Dear Readers,

Welcome to the final edition of the Volume 2 of our weekly newsletter, "Editor's Pick". Over the past year, our newsletter has gradually evolved alongside the developments and achievements of TDT. While the newsletter's objective—published every Monday—remains unchanged, it continues to spotlight the most important stories from the past week. However, the presentation of these stories has undergone a few adjustments.

The TDT newsletter is divided into two sections: the introductory segment and the stories from the past week. Initially, the introduction often took on a philosophical tone, exploring ideas not directly related to open source or Drupal but rather sharing deeply personal reflections from the author. These musings were then tied back to the Drupal ecosystem, often focusing on something notable from the week. However, a challenge arose as the number of important stories increased—once even reaching 30 in a single issue. To address this, we introduced a cap, limiting the newsletter to a maximum of 16 key stories each week.

Earlier this year, we also revised the introduction’s format. Instead of philosophical musings, we began focusing on significant updates in the Drupal and open-source communities, paired with subjective analysis. This shift proved effective, steering us in the right direction. Despite capping the story count at 16, the newsletter sometimes felt overly dense. To make it more reader-friendly, we refined the format further by including bullet points after a brief editorial introduction. This approach, inspired in part by 'TheWeeklyDrop' by Bob Kepford, has brought us closer to a concise yet comprehensive format.

As 2024 comes to a close, anticipation is growing for the full launch of Drupal CMS v1, scheduled for January 15, 2025. At The DropTimes, we’re excited to keep you informed about every development along the way.

With that let's move on to the important stories from the past week

DRUPAL CMS

• Inside the Media Management Track of Drupal CMS
• Canberra to Host Drupal CMS Release Party
• The Countdown to Drupal CMS: A New Era Begins on January 15, 2025
• Drupal CMS Release Party in Nagoya: Celebrate the Future of Web Development

EVENT

• Innoraft's Experience at DrupalCon Singapore 2024: A Recap
• Drupal Enthusiasts Gear Up for Jaipur Meetup in January 2025
• Cambridge to Host Inaugural DrupalCamp England in March 2025

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Drupal Scheduler Module Simplifies Automated Content Management
• Views Data Export: Sprint 1 Achieves 60% Reduction in Open Issues

ORGANIZATION NEWS

• Drupal4Gov Earns Nonprofit Status: Empowering Government Through Open Source
• ANNAI Inc. Announces Drupal 7 Extended Support in Collaboration with amazee.io
• Drupal Advent Calendar 2024 Features The Drop Times
• Get a Sneak Peek: 1xINTERNET Offers Hands-On Drupal CMS Demo Ahead of Release

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you, 
Sincerely 
Alka Elizabeth 
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

With 2024 ending, we'd like to summarize the last twelve months at Droptica. It has been a year of dynamic changes, both in the Drupal ecosystem and our services. We're excited to share with you our achievements, innovations, and future plans that will allow us to support client projects even better. Find out what improvements we've made so far and how they can affect your operations. Also, discover what opportunities are opening up for us in the year ahead.

At DrupalCon Asia in Singapore a few weeks ago, I delivered my traditional State of Drupal keynote. This event marked DrupalCon's return to Asia after an eight-year hiatus, with the last one being DrupalCon Mumbai in 2016.

It was so fun to reconnect with the Drupal community across Asia and feel the passion and enthusiasm for Drupal. The positive energy was so contagious that three weeks later, I still feel inspired by it.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below, or download my slides (196 MB).

I talked about the significant progress we've made on Drupal CMS (code name Drupal Starshot) since DrupalCon Barcelona just a few months ago.

Our vision for Drupal CMS is clear: to set the standard for no-code website building. My updates highlighted how Drupal CMS empowers digital marketers and content creators to design sophisticated digital experiences while preserving Drupal's power and flexibility.

For more background on Drupal CMS, I recommend reading our three-year strategy document. We're about a quarter of the way through, time-wise, and as you'll see from my keynote, we're making very fast progress.

