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Like each month, we’re bringing you an overview of our favorite Drupal articles from the month before. We hope you enjoy our selection for this month!
What to Do With Your Drupal 7 Website
Thanks to the recent extension to the end-of-life date for Drupal 7, many D7 site owners are still not decided on the best way forward for these websites. The first article on our list for March, coming from Matt Robison of Lullabot, explores the different options available to them.
The first key question to ask is whether – or rather, how long – you’re going to stay on Drupal 7, taking into account both the risks and inflexibility of this decision. This means you’ll likely be left with three options: upgrading to the latest version of Drupal; moving to Backdrop CMS, which is a fork of Drupal 7; or moving to a completely different CMS.
Read more about what to do with you D7 site
Building Decoupled Drupal
Next up, we have a two-post series about decoupled Drupal, written by Evolving Web’s Don Lalicon. The first part focuses on the different application types to choose from when decoupling – namely, building an SPA or single-page application, using SSR for a server-rendered application, or using a static site generator.
In part two, Don focuses on the more practical information that will actually help you implement your choice. The main things to keep in consideration are routing, JSON:API requests and content previewing. He concludes the series by providing some extra tips and resources to help you ensure as smooth an implementation as possible.
Read Part 1: Choosing Your ApplicationRead Part 2: Tips and Resources to Implement It
My official resignation for the DA board
We continue with Pedro Cambra’s latest, and apparently final update to his journey on the Drupal Association Board, as he unfortunately just announced his resignation from the board in this post.
As he states, the main reason for his stepping down was not being able to get any traction on the issue of the new process for electing new Drupal Association Board members, even after unsuccessfully attempting to engage community members to participate by joining the Community Elections Task Force.
Read more about Pedro Cambra’s resignation from the DA board
Your Team's Technical Guide to Drupal Code Reviews
The fourth post is a comprehensive guide to Drupal code reviews, by Andy Carlberg of Bounteous and structured as a checklist which you can follow to make sure you’re ticking all the boxes. The post starts off with a section on creating a pull request, followed by one emphasizing the importance of reviewing with empathy.
After the two introductory sections, Andy gets to the meat of the article, actually performing the code review. He first presents the general approach, then moves on to the more Drupal-specific way. The key things to consider here are security, documentation, coding style and standards, and Drupal’s API-first approach.
Read more about Drupal code reviews
Five basic things I’ve learned using GraphQL in Drupal
In the next post, David Rodríguez breaks down 5 lessons that he’s learned through using GraphQL in Drupal. He gives some context for the article in the introduction, following that up with a short section on installing GraphQL in Drupal before listing the 5 key lessons of using the two technologies together.
These are: aligning file name and resources; respecting the order of the parameters; enabling debugging mode; maintaining clean code & refactoring; and, lastly, the context in which using GraphQL isn’t the optimal approach. David rounds off the article with a list of additional resources for learning more about GraphQL and Drupal, from Amazee Labs.
Read more about using GraphQL in Drupal
Did You Know? 4 Fun Facts about Drupal
This next post, featured on Promet Source’s blog, comes from Drupal trainer Rod Martin who shares 4 facts about the CMS that often serve as “eureka” moments for learners.
One of the most surprising facts to newcomers, especially those familiar with WordPress, is that Drupal modules are free, and abundant. Also important is Drupal’s newly adopted focus on backward compatibility, where Drupal 8.8 and 8.9 are practically the same as Drupal 9.
The origin story of Drupal, with Dries’s misspelling leading to the now well-known name, is also a great one for newcomers, as is the information on what kind of websites use Drupal – from some of the most renowned universities to NASA and Tesla.
Eight Awesome Things About Next-Drupal
In the spirit of “X about Drupal”, we continue with Chapter Three’s John Faber’s article about their NextJS-Drupal integration and the advantages of decoupling Drupal in such a way.
With Next-Drupal, you get both a capable CMS and a modern front end; it is secure by default, which doesn’t come at any expense of its speed, and it ensures your site functions optimally even during traffic spikes.
It’s also easy to work with, meaning you don’t need custom tooling to push your code. It’s SEO-optimized and even facilitates better client-agency collaboration. The final thing John mentions is Turborepo, a developer tool for JavaScript/TypeScript which boosts efficiency.
Drupal 7’s End of Life Extended: Keep Your Plans on Track
Keeping things in balance, we finish this month’s recap with another post about the extension of Drupal 7’s end of life, this one written by Kya Garibaldi of Mediacurrent.
In the first part of her post, Kya points out that the extension shouldn’t mean deciding not to upgrade at all, but should instead be taken as an opportunity to plan the upgrade more deliberately.
In the second half, she takes the reader through the reasons for upgrading: the best features of Drupal 8 and beyond; intuitive tooling; seamless future upgrades; highly capable and/or specialized distributions; and the chance to keep up with the innovation in web development / digital experience.
Read more about keeping Drupal 7 upgrade plans on track
This concludes our recap of the top Drupal reads from March. We have more great Drupal-related articles coming soon, stay tuned!
