Top Drupal blog posts from October 2024

Here is our roundup of the most important Drupal-related news & top Drupal articles from October. We hope you enjoy (re)discovering them!

Solving the Maker-Taker problem

Recently, the entire situation around the WPEngine lawsuit has spurred a lot of drama and heated discussion not just in the WordPress community but in the broader open-source tech community due to the implications it has for open source as a whole. So, we’re kicking off this month’s overview with Dries Buytaert’s response & proposed solution to the issues that have precipitated the current situation.

Specifically, Dries focuses on the challenge of makers versus takers which he has previously written about, and highlights how the adoption of something similar to the Drupal contribution credit system could help other open source projects to better balance the two.

Nominate someone for the 2025 Aaron Winborn Award

The next important post to mention is the announcement of the opening of nominations for the 2025 Aaron Winborn Award, coming from Donna Bungard of the Drupal Community Working Group.

The award, established in honor of the legacy of Aaron Winborn, a long-time Drupal contributor who lost his battle with ALS / Lou Gehrig's Disease in March of 2015, is intended to recognize individuals who go above and beyond in their commitment to the Drupal community and the values it represents.

Nominations will be open until February 1, 2025, and community members are encouraged to nominate anyone whose positive impact on the Drupal community, either globally or locally.

Why Drupal module developers should be excited about object-oriented hooks

In this next article on the DrupalEasy blog, Michael Anello / ultimike shares his excitement about an upcoming feature planned for Drupal 11.1 – object-oriented hook implementations. This is particularly significant since hooks have been one of the few parts of Drupal Core that hadn’t yet moved to the object-oriented programming approach of modern PHP.

With this new approach, developers will be able to write classes which include methods to act as hook implementations. Since these classes are services, they offer better performance than the old approach using PHP functions. Additionally, this comes with built-in backwards compatibility for Drupal versions from 10.1 to 11.0.

Is Drupal the Right fit? T-Shirt Sizing for Your Next Website Project

Moving on, we have an article from Evolving Web’s Suzanne Dergacheva, a member of the leadership team for the upcoming Drupal CMS, who writes about how Drupal provides such great support for the three different main types of websites.

These three areas that Suzanne covers are: using Drupal as simply a CMS platform, using it as the backbone of a digital strategy, and as a marketing microsite which is designed to scale with time. For each of these common use cases, she goes into detail on the specific features and capabilities of Drupal that make it such a great fit for that particular case.

Who is using Drupal

Following up on the previous article, we have an excellent breakdown of Drupal market adoption from Shivan Jaikaran of Salsa Digital. His detailed article covers trends in Drupal usage statistics, as well as the demographics of companies and organizations using Drupal. He also takes a look at what makes Drupal the CMS of choice for these industries.

A particular section focuses on the value Drupal can bring to enterprise-level businesses which require complex and high-traffic site management. Shivan also includes a few case studies of organizations using Drupal, such as MIT and the University of Oxford, and finishes with a look at Drupal’s security advantages.

Drupal CMS: A New Era for Non-Technical Users

In the next article from October, James Davidson of CTI Digital explores how the new Drupal CMS is going to revolutionize the user experience of Drupal for non-technical people working with it.

The article breaks down several key elements, with the first one being Drupal Recipes which accelerate experience creation by bundling together common functionalities, configurations and content.

Also very important are Drupal’s AI initiative and the coming Drupal Experience Builder, an improvement upon the Layout Builder. In closing, James also emphasizes the importance of the vibrant Drupal community.

Drupal CMS base recipe update for initial release

Speaking of Drupal CMS, next on our list for this month is Pamela Barone’s update on the current state of the base recipe of Drupal CMS before its initial release. This base recipe is intended to effectively replace the traditional Drupal install profile in Drupal CMS through a pre-installed set of themes and modules using Recipes.

The out-of-the-box functionality to include in this base recipe was decided based on a recent community survey and market research and benchmarking of competitors. Drupal CMS is planned to launch on 15 January 2025 and will provide this base recipe in its initial version, with more features planned for future releases.

A Eulogy for Drupal 7

We conclude this month’s overview with Pantheon’s Josh Koenig’s eulogy for the long standing version 7 of Drupal whose time is finally coming to an end with its EOL planned for January 2025. Released in 2011, Drupal 7 has been the most popular version of the CMS for close to 14 years.

As Josh highlights in his article, Drupal 7 powered over one million websites at its peak in 2016, owing much of that popularity to its versatility, i.e. its ability to power anything from personal blogs to complex web applications. One of his key conclusions is that Drupal 7 was ahead of its time in terms of its value proposition, offering features such as WYSIWYG full-site editing long before other now dominant platforms and editors.

Read Josh Koenig’s eulogy for Drupal 7

Posted by Tim on 08 Nov 2024 in Drupal