April gave us a lot of great Drupal-related content. Here are some of our favorite reads and most important news from the Drupal community.
Drupal 11.0.0-alpha 1 will be released on the week of April 29, 2024
The first entry on this month’s overview is Gábor Hojtsy’s announcement of the release of Drupal 11.0.0-alpha 1 which took place on the week of April 29. This release is intended to help the Drupal community prepare for the full Drupal 11 release which is currently planned for either the week of July 29 of this year.
This release also makes it possible for DrupalCon Portland attendees to already try out Drupal 11 and modules can check for D11 compatibility. If everything goes well with the PHPUnit 10 update and other key issues, a beta release of Drupal 11 is expected shortly after May 10.
Read more about the Drupal 11.0.0-alpha 1 release
How to create a partial date field in Drupal (i.e. Year & Month without Day)
Next we have a guide from Ashraf Abed, CEO of Debug Academy, on how to create a partial date field in Drupal. In the first part of the article, Ashraf shows how to hide the time from a Drupal date field, including creating a new date field and hiding the time input in a form. This is all pretty straightforward thanks to Drupal’s highly configurable date field display.
The second half of the article focuses on removing the day or month in Drupal forms inputs, which is more complex and requires some custom code, which includes creating a custom module.
Read more about creating a partial date field in Drupal
cspell and drupalorg CLI: two useful tools for Drupal contrib module maintainers
In the next article from last month, Michael Anello of DrupalEasy showcases two tools that can help Drupal contrib module maintainers improve both code quality and the quality of the modules’ release notes.
The first of these is cspell, a Node.js spell-checker for code which has recently been made available in the default Drupal GitLab templates. You’re able to modify cspell’s default wordlist with a custom wordlist specific to Drupal development.
The second tool showcased is drupalorg CLI, a command-line interface maintained by Matt Glaman which allows contributors to interact with drupal.org through a substantial list of available commands.
Read more about cspell and drupalorg CLI
Drupal needs infrastructure innovation
We continue this month’s selection with a blog post by Théodore Biadala (nod_) who wrote about the need for Drupal to innovate its infrastructure in order to alleviate the costs of hosting and maintenance.
While several Drupal initiatives such as Automatic Updates and Project Browser are already underway, nod_ argues that these aren’t enough and that Drupal could scale down by using FrankenPHP as the default way of putting a Drupal website on production.
This would boost performance while simultaneously making it easier to host and maintain a Drupal site. The post also includes a short step-by-step guide to enable it.
Read more about Drupal infrastructure innovation with FrankenPHP
Learning Drupal with the Help of an AI Tutor
Moving on, we have an article from Joe Shindelar of Drupalize.Me which shows how an AI tutor could be valuable for someone learning Drupal. A mentor or tutor is pretty much essential to achieve any sort of mastery of Drupal, but tutorship tends to be expensive and difficult to get at scale.
To tackle these two challenges, Joe proposes using AI as a tutor when learning Drupal, since it’s widely accessible as well as much more affordable than human tutors. He notes the challenges and risks of an AI tutor in addition to providing tips on getting the most out of such a tutorship as well as a recommended prompt template.
Read more about learning Drupal with the help of AI
Migrating Your Data from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10:
Source Site Audit - A High Level OverviewThe sixth article comes from Mauricio Dinarte of Tag1 Consulting and is part of their series on Drupal migration. This particular article focuses on the importance of being familiar with and understanding the source site, more specifically dealing with a high-level overview of the site’s architecture.
Firstly, out of date functionality and unused content do not need to be migrated to the new Drupal website. Other key considerations include whether or not the source site is multilingual, how modules are used on it, whether or not the same installation is used for several sites, and in cases where a distribution is used, checking if the latest version is available.
Read more about source site audits for Drupal
Unveiling the Power of Drupal: Your Ultimate Choice for Web Development
Next up, we have a blog post by Iwantha Lekamge on the Drupal Association blog which highlights the benefits of using Drupal for web development ahead of DrupalCon 2024 which took place the week of May 6 in Portland, Oregon.
The aspects that Iwantha’s post highlights are: open-source excellence; flexibility and scalability; outstanding content management capabilities; streamlined security; mobile responsiveness; and support of an active, thriving community that promotes collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Read more about the benefits of Drupal in web development
Evolving Drupal's Layout Builder to an Experience Builder
Last but most certainly not least, we have an article from Drupal founder and project lead Dries Buytaert who announced the evolution of the Drupal Layout Builder into the Experience Builder.
This is essentially a continuation of the efforts of the Next Generation Page Builder initiative announced last year at DrupalCon Lille, but with the broadened scope of integrating basic theming capabilities.
After the exploration of different options for this new initiative, including switching to the WordPress Gutenberg editor and adopting Paragraphs, the Drupal Core Committer team decided that the best approach would be to expand the Layout Builder while incorporating the best features of Drupal Paragraphs.
Read more about the Drupal Experience Builder
We hope you enjoyed this month’s overview of the top Drupal articles. Make sure you don’t miss the recap for May coming next month!
Posted by Tim on 14 May 2024 in Drupal