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We’re back with the latest monthly overview of top Drupal articles and news. We hope you enjoy our selection for May!
From Monoliths to Multi-Sites: Two Stories of Enterprise Drupal Website Migrations Done Right
First off, we have an article from amazee’s Martin Schlögl who shares two success stories of enterprise Drupal migrations, one of them involving a mission critical website with a focus on performance and scalability, and the other on scale, automation and developer enablement.
The first was the mission-critical Drupal 10 website of global tech leader Renesas, which needed a thorough refresh due to its complexity and a history of occasional downtime. The amazee team helped them deliver a structured, low-risk migration with zero downtime.
The second case study involves a global pharmaceutical company that needed a migration of over 180 decoupled Drupal sites in a multisite system, while also undergoing an internal IT migration. The amazee team took full ownership of the project and set up a standardised platform with an automated deployment process.
Read two Drupal migration success stories
Drupal AI: my first steps with AI module
The next article comes from Drupal developer Jo Fitzgerald who wrote about his first experience with the Drupal AI module, using it on a large website with a lot of old content, including product reviews that needed improved categorization.
Jo’s goal was to tag all of these review nodes with the relevant Make and Model of the products. He approached this by writing a custom Drush script to loop through the review nodes, then using AI (specifically, Google Gemini) to parse the Title and Body fields in order to obtain the Make and Model.
Read more about using AI in Drupal
5 Common Drupal Website Issues (and How Ongoing Maintenance Prevents Them)
Moving on, this article from Nadiia Nykolaichuk of ImageX breaks down 5 common Drupal website issues that arise with poor maintenance and negatively affect business. Good ongoing support and maintenance are able to not only resolve but in most cases altogether prevent these issues.
So, these are the 5 problems that poorly maintained Drupal websites are likely to encounter: slow performance and loading times; broken links and missing pages; broken functionality; poor accessibility; and cluttered content pages – all of which result in frustration and drive visitors away.
Read more about 5 common Drupal website issues
Drupal SEO: Best Modules, Optimization Tips & Advanced Strategies
Next up, we have an article from Acquia’s Matt Wetmore who takes a deep dive into search engine optimization for Drupal websites. The guide starts off with a breakdown of features that make Drupal a particularly SEO-friendly CMS, followed by a list of top Drupal SEO modules and a checklist for SEO best practices.
Besides the basics, Matt also covers some advanced Drupal SEO strategies, such as using AI-driven SEO tools, integrating advanced analytics and some sector-specific tips. He includes a section on technical SEO and UX before concluding with some frequently asked questions about SEO in Drupal.
How to Move from Drupal 7 to a Decoupled Architecture?
In the fifth article from May, Jesus Manuel Olivas of Octahedroid discusses decoupled architecture as a powerful upgrade to the large number of Drupal 7 sites that have been running this end-of-life version since January.
Jesus first explains what decoupled architecture is and what benefits it brings, as well as how their Drupal Decoupled approach simplifies a lot of the complexities typically associated with decoupled setups. He also provides a more detailed breakdown of what this decoupled stack includes.
One section of the article takes a look at real-world use cases of decoupled architecture bringing the biggest benefits, followed by a few cases where it might not be the best fit.
Read more about moving to decoupled Drupal from D7
Drupal Back-to-Basics - looking for a leader
We continue with an article from Michael Anello of DrupalEasy calling for someone to lead the Back-to-Basics initiative, which aims to support newcomers to the Drupal community by prioritizing more beginner-level sessions at Drupal events.
The main idea is to provide Drupal event organizers with 6 to 8 pre-planned presentations on beginner topics that can then be delivered by experienced speakers.
Mike identifies two main challenges here: limited availability of presentation slots for Drupal events, and presenter/session selection (i.e. allowing the same presenter to submit both a beginner-level and an advanced session for the same event).
Read more about Drupal Back-to-Basics
The Drupal Event Platform: a new stage of evolution
Another important article from May explores the history of the Drupal Event Platform, from its original inception by the Event Organizers Working Group, to its latest stage of evolution.
The recently released 2.0 branch of Event Platform can now implement a multi-event architecture to facilitate organizers of annual camps. The Event Horizon is another powerful feature that makes it easy to create custom themes for individual events.
You can also watch a recording of Martin Anderson-Clutz’s demo of the Event Platform from Drupal MidCamp, as well as an updated demo of the recent 2.0.0-beta4 release, to see it in action and learn more about everything it has to offer.
Read more about the Drupal Event Platform
Why Drupal’s Greatest Strength Might Be Its Biggest Marketing Challenge
The final article we’d like to include this month was written by Alejandro Moreno López for The Drop Times. He highlights that Drupal’s touted flexibility can sometimes be a weakness since there’s no particular area where it excels. However, he does point to Drupal’s no-code & low-code capabilities as something we should focus on when promoting Drupal.
Another problem which Alejandro exposes is that all of the hype around Drupal innovation is happening just in the Drupal echo chamber. A “guerrilla” approach to marketing may just be the best way to shift perception about Drupal and attract more people to give it a go.
