Top Drupal blog posts from September 2023
Like every month, we’ve prepared a recap of the top Drupal-related content from the month before. We hope you enjoy (re)discovering September’s selection.
Drupal, Innovation and the Future
For the first article we’d like to highlight this month, we have Alex Moreno of the Drupal Association sharing his ideas and suggestions regarding the future of Drupal. He shows a few snapshots from last year’s Developer Survey from Stack Overflow, which at first glance make it seem like Drupal is quite poorly positioned due to its very low popularity.
However, Alex argues that the two snapshots also reveal opportunities for innovation in Drupal if the community is able to make a stronger effort to attract developers from other communities as well. The biggest of these is strongly tied to the popularity of frameworks such as React,Vue and NodeJS, which Drupal has made a priority of strongly supporting.
Read more about Drupal, innovation and the future
Drupal security — a complete Drupal self-help guide to ensuring your website’s security
Next up, we have an article from Salsa Digital’s series of Drupal self-help guides. We chose this one in particular due to the increasing frequency and diversity of cyber-security risks. The author Kristen Pol begins with the basics of website security, i.e. what it is and why it matters, including global authorities and guidelines, as well as the benefits of having a secure website and the downsides of ignoring security.
The majority of the article is then dedicated to the security of Drupal websites: one section focuses on Drupal’s security features, as well as a number of success stories and a couple examples of poor security practices., finishing with a detailed look at ten ways of improving Drupal security.
Read more about Drupal security
Book Review: Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development
We continue with an article from the prolific Matt Glaman, in which he reviews the recently published book Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development written by Luca Lusso.
The first key thing Matt points out is that the abundance of knowledge in the book goes beyond theme development in Drupal 10, and is as such a great resource for pretty much any kind of Drupal developer.
He also includes a list of his top highlights from the book, such as the importance of Xdebug, working with component-based design systems, using custom entity type bundle classes, and many more.
Read more about Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development
5 Useful Modules to Enhance CKEditor 5 in Drupal 10
The next article, coming from Evolving Web’s Sebastián González Díaz, takes a look at five modules that can enhance the capabilities of CKEditor 5 on a Drupal 10 website. The first one is Editor Advanced Link, which makes the experience of adding links even easier. The next module, CKEditor List Style, doesn’t yet have a formal release for Drupal 10, but Sebastián provides a smooth workaround.
The CKEditor 5 Embedded Content module enables embedding of rich and styled pieces of content without the need for HTML editing permissions. CKEditor Media Resize allows authors to easily resize images within the editor (but at the time there’s only a development version available). Lastly, the CKEditor 5 Premium Features module provides premium features available through purchasing a license.
Read more about 5 modules to extend CKEditor 5 in D10
Building complex content models using the Schema.org Blueprints module’s configuration, mapping sets, and starter kits
Moving on, we have an article from Jacob Rockowitz, the maintainer of the Webform and Schema.org Blueprints modules, who tells us more about his new Schema.org Blueprints specific starter kit API and his reasons for creating it. He also includes a video he recorded which goes into greater detail.
This starter kit addresses Jacob’s observations about the different peculiarities of schema needs for different industries which can make it difficult for developers in those sectors to fully leverage the capabilities of Schema.org, by defining the types and properties, modules, and configurations required for a specific use case.
Read more about the Schema.org Blueprints starter kit
Best Practices With Composable Drupal
In the next article, Chris Greatens of Bounteous breaks down their tips and best practices for building a composable, Drupal-based digital ecosystem. The first set of tips is dedicated to creating reusable front-end components in Drupal – i.e., using Acquia Site Studio for a streamlined experience; using Layout Builder to build reusable components; using CI/CD to create efficient dev processes; and managing Drupal and its dependencies with Composer.
The other two key best practices are isolating your business logic, which in Drupal chiefly means that business logic should not be a part of the theme layer and should instead come from custom modules, and making your entire system future ready.
Read more about best practices with composable Drupal
New Development Settings Page in Drupal 10.1 Simplifies Front End Experiences
Another great article from September is this next one from ImageX which takes a look at the new development settings page in the Admin UI which shipped with the latest Drupal release, version 10.1. The new feature enables easy management of two key elements of Drupal theme development through a user-friendly interface rather than having to rely on the more tedious approach of making code changes.
Namely, the new settings page provides simple checkboxes for Twig and Cache settings, both unchecked by default since they should only be checked on a development environment, which users are also reminded of on the page itself, as well as via warnings on the Status Report page.
Read more about the development settings page in D10
What's Your Future With Drupal in an AI-Led World?
Last on our list for September is another article from Evolving Web, this one coming from Suzanne Dergacheva and exploring the future of Drupal in an AI-driven world.
As she points out, the Open Web can play a major role in responsible development of AI – and Drupal is perfectly aligned with this drive of using innovation for good, also having recently published the Drupal Open Web Manifesto.
Suzanne also includes some great insights from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert from their recent event EvolveDrupal Toronto; namely, he talked about how AI is poised to transform the Drupal UI in the short term, mid term and long term.
Read more about the future of Drupal in an AI-driven world
This concludes our selection of top Drupal articles from September. Stay tuned for more content on Drupal, open source and the digital world coming soon!
