Top Drupal blog posts from October 2023

Last month was particularly exciting for Drupal, largely due to DrupalCon Europe taking place in Lille, France, and also because of all the great discussions and content that have resulted from it. Here are our top picks of Drupal articles from October. 

 

State of Drupal presentation (October 2023)

We’re kicking off this month’s selection with Dries’ recap of his traditional State of Drupal presentation from DrupalCon Lille in October (the “Driesnote”). This time he took a storytelling approach, recounting the tale of Drupal, a character from the Drupal Village, who ventures to neighboring communities in order to learn how they construct their homes there.

Drawing on this, Dries establishes the key goals for Drupal – it should be: easier to start, easier to build and easier to maintain. Here, he highlights the significance of the Project Browser and Automatic Updates Initiatives, as well as introducing a new strategic initiative, Next Generation Page Builder.

Read more about the state of Drupal in October 2023

 

DDEV being considered as the "official" Drupal development environment

We continue with an article from Kevin Quillen about discussions around DDEV being considered as the "official" Drupal development environment, arising from the desire to have a single solution for running Drupal.

One of the biggest benefits of DDEV which Kevin highlights is that it makes it easier for people with less Drupal/LAMP experience to get more hands-on with Drupal and more involved in Drupal projects.

As Kevin points out, the features of DDEV also facilitate one of the biggest challenges for people working with Drupal, getting started; recalling the DrupalCon Lille Driesnote, this just so happens to coincide perfectly with Dries’ vision for the future of Drupal.

Read more about DDEV being considered as the "official" Drupal dev environment

 

Reviewing the Bug Smash initiative and goals after three years

For another interesting and important update from October, we have a review of the Drupal Bug Smash Initiative and its future goals from Griffyn Heels of PreviousNext. He starts off with some impressive stats, namely that the initiative has reduced the number of bugs in Drupal core by 27% in about three and a half years of first getting implemented.

Based on a recent community survey conducted by the initiative, they’ve decided to keep the initiative focused on bugs for another year while also expanding its goals. One of the major decisions was to not focus more heavily on more critical bugs, as several community members suggested, since that would make it more difficult to get involved with the initiative and thus in a way defeat its main purpose of getting people to contribute.

Read more about the Bug Smash initiative

 

Gander: The Future of Drupal Performance and Scalability

Next up, we have an article from Janez Urevc of Tag1 Consulting announcing a new open-source automated performance testing framework, Gander, which is the result of a collaboration between Tag1 and the Google Chrome team, under the leadership of Drupal core release and framework manager Nathaniel Catchpole.

By streamlining the work of core maintainers and committers through automated performance testing, Gander will greatly benefit both individual companies using Drupal as well as the Drupal project as a whole, if not the broader open-source software community. The framework is currently being incorporated into Drupal's automated QA infrastructure and will soon become part of the core development process.

Read more about automated performance testing in Drupal

 

Writing backward-compatible deprecation fixes for contributed modules will be much easier for Drupal 11

The next article comes from Matt Glaman, who gets featured very frequently on these monthly recaps. In this one, he writes about a new feature that came in Drupal 10.1.3, which makes it possible to do backward-compatible calls and will as such make it easier to make deprecation fixes in the future.. 

Namely, the new utility class Deprecation Helper and its ‘backwardsCompatibleCall’ allow for code to be executed based on the current running version of Drupal Core. Matt breaks down an example of a function that got deprecated in Drupal 10.2 to demonstrate the new feature more clearly. 

Read more about backward-compatible deprecation fixes in Drupal

 

8 Rock Solid Reasons Why Drupal 10 is a No-Brainer

Moving on, we have Simon Morvan from Evolving Web breaking down eight key reasons why the latest version of Drupal 10, Drupal 10, should be a no-brainer for anyone with their website(s) running on the platform.

These rock-solid reasons, as Simon calls them are: streamlined performance; global-readiness through Drupal 10’s advanced multilingual support; modern functionalities on both the front and the back end; more intuitive interface design; having accessibility as a key priority; simplified content creation & editing; advanced security; and continuous innovation through Drupal’s unique release cycle.

Read more about 8 reasons why Drupal 10 is a no-brainer

 

The Drupal Association Announces 2023 Board Election Winner and 3 Additional New Board Members

Approaching the end of October’s overview, we have a post from the Drupal Association announcing the 2023 DA Board Election winner as well as three additional new members of the Drupal Association Board.

With 156 final votes, Fei Lauren is the winner of the At-Large DA Board community election. The three other new Board members are Imre Gmelig Meijling, Lenny Moskalyk and Piyush Poddar, replacing exiting Board members Mike Herchel, Ryan Szrama, and Board Chair Baddý Sonja Breidert, the latter of whom will continue as a non-voting Immediate Past Chair on the Executive Committee for one year.

Read more about the new members of the DA Board

 

(The opportunities and challenges of) Marketing & Drupal

Lastly, we have two correlated articles about the future of marketing Drupal, both of them coming from Morpht’s Scott Massey and based on his panel discussion at DrupalCon Lille as well as other sessions and discussions from the event. 

The first of the two articles from Scott is more of a summary of those discussions and the fruits they have yielded, highlighting the importance of the recently formed Drupal Marketing Committee.

The second article focuses on some of the main opportunities and challenges of marketing Drupal and have these marketing efforts be more coordinated across the community, and consequently better measurable and optimizable.

Read more about marketing and Drupal

Read more about the challenges & opportunities of marketing Drupal

 

We hope you enjoyed this month’s selection of Drupal articles and news. Don’t forget to tune in next month to revisit the news from November!