A slide from my recent DrupalCon Singapore State of Drupal keynote showcasing key contributors to Drupal CMS. This slide showcases how we recognize and celebrate Makers in our community, encouraging active participation in the project.

Below are some of the key improvements I showcased in my keynote, highlighted in short video segments. These videos demonstrate just 7 recipes, but we have nearly 20 in development.

Watching these demos, it will become very clear how much time and effort Drupal CMS can save for both beginners and experienced developers. Manually assembling these features would take weeks for a Drupal expert and months for a novice. These recipes pack a wealth of expertise and best practices. What once took a Drupal expert weeks can now be done by a novice in hours.

AI support in Drupal

We're integrating AI agents into Drupal to assist with complex site-building tasks, going far beyond just content creation. Users can choose to have AI complete tasks automatically or provide step-by-step guidance, helping them learn Drupal as they go.

Search

We're including enhanced search functionality that includes autocomplete and faceted search, delivering enterprise-grade functionality out-of-the-box.

Privacy

With increasing global privacy regulations, marketers need robust compliance solutions, yet very few content management systems offer this out-of-the-box. I demonstrated how Drupal CMS will offer a user-centric approach to privacy and consent management, making compliance easier and more effective.

Media management

Our improved media management tools now include features like focal point control and image style presets, enabling editors to handle visual content efficiently while maintaining accessibility standards.

Accessibility tools

Our accessibility tools provide real-time feedback during content creation, helping identify and resolve potential issues that could affect the user experience for visually-impaired visitors.

Analytics

Analytics integration streamlines the setup of Google Analytics and Tag Manager, something that 75% of all marketers use.

Experience Builder

Drupal's new Experience Builder will bring a massive improvement in visual page building. It combines drag-and-drop simplicity with an enterprise-grade component architecture. It looks fantastic, and I'm really excited for it!

Conclusion Drupal CMS has been a catalyst for innovation and collaboration, driving strong growth in organizational credits. Development of Drupal CMS began in 2024, and we expect a significant increase in contributions this year. Credits have tripled from 2019 to 2024, demonstrating our growing success in driving strategic innovation in Drupal.

In addition to our progress on Drupal CMS, the product, we've made real strides in other areas, such as marketing, modernizing Drupal.org, and improving documentation – all important parts of the Drupal Starshot initiative.

Overall, I'm incredibly proud of the progress we've made. So much so that we've released our first release candidate at DrupalCon Singapore, which you can try today by following my installation instructions for Drupal CMS.

While we still have a lot of work left, we are on track for the official release on January 15, 2025! To mark the occasion, we're inviting the Drupal community to organize release parties around the world. Whether you want to host your own event or join a party near you, you can find all the details and sign-up links for Drupal CMS release parties. I'll be celebrating from Boston and hope to drop in on other parties via Zoom!

Finally, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed to Drupal CMS and DrupalCon Singapore. Your hard work and dedication have made this possible. Thank you!

Drupal Project Browser: Guide Editor Fri, 12/27/2024 - 10:12

"In the past 18 months, Project Browser has gone from announcement to beta. And the latest beta has a full-featured user interface for discovering and installing projects, fulfilling the original vision of users not needing a command line."
 — Dries Buytaert

As a product owner assistant at Liip, I enable customers to get the most out of the products we build together. In this article, I want to reflect on the learnings I made during the relaunch of pharmaSuisse - the new platform of the Swiss Pharmacists Association.

Goodbye individual CMS, hello open-source CMS. The new websites of the Swiss Pharmacists Association are based on the open-source solution Drupal, including a decoupled frontend with Nuxt, an ERP integration, user account management, different commerce workflows, and a paywall that gives members exclusive access to content.

