Top Drupal blog posts from November 2023
We’re back with our monthly selection of our favorite Drupal articles & most important Drupal-related news. We hope you enjoy the November edition!
Beyond Code: Drupal’s Community, Impact, and Possibilities
For the first article from November, we have a great piece by Tiffany Farriss of Palantir about Drupal being more than just code and it goes hand in hand with community, since the code itself is a direct expression of the open-source values that Drupal has been built and has thrived on.
Tiffany’s article draws an interesting comparison between Drupal and the Ship of Theseus, since Drupal has changed so much since its inception over 20 years ago, yet its essence still remains the same. Finally, it challenges some outdated tenets of the Drupal community, such as emphasizing the need to get off the Drupal island, and closes by highlighting the importance of Drupal’s Open Web Manifesto.
Read more about Drupal’s community, impact & possibilities
On a 1-10, How Important is Your Drupal Website?
The next article comes from Danita Bowman of Promet Source and focuses on the risks of outdated legacy technologies such as Drupal 7, while contrasting that with the enhanced capabilities of newer versions and making a strong case for upgrading to Drupal 10, as well as exploring the reasons for such a large number of sites still running on the outdated Drupal 7.
Some of the major issues Danita’s article exposes are the viability of legacy technology and the fast approaching end of life for Drupal 7, meaning no security coverage or new features, except by custom request, as well as diminished Drupal 7 support from the community of contributors.
Read more about how Drupal 7 compares to the latest versions
CKEditor 5 Empowers Creativity: What's New in Drupal 10
Moving on, this article from Tony Hutson of cti digital also talks about the benefits of Drupal 10, but focuses particularly on the features of the new CKEditor 5 that comes out of the box in Drupal 10, and how these improve the experience of content editors working with Drupal.
The features that Tony highlights are streamlined drag and drop; better link and table management; optimized handling of images and fonts; as well as a number of other useful extensions, plus the suite of CKEditor 5 premium features, including the Productivity Pack premium bundle.
Read more about CKEditor 5 in Drupal 10
Love thy CMS!
It’s a rare occasion not to include an article from the Schema.org Blueprints modules maintainer Jacob Rockowitz in our monthly overview. In this one, he talks about learning to love your CMS, an idea that’s often been discussed in the Drupal community over the years in different settings.
An internal discussion at Jacob’s organization about the concept of loving one’s CMS was also the basis for his session demoing how Schema.org can help streamline Drupal’s content authoring experience, with the more appealing and poetic adjustment of “Love thy CMS!”.
Read more about loving thy CMS
A brief history of Drupal 7 and overview of end-of-life options
Since the Drupal 7 end of life is fast approaching (the final extension will end in just over a year), there has been a lot of important content lately related to the D7 EOL and what site owners’ options are.
This great article from Kristen Pol of QuantCDN not only provides an overview of the end-of-life options, but also takes a look at the history of Drupal 7 since its release in January 2011 and how the fundamental reworking of the CMS with Drupal 8 impacted the community and led to the creation of Backdrop CMS.
Read more about the history of Drupal 7 & its EOL
Elevated Marketing Strategies with Drupal
Next up, we have an article about how Drupal empowers marketers, written by Kyla Tucker of Acro Commerce. The main benefits for marketers are streamlined back-end management, Drupal’s customizability, mobile-optimized design, top-notch SEO & analytics capabilities, and other useful UX features such as strong multilingual support.
To businesses that successfully leverage Drupal for their marketing strategies, the benefits are also plentiful; Drupal is cost-effective, prioritizes security, and has a number of other advantages stemming from its open-source nature that have transformed it into something more than a mere content management system.
Read more about using Drupal in your marketing strategy
The Pitchburgh Diaries - decoupled Layout Builder Sprint 5 & 6
We continue with an article by Lee Rowlands of PreviousNext who provides an update on the latest progress done on their Pitchburgh project, a React-based decoupled Layout Builder.
This article breaks down the work of the final two out of six sprints that were part of the Pitchburgh budget, with the first four focusing on feature development and sprints 5 and 6 on instantiating the Layout Editor in an actual Drupal website.
Lee covers the key highlights from these two final sprints, and concludes by announcing that the PreviousNext team plan to continue working on this project beyond what was covered through Pitchburgh and already have a backlog of new desirable features.
Read more about decoupled Layout Builder Sprint 5 & 6
Drupal 10 will be supported until the release of Drupal 12 in mid-late 2026
Last on our Drupal news overview for this month is a blog post from Gábor Hojtsy announcing the Drupal release schedule from now up until the release of Drupal 12 in 2026.
Following this new release schedule, a new major version will be released every two years, with two years of active support and an additional two years of maintenance and security coverage (e.g. for Drupal 10, this means support will end in 2026 with the release of Drupal 12).
Read more about Drupal’s future release schedule
With that we conclude our November selection of top Drupal blog posts. We hope you enjoyed this month’s edition!
