Top Drupal blog posts from September 2021
September gave us a lot of interesting Drupal-related news and articles. Here’s our recap of some of our favorite posts.
Acquia to Acquire Widen, Advancing Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform
We’d like to start things off with news about the leading Drupal company Acquia acquiring Widen, cloud providers of digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software.
As Widen’s CEO Matthew Gonnering states, “content is the heart of any digital experience” and marketers need efficient tools for creating and distributing well personalized customer focused content at scale.
Thanks to the acquisition, Acquia will be able to add advanced rich media and product information content management to their already impressive digital experience management roster. This positions the company even more firmly as a leader in the open enterprise DXP landscape.
Read more about Acquia’s acquisition of Widen
To Drupal or not to Drupal… the end of my story
The second post is a really great one; we already featured a post or two from Jacob Rockowitz’s “To Drupal or not to Drupal” series in our recaps, and last month, he published the final chapter of that story which turned out to be the best possible conclusion to it.
One of the focuses of Jacob’s series was his employer’s planned transition from Drupal to Sitecore and his dilemma of how to continue contributing to Drupal in that case. However, due to Sitecore’s lack of flexibility when compared to Drupal and the complexity of migrating, they decided not only to stay on Drupal but to actually invest even more in it - truly a win-win!
Read the end of Jacob Rockowitz’s story
New provisional Drupal 9 core committers: Victoria Spagnolo, Ben Mullins, and Cristina Chumillas!
We continue with another big piece of news announced by Dries, this time specific to the Drupal community. Congratulations to Victoria Spagnolo, Ben Mullins, and Cristina Chumillas for their new roles as provisional Drupal 9 core committers!
New Zealand-based Victoria Spagnolo, who received the New Zealand Open Source Award in 2018 for her Drupal contributions, has joined as provisional release manager.
Ben Mullins and Cristina Chumillas (check out our interview with Cristina) have taken on the roles of provisional frontend framework managers. They’ve already been working together on the new back-end theme Claro, so this collaboration will definitely be a successful one as well.
Read more about the new provisional Drupal 9 core committers
How We Compare: Leaderboards and Related Comparison Metrics in the Drupal Community
The next post comes from Matthew Tift of Lullabot who analyzes the different ways of measuring contribution leadership throughout the history of the Drupal project. It breaks down three such attempts; Certified to Rock, DrupalCores, and the current Drupal Marketplace page.
As he explains, Certified to Rock was primarily used for hiring top talent and served organizations more than it did members of the community, while the main issue with DrupalCores was that it only included code contributions.
The Drupal Marketplace page is the oldest of the three and as such also the one that’s undergone the most changes, transitioning from alphabetic listing to a leaderboard based on the issue credit system implemented in 2015, which has led to its own set of problems.
Read more about leadership and comparison metrics in Drupal
Demystifying Drupal Migrations
Next up, we have a post by Steve Zipfel of Promet Source in which he demystifies some of the complexities regarding Drupal migrations by breaking down some of the key things to know for a successful migration. This is especially relevant now with the EOL date of Drupal 8 just a few weeks away and the EOL for Drupal 7 scheduled for next November.
He starts off by explaining terms such as content types, taxonomies and views, before proceeding with an overview of common website components. The next section is dedicated to commonly used acronyms (JSON, XML, PHP, etc.), then Steve concludes his article with some specific helpful considerations for a successful migration.
Read more about Drupal migrations
10 Best Practices for Drupal SEO
Moving on, we have a post by one of the top bloggers who pretty much every content marketer has heard about, Neil Patel, who highlights 10 SEO best practices for a Drupal website.
In the first part of the post, Neil gives a short presentation of Drupal, compares some of its pros and cons, and provides a quick overview of the kind of websites that most frequently use Drupal.
The main section of the article is dedicated to optimizing the SEO of a Drupal site, most of the tips here being similar for any kind of website or CMS (e.g. keyword research, mobile responsiveness, URL optimization, etc.), with an extra tip of leveraging Drupal SEO modules.
Read more about best practices for Drupal SEO
Date Content: Upgrade the Capabilities of Your Site’s Event Handling
Approaching the end of our list for September, we have another post from Acquia, this one written by their solutions engineer Martin Anderson-Clutz who presents his recent work on the Date Content module which can complement the Smart Date module by enabling customization of content for recurring events.
Martin first gives a brief explanation of how the module works, before going more in depth with specific use cases. He begins with the basic ones which can be used pretty much out of the box, then finishes with a few more complex ones which require more technical expertise for effective implementation.
Read more about the Date Content module
Let’s Rethink Multi-site, ok?
The last post we’d like to highlight, coming from John Faber of Chapter Three, expands upon an earlier post of his about integrating Next.js with Drupal (which we included in last month’s recap). In this one, he shows how a decoupled approach utilizing Next.js improves upon Drupal’s traditional multisite feature.
A setup like this allows multiple custom Next.js front ends to be distributed via a single Drupal back-end content repository. Chapter Three’s custom next-drupal.org integration even enables this for content editors, so the increase in developer experience does not come at the expense of editor efficiency or experience.
Read more about next-drupal.org
We hope you enjoyed our recap of our top Drupal takeaways from September. Check out our other Drupal-related articles or tune in next month if you don’t want to miss our top picks from this month.
