Top Drupal blog posts from November 2022
Like every month, we’ve prepared a breakdown of our favorite Drupal-related blog posts from the month before. Here are our top picks from November.
Learning to Fly
In the first post on this month’s selection, Martin Anderson-Clutz shares his experience of joining the Drupal community, comparing it to his brief derby career. The first half of the post is dedicated to his experience playing roller derby, which he then connects to Drupal in the second half.
One of the biggest and most important similarities between the two is how being in the presence of long-time professionals did wonders for motivating Martin to start getting more seriously involved as well.
He also lists some of the most important community members who he’s worked with and who have inspired him, before concluding with a thank you to everyone who has contributed to his Drupal journey.
Learn more about Martin Anderson-Clutz’ Drupal journey
The Future of Drupal – What You Can Look Forward To!
The next post comes from Evolving Web’s Suzanne Dergacheva, who shares what upcoming Drupal features she’s most excited about. She first covers the changes for content creators, of which the most notable one is the update to CKEditor 5.
In the following two sections, Suzanne presents how the Distribution and Recipes initiative impacts site builders, and the introduction of GitLab together with automated updates for Drupal core as the two major changes for developers.
She also includes a brief summary of her DrupalCon talk on the future of content management and how Drupal fits into the picture as an open digital experience platform, before finishing with a roadmap for Drupal 10 and beyond.
Read more about the future of Drupal
Drupal SEO: The Ultimate Guide [2023]
We continue with a comprehensive guide to search engine optimization in Drupal, written by Veniz Guzman for the Promet Source blog. The first part covers the SEO specifics for Drupal, i.e. a look at how the platform enables search engine friendly URLs and an overview of some of the top SEO modules for Drupal.
In the much more extensive second part of the guide, Veniz focuses on more general SEO best practices, which cover technical SEO, on-page and off-page SEO, and content creation best practices for SEO. She also includes a checklist to help you make sure your website ticks all the right SEO boxes.
‘Gatsby Killer’ Next-Drupal Brings Headless to Drupal CMS
Next up, we have an interview on The New Stack featuring John Faber of Chapter Three, creators of the Next-Drupal framework for creating streamlined decoupled experiences using Drupal and Next.js.
The main topic of the interview is the need for Drupal to lean more into the headless CMS space. John and Loraine Lawson, the interviewer, discuss the main issues with other headless solutions and how Next-Drupal distinguishes itself from these other tools.
The post concludes with a statement from California State University’s director of Marketing and Systems for the Extended Education and Global Outreach about how using Next-Drupal has benefited them.
Designing for Drupal
Another great article from last month comes from Monet Fort of Sparkbox, serving as a useful guide of Drupal terms and concepts to help facilitate the collaboration of designers and developers working together on a Drupal project.
Monet first provides an overview of Drupal’s basic building blocks – fields, nodes and content types. She then continues with the more fleshed out Drupal concepts, detailing how to use each one in a design system. These primarily include blocks, but also menus, views, paragraphs, etc.
In her final thoughts, Monet highlights the importance of being in tune with the client’s needs and well synchronized with the Drupal development team in order for the design to be successful.
Read more about designing for Drupal
A minimal and fast Drupal environment (part 2)
Moving on, we have the second article from a two-part series written by Christophe Jossart / Colorfield about how to easily set up a minimal and performant Drupal 9 environment.
While part one focused on the setup of a very basic development environment suited for prototyping or proof of concepts, part two goes into greater detail, and includes things such as switching between different PHP versions, and working with Solr, Xdebug, etc.
The final section of the article also covers some of the most commonly encountered pitfalls, such as images not getting displayed properly, or when to use Apache versus Nginx.
Read more about setting up a minimal Drupal environment
Recoupling a Decoupled Site
We’ve read, featured and written great articles about decoupled Drupal, which is precisely why we wanted to include this one by Chromatic’s Mark Dorison which adopts the completely inverse perspective and takes a look at circumstances in which you would want to recouple a decoupled website.
Mark highlights three main cases where recoupling makes sense: the benefit of the decoupled website is no longer clear; the API is only used to serve the front end rather than to distribute content across channels; the maintenance of two decoupled apps requires too much time and effort.
Read more about recoupling a decoupled website
5 Top Tips to Securing Your Drupal Website
The last post from November is provided by Heather Hawkins of Ixis who breaks down 5 top tips for making sure a Drupal website is secure. While Drupal has a reputation for being quite a secure CMS out of the box, there are certain types of attacks that the platform is more vulnerable to, and hence it makes sense to take some additional security measures.
The top tips Heather highlights are as follows: making use of Drupal’s core security features; leveraging roles and permissions; having a well-thought out password policy; limiting the number of login attempts; using two- or multi-factor authentication.
Read more about securing a Drupal website
If you enjoyed this selection of Drupal articles, make sure to tune in for more content on Drupal, agency business and digital strategy that we regularly post here on our blog.
