Top Drupal blog posts from December 2021
Happy New Year, everyone! Let’s kick it off by revisiting some of the top Drupal blog posts written in the final month of 2021.
Drupal 9.3.0 is available
For the first post from December, we have Gábor Hojtsy’s announcement of the release of Drupal 9.3.0 and the new features that come with this release. One of the most significant updates has got to be the fact that Olivero, the fresh new front-end theme, is now stable, thanks to the efforts of contributors.
Other key features include experimental support for CKEditor 5, the inclusion of a new content editor role to the standard Drupal profile. In addition to these, there were some notable developer-specific optimizations, such as changes to the functionality of entity bundles and full support for PHP 8.
Read more about what’s new in Drupal 9.3.0
Update on elections for the Drupal Association board
The next post is Pedro Cambra’s update on the work of the Drupal Association, specifically the elections for the Drupal Association board. The main priority for the board right now was to form committees for the current term, and Pedro will act as the community committee head.
Thanks to Pedro’s efforts, the DA board has decided to form a new task force which will engage with the community to determine the future evolution of the election process for the at-large board position. Members of the community are encouraged to apply to participate, since the task force will need to be composed of diverse voices to truly represent the community.
Read more about the update on the DA board elections
An Introduction to Services, Plugins and Events in Drupal
In the third post, Evolving Web’s Dharizza Espinach provides a great guide to start working with services, plugins and events in Drupal. She starts off with a short introduction to object-oriented programming before moving on to the respective sections on services, plugins and events.
The post describes concepts such as dependency injection and describes how to inject dependencies to services, blocks and forms. It also covers Drupal’s Plugin system and the Plugin API, as well as dispatching and subscribing to an event. Dharizza concludes the post with some key tips on the best practices of working with the entities in question.
Read more about Drupal services, plugins and events
Why URLs Matter and How to Set Up Automatic URL Generation in Drupal
Next up is a guide to automatic URL generation in Drupal, written up by ImageX. Since well-structured, informative URLs are essential to good SEO rankings, you need to ensure that your URLs are reflective of the content they link to, rather than just using a generic default URL.
Luckily, Drupal has a convenient way of taking care of this automatically, so you don’t have to do it manually. This post by ImageX takes you through all the steps necessary to set this up, while also providing some extra information on the importance of well-thought-out URLs and how the process works in Drupal.
Read more about URL generation in Drupal
How to Set Up Responsive Images in Drupal 9
We continue with a post by Aaron Armstrong of Promet Source, who takes a deep dive into setting up responsive images in Drupal 9. With the steep rise in the demand for well-designed multichannel digital experiences, marked most notably by the super frequent use of smartphones, it’s becoming increasingly important to optimize the user experience by setting up responsive images.
Aaron goes through the steps necessary to set this up. First, of course, you need to install the Responsive Images module, then set up the desired breakpoints and create the image styles you’ll be using. After that, assign the created styles to the breakpoints and assign the Responsive Image Style to the Image Field. Finally, export the configuration as code, and voilà!
Read more about setting up responsive images in Drupal 9
Major Drupal configuration schema cheat sheet update - 7 years later
Rounding off December’s recap in balance, we’re closing with another post by Gábor Hojtsy, in which he shares a recently overhauled version of his Drupal configuration schema cheat sheet which he first released almost 7 years ago.
The new cheat sheet is twice as long as before and is tailored to Drupal 9, with some of its most important updates being more comprehensive examples and pointers to core definitions, alongside those specific to Drupal 9 and its latest minor versions.
Check out the Drupal 9 configuration schema cheat sheet
We hope you enjoyed our recap of December’s Drupal articles. Here’s to a happy and successful 2022!
