're building. Stay tuned. For now, if you want to grab a copy of all the code in this post, you can do so below.
Getting to this point was a team effort and I'd like to thank Chaz Chumley, a Senior Software Engineer, who did a lot of the configuration discussed in this post. In addition, I am thankful to the Emulsify and Gesso teams for letting us pick their brains during our research. Their help was critical in this process.
I hope this was helpful and if there is anything I can help you with in your journey of a Storybook-friendly Drupal theme, feel free to reach out.
Today, Beyond Blocks - the podcast I started last year and has 20 published episodes - passed 1,000 total downloads.
I've had some great guests on the show and discussed some interesting topics so far and I have others recorded and guests lined up for future episodes.
This week's episode will be with Eirik Morland again - the first returning guest - where we discuss the improvements and changes that have been made to Violinist.io since we spoke in January.
The first episode with Erik is here if you want to listen to it beforehand.
Thanks to all the guests and listeners of the podcast, and if you'd like to be a guest or suggest a topic, reply and let me know.