Top Drupal blog posts from May 2021

Birds migrating in the evening sun
Drupal

We’re back with a recap of our favorite Drupal blog posts from last month. We hope you enjoy our selection for May!

 

Drupal 7 to 9 Migration Planning Guide

First off, we have a guide for planning Drupal 7 to 9 migrations shared by Anne Stefanyk of Kanopi Studios. With the end-of-life date for Drupal 8 in 2021, one year earlier than for Drupal 7, it makes the best sense for Drupal 7 site owners to skip Drupal 8 and migrate straight to 9.

Anne’s post includes a step-by-step planning and migration process, as well as some of the main considerations and challenges, such as making sure to have the website use the latest version of Drupal 7 to facilitate the migration, and taking into account the changes in certain practices in newer Drupal versions.

Read the whole migration planning guide

 

Write Better Code with Typed Entity

In the next post from May, Mateu Aguiló Bosch of Lullabot presents Typed Entity, a module that he built which can help you write cleaner, more maintainable code with fewer costs.

With Typed Entity, you create a plugin serving as a typed repository and containing the business logic rather than that of a specific entity. This can then be used to extend the class and create specific instances of the wrapped entities.

Mateu demonstrates this approach more in depth and shows examples of the module and how it works. He also includes a video version of the article for those who prefer watching.

Read more about Typed Entity

 

Streamlining Drupal Multisite Maintenance with Config

Next up, Byron Duvall and Bec White of Palantir.net show how to facilitate the maintenance of a Drupal multisite architecture with shared configuration rather than by using different install profiles. 

As opposed to the latter, shared configuration management is a much quicker and more straightforward process. It enables you to only make updates once (e.g. installing and setting up a module) and then rolls them out to all the sites with the shared config.

The set-up process as well as adding new sites and making updates are all simple as well; Byron and Bec also provide a step-by-step guide for each.

Read more about shared config management in Drupal

 

Migrating into Layout Builder

Moving on, we have a post by Chris Wells of Redfin Solutions recapping his session from the recent DrupalCon North America about migrating a Drupal 7 website to Drupal 8 with Layout Builder enabled on the new website.

The main challenge here was migrating the content which was created with WYSIWYG templates in Drupal 7 to pages created with the new paradigm of Layout Builder using overrides. For this, they used Drupal’s Migrate API.

Importing the blocks and nodes are both fairly straightforward parts of the migration; the key change is transforming the data into a format which can be read by Layout Builder, for which they use their custom process plugin.

Read more about migrating content to Drupal 8

 

Is Drupal Right for Universities?

Another enjoyable post from May was this next one by Mediacurrent which breaks down why Drupal is a top choice for higher education websites. Indeed, Drupal is particularly well suited to the digital needs of universities, with its high commitment to accessibility, multilingual capabilities, mobile optimizations and personalization features.

On top of that, Drupal also provides great multisite capabilities with easy and efficient management. It can help with brand visibility with its out-of-the-box SEO features, and its focus on security and privacy is now even more important with stricter privacy laws. It’s no wonder that over 70% of leading universities use Drupal to power their digital experiences.

Read more about Drupal in higher education

 

Books/ 31 Days of Drupal Migrations

We continue with David Rodríguez’s review of the book 31 Days of Drupal Migrations written by Mauricio Dinarte. The book is based on a series of Mauricio’s articles from a few years ago and is the most comprehensive resource for up-to-date information on the Drupal Migrate API.

David provides an overview of the book’s key information and its most important points. He highly recommends every development team should have a copy at their disposal; he has nothing but high praise for the book, in terms of both style and content usefulness, and gives it a 5 out of 5 in every category he looks at.

Read more about 31 Days of Drupal Migrations

 

Drupal 9: Setting Up Multilingual Content Views

Nearing the end of our selection for May, we have a blog post by Philip Norton on #! code explaining how to set up multilingual content views in Drupal 9. The issue with Views is that the wizard does not support multilingual content and this ends up creating lists of content with duplicated items.

As Philip shows, though, the solution is very straightforward. You need to first add the Default translation filter, then select a different rendering language, both of which can be done through the admin interface. This will also ensure that a content view will fall back to the original language if there’s no translation for it.

Read more about setting up multilingual content views in Drupal 9

 

Makers, takers and altruism

Topping off this month’s list, we have a post by Morpht’s co-founder and managing director Murray Woodman, who shares his thoughts and ideas regarding a recent post by Dries Buytaert on balancing makers and takers in open source.

Murray further elaborates on some of Dries’s key points with a simulation of “green beard altruism” by Justin Helps, which highlights the importance of encouraging altruistic behavior to ensure the sustainability of a project.

In the second part of the article, he explores how these lessons can be applied to the Drupal community, coming to the realization that we’re already taking a lot of the right steps, e.g. with the financial sponsorships of the Drupal Association and the contribution credit system.

Read more about altruism and sustainability in open source

 

Different hands holding up paper house

This concludes our recap for May. We hope you enjoyed (re)discovering the articles!