Top Drupal blog posts from March 2024

We’re back with our monthly selection of the top Drupal content! Check out the overview for March to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

 

How can free open source CMSes remain competitive with enterprise clients?

This time we’re kicking things off with an article by PreviousNext’s Owen Lansbury based on his FOSDEM 2024 talk about how free open-source content management systems can compete with proprietary platforms to cater to enterprise clients. While the talk and the article focus mainly on Drupal, the tactics Owen shares can be applied to other OSS projects as well.

Compared with Drupal and other open-source platforms, proprietary solutions tend to be much better funded – and marketed. Owen’s article proposes some key tactics to improve this on Drupal, on top of the past and existing initiatives that have tried to remedy this, such as the Promote Drupal Initiative and the recent Pitchburgh initiative.

Read more about how OSS can remain competitive with enterprise

 

ChatGPT Experiments: "Act as Drush, shall we play a game?"

Next up, Joe Shindelar of Drupalize.Me shares his experiment with ChatGPT acting as Drush based on an elaborate prompt from Joe. As he states, the results were unexpectedly positive, with ChatGPT producing viable examples for a number of Drush commands.

His conclusion is that the AI is a decent tool for emulating a command line application, with the most impressive aspect being how ChatGPT persists data. You can check out all the examples together with Joe’s comments in the article itself.

Read more about ChatGPT emulating Drush

 

Gander Documentation:
Start Your Drupal Automated Performance Testing Today

For the third article from last month, we have an announcement from Janez Urevc of Tag1 Consulting of documentation now being available for Gander, the automated performance testing framework for Drupal that they have developed together with the Google Chrome team.

The comprehensive documentation for Gander can be found on the official Drupal website and includes the introduction, an explanation of the two different ways of using it, a guide on how to contribute, a quickstart guide, performance assertions and monitoring performance metrics.The article also further breaks down the quickstart guide based on DDEV.

Read more about the Gander documentation

 

Just Say Drupal

We’re continuing our March selection with an article from TEN7’s CEO Ivan Stegic who shared some very interesting and relevant thoughts about the future of Drupal versioning and naming conventions. Namely, Ivan highlights how no other similar technology, such as WordPress, relies on the platform’s current version number in their marketing and messaging. 

In Drupal’s case, the breaking changes between Drupal 7 and modern Drupal make the community want to avoid the negative connotations of D7 and thus emphasize the version number. Ivan suggests that we need to altogether change how we speak about and market Drupal, rather than simply dropping the version number.

Read more about the problem with Drupal naming conventions

 

Drupal Web Projects Leveled Up with Mercury Editor

In the next article on this month’s recap, Jake Douma from Aten Design Group writes about the drag-and-drop Mercury Editor module that they have developed, and how it can level up a Drupal project.

The Mercury Editor enables WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing, is easy to learn and makes websites easily maintainable. Its flexibility allows the level of complexity to be adjusted for each individual team working with it, while still remaining consistent.

On top of that, the tool enables a streamlined project management process and also reflects important values of the Aten team such as creative, productive, collaborative, trustworthy and thoughtful.

Read more about the Mercury Editor

 

Composable Architecture: Why Drupal should be part of your Solution

Moving on, we have an article from amazee’s Henk Beld about the benefits of Drupal as the basis of a composable software architecture. Henk starts off with a brief breakdown of what composable architecture is, before moving on to specific features of Drupal that make it such a great option for a composable approach.

Namely, Drupal is API first, scalable, secure and highly interoperable. Its rich module ecosystem allows for a high degree of extensibility, with custom content types and views, as well as strong multilingual capabilities. Last but not least, the Drupal community actively contributes to the project and provides support for companies using the platform.

Read more about composable architecture and Drupal

 

Improving the Drupal theme starterkit and theme generation experience

The next article comes from Matt Glaman who wrote about the work on improving the Drupal theme starterkit and theme generation experience that he did during the Florida DrupalCamp this past February. The improvements arose from attempting to make the new Olivero front-end theme into a starterkit theme, which would otherwise require writing a lot of PHP code.

The key change with the new approach is the use of a new ‘starterkit.yml’ file instead of the ‘starterkit: true’ property in a theme's ‘info.yml’ file. This allows for easy customization and supports ignoring files, skipping the modification of files, and controlling the generated theme’s ‘info.yml’ file.

Read more about the new Drupal theme generation experience

 

Contributor guide: Maximizing Impactful Contributions

Rounding off this month’s selection of articles, we have a contributor guide written up by Alex Moreno of the Drupal Association which mostly serves as a reference point with the most important initiatives and issues where contributions are most needed.

The list includes the strategic initiatives Automatic Updates; the Easy out of the box initiative; Gitlab Acceleration; the Next Generation Page Builder; Project Browser; and Recipes, Starter Kits and Distributions.

Apart from these bigger initiatives, the guide also covers some of the most pressing issues, such as any Drupal 11.x compatibility issues and UX issues, as well as issues with modules and projects such as the Layout Builder, top used patches, and easy to fix issues.

Read the Drupal contributor guide

 

This concludes our recap for March; we hope you enjoyed (re)discovering the articles!