With the release of Drupal 11 and constant important updates on the Drupal Starshot initiative, August brought so many fantastic Drupal articles that it was particularly tough making our selection for this month. We hope you enjoy revisiting all the goings-on!
Drupal launches Drupal 11, the latest version of the Open Source CMS
Of course, we’re starting with the obvious one – the announcement of the latest major Drupal release, version 11, which took place on the very first day of August.
Drupal 11 continues the long-standing CMS’s commitment to its core strengths, empowering its users even more with a refreshed navigation experience, the experimental Recipes feature, stable single-directory components, and other benefits such as significant performance improvements thanks to PHP 8.3 as its dependency. More key features are planned for future minor releases of Drupal 11.
Read the Drupal 11 press release
Drupal 11: What’s New and What’s Next
Where we find out even more about the new Drupal 11 release is in this next August article from Lullabot’s Matt Robison. One of the first things he highlights is the preliminary work done for the Drupal Starshot project, which the core new features of Drupal 11.x minor releases will help support.
In addition to the new features mentioned in the official press release from the Drupal Association, Matt also highlights the new experimental navigation module, a stable Workspaces module, the new Access Policy API and more, including which modules have been removed from Drupal Core to make it smaller.
Drupal CMS: the official name for Drupal Starshot
We continue with the announcement by Dries that Drupal CMS is indeed going to be the official name for the product developed by the Drupal Starshot initiative.
Through testing with both newcomers and seasoned Drupal users, the inclusion of the term “CMS” has been proved to be beneficial in clearly communicating exactly what the product is and does.
As Dries also states, the unofficial name “Drupal Starshot” will most likely be retired after the release of the first version of Drupal CMS.
Read more about the official name for Drupal Starshot
Drupal Core Contribution Guide
Next up, we have a contribution guide to Drupal Core by Mariano D'Agostino of Gizra which is mainly intended to assist new Drupal developers getting started contributing to Core.
In the first part, Mariano covers the installation of Drupal, with DDEV being the most convenient option (he provides an alternative approach at the end of the article, coming from Joachim Noreiko).
The second part of the guide covers running tests and using essential tools for performing local checks and leveraging continuous integration for code validation, including debugging with VS Code or PhpStorm.
Read more about the Drupal Core contribution guide
Interview With Keynote Speaker, Preston So
The next article from August that we want to highlight is this interview with Preston So with Twin Cities Drupal Camp. Preston first talks about his current job as vice president of product at dotCMS before the interview continues with the topic of non-traditional interfaces and voice content, about which he has written a lot, including a book titled Voice Content and Usability.
Another topic that the interview covers is Preston’s interest in linguistics and love of learning languages. Finally, Preston talks more about his keynote speech which he gave at the Twin Cities Drupal Camp this past weekend, which was about the idea of the “universal CMS”, intended to bridge the divide between traditional and headless CMSs.
Preparing for Drupal 7 End of Life: Key Steps to Take Now
Moving on, we have a short guide from the Drupal Association breaking down the key steps to take now in order to prepare for the end of life of Drupal 7 coming in January 2025.
The first things to do are conducting a comprehensive site audit and planning the migration strategy. Next comes the selection of a certified migration partner, updating the hosting environment, and creating a back and setting up a testing environment.
Finally, you’ll be able to execute the actual migration, after which you shouldn’t forget about important post-migration steps such as a final site audit and any performance optimizations.
Read more about preparing for Drupal 7’s EOL
Introducing Drupal Starshot's product strategy
We’re concluding this month’s overview with two more important announcements regarding Drupal Starshot, the first being Dries’s breakdown of the Starshot product strategy, which will serve as the foundation for the project’s development and help align its different moving parts towards a common vision.
In short, Drupal Starshot aims to provide the ideal tool for marketers who need to build great digital experiences. The aim here is twofold, both enabling as much of Drupal’s functionality without the need of an IDE, and increasing Drupal’s presence in the mid-market segment. It will include features such as AI-assisted site building along with the already streamlined content management capabilities of Drupal.
Read more about the Drupal Starshot product strategy
Growing the Starshot team with new track leads
The second of the two Starshot articles and our final article for this month is the announcement of new Starshot track leads, coming from Pamela Barone. These experienced individuals from the Drupal community are leading the work being done for a particular track of Drupal Starshot.
These 10 tracks are: Blog recipe, Privacy, Dashboard, Sitewide SEO recipe, AI, Media management, Advanced search, Accessibility tools, Analytics and Multilingual content. The Concurrent editing track will be postponed until the development of the Experience Builder takes off.
Additionally, there are still 3 tracks left without an assigned lead; Starshot documentation, Contact form and Content publishing workflows, which you can apply for.
