Top Drupal blog posts from January 2024
We’re back with our monthly overview of the top Drupal blog posts! Here are our favorites from January.
Introducing: the bounty program
First up, we have an announcement from the Drupal Association’s Alex Moreno about the introduction of a credit bounty program intended to maximize the impact of contributions from members of the Drupal community.
He lists 4 critical issues that will be included in the pilot version of the program and which maintainers need the most help with. For these issues, the reward will be 5 times the regular amount.
As Alex states, if the initial phase of the bounty program is impactful enough, the plan is to tweak and expand it going forward; he invites everyone to reach out to him with any questions and/or suggestions.
Read more about the credit bounty program
How to set up a local development environment (LDE) for Drupal
Moving on with our selection for this month, we have a guide showing how to set up a local development environment (LDE) for Drupal from David Rodríguez Vicente on his blog The Russian Lullaby. He first explains what an LDE is and what readers will accomplish by going through his guide, then proceeds with the software requirements.
The first thing to do is to set up a lightweight local environment for PHP, and then a heavyweight local environment based on software containers with DDEV. Finally, you need to set up an IDE for Drupal development, which includes VSCode, XDebug and PHP Codesniffer.
Read more about setting up a LDE for Drupal
Spotlight on Symfony in Drupal
Next up, we have a four part series of articles about using Symfony in Drupal by Blake Hall of Drupalize.Me. Part one focuses on the HttpKernel Component, a key Symfony component for coordinating the request/response cycle in Drupal. Part two is then dedicated to Symfony’s event dispatcher.
In part three, Blake takes a look at Symfony’s Routing component and how it can be enhanced with Drupal. In the fourth and final post, he focuses on utility components, i.e. other Symfony components which provide useful functionality, such as Console, Yaml, Polyfill, Serializer, etc.
Read part one about Symfony in Drupal
Planning Your Drupal 7 Migration: The to-do list you can't do without
Fourth on this month’s list, this article from Stella Power of Annertech provides 6 key tips to ensure a smooth and successful migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. The first step is conducting a comprehensive content audit, followed by an assessment of your current Drupal 7 website and choosing the migration approach which is the best fit for you.
Step four demands evaluating the suitability of your existing modules and finding alternatives for unsuitable ones. The next crucial step is planning for your data migration. The sixth and final step then involves thorough testing and other post-migration activities such as SEO optimization.
Read more about planning a Drupal 7 migration
Why you need to start upgrading from Drupal 7 now
This next post comes from Oliver Davies who also wrote about upgrading from Drupal 7 to a more modern version of the platform. Even though the Drupal 7 end of life is almost a year away (the final extension lasts until January 2025), Oliver emphasizes the need to start planning the migration now rather than waiting.
More than 330,000 websites are still on Drupal 7, and upgrading requires a lot of time and effort, particularly due to the abundance of custom modules and themes, many of which may be contributed by community members and potentially outdated since the priority has been functionality for newer Drupal versions.
Read more about the need to upgrade from Drupal 7
Symfony Messenger
We continue with another series of articles related to Symfony and Drupal, this time coming from PreviousNext’s Daniel Phin and focusing on Symfony Messenger. Part one covers the features of Symfony Messenger; part two focuses on message and message handlers, as well as how Messenger compares to Drupal’s @QueueWorker.
Part three of the series covers the Consume command and prioritized messages. Part four then covers automatic message scheduling and how Symfony Scheduler can replace Drupal’s hook_cron. In part five, Daniel shows how to add real-time processing to QueueWorker plugins.
Part six shows how to integrate Messenger with Symfony Mailer. Part seven focuses on displaying notifications of processed Messages. Finally, part eight takes a look at the future of Symfony Messenger in Drupal.
Read part 1 of Symfony Messenger in Drupal
How Much Does it Cost to Migrate from Drupal 7 to 10
Nearing the end of our selection from January, we have another article about upgrading from Drupal 7, this one written by Promet Source’s Sonal Bendle and focusing specifically on the costs of migrating from Drupal 7 to the current latest version, Drupal 10.
Sonal’s article starts off with a breakdown of what a Drupal migration is and the different elements that it requires. As she points out, the factors concerning design and/or themes are particularly important to keep in mind when planning the migration.
A key section of the article is dedicated to an overview of the essential migration scope, complete with both a pre-migration assessment table as well as a D7 to D10 content migration cost estimation table.
Read more about the costs of upgrading from D7 to D10
A Selfish Exercise in Selfless Commitment: Conversation with Michael Anello
For the final piece on this month’s selection, we have an interview with Michael Anello / ultimike, by Alka Elizabeth of The DropTimes, in which he shares his journey of Drupal contribution and mentoring. As he states in this interview, teaching others has been a bit of a selfish exercise for him, since it made him learn things much more in depth.
Michael also speaks more generally about his introduction to and experience with Drupal, as well as some of the contributions that he is most proud of. He finishes by reflecting on the biggest challenges of the past year and looking ahead to what this year will bring.
Read more about Michael Anello and his Drupal journey
That’s it for this month’s selection of articles. Stay tuned for more Drupal-related news and interviews coming soon to our blog!