Running Multiple Products on One Platform

Together with pharmaSuisse, we chose to develop a platform that could feed multiple web presences:

• pharmasuisse.org is the place where all members (pharmacies and pharmacists) get access to relevant information for them, can buy products or change their data

• ihre-apotheke.ch is the place where the general public can find the pharmacy that best suits their needs

• fphch.org serves as an entry point for the education of pharmacists

All three sites benefit from the same base functionalities:

• A modern design system that can be slightly adapted to each website's needs

• Flexible content blocks & editing capabilities based on our Interactive Page Builder blökkli

• Two-way synchronisation with the Navision ERP system thanks to the Odata API Sync module

• Granular, role-based access controls that allow to serve premium content to association members behind a paywall

• Integrated shop system that serves 4 different product types such as physical products, e-learnings, digital downloads and licence keys with Drupal Commerce

• Powerful automated translation workflows thanks to the Translation Management Tool ecosystem  

• A form builder that allows editors to create online forms using webforms

Working with multiple Product Owners on one platform was an inspiration for me. For the planning, this means that we dedicate certain sprints to the particular needs of a platform. At times it was a challenge to consolidate the needs onto a unified platform, but for me, the advantages were evident in this case. Each increment didn’t only add to one of the site instances but would automatically benefit the others. The focus per sprint on a product helped the rhythm of the implementation and gave pauses and time for each Product Owner to prepare for their next turn.

Staging the Go-Live

We decided to go live with the smallest platform first. This gave us the opportunity to incorporate a good amount of learnings for the more challenging go-lives that came after that. If possible, I recommend going live with a smaller version of the product before doing a big bang launch where the risks of failure can be very high.

Adapting the Pace

The relaunch of this platform involved touching various integration points. A complex ERP integration and further interfaces needed to be implemented. Over the course of the project, we realised that the pace of delivery was not aligned and too fast in comparison to the pace of the other organisations involved. What helped us was taking breaks and using this time to get stories tested and resolve dependencies between systems. Since this experience, I try to implement sprint breaks after 2-4 sprints so that the affected people have time to use the system, incorporate the learnings, and revisit design or conceptual questions before we continue with further implementation cycles. 

Creating Feedback Loops and Transparency

With every complex project, the situation can change drastically over time. You get more insight into what is to be done, you identify shortcuts or other obstacles, and new ideas emerge. Using agile methods, we kept everyone up-to-date by delivering working software from day 1. We were able to update the forecast of how much work is left for the MVP to be finished. We could add new feature requests and drop one that we prioritised lower. Often these come with a trade-off, and especially if you relaunch a grown existing system, people are worried about all the important things they are used to and will lose. By maintaining transparency about what is possible in terms of time and budget, we navigated the scope discussions with the Product Owners and delivered the new platform within 10 months.

I would like to thank the three pharmaSuisse Product Owners, Simona Kröni, Jens Apel, Cristian Dias and the entire pharmaSuisse team, for your dedicated work in realising this web relaunch together with Liip.

Significant changes arrive with Drupal 11.1, marking a shift in how developers work with content types and hooks.

No More Default Body Field

The default body field will no longer be automatically generated when you create a content type. This change moves away from the traditional standard where the body field serves as the primary content container. In the past, when starting a new Drupal site, the body field was always expected to be present. 

It was a standard feature that developers relied on. Now, new sites will have various field names such as `field_description`, `field_text`, and `field_content`. This shift in naming conventions may lead to some adjustments in how content is managed.

But I noticed that the body field was slowly being phased out and replaced with the paragraph field, where instead of adding all your content into a single field, you would build out your page using paragraph types, or as we would often call them, components.

Join Mukesh Agarwal, CEO of Innoraft, as he recounts an unforgettable experience at DrupalCon Singapore 2024—the first Asian gathering of Drupal enthusiasts in nearly a decade. This landmark event showcased cutting-edge innovations, visionary insights, and community-driven contributions that are shaping the future of the Drupal ecosystem.

From the highly anticipated launch of the Drupal CMS Release Candidate to the inspiring 41st Driesnote and hands-on workshops exploring the latest technological breakthroughs, the conference was a celebration of innovation and collaboration. Mukesh shares key highlights, technical revelations, and the spirit of community that makes Drupal more than a CMS—it’s a movement.

Dive into the highlights and discover how DrupalCon Singapore 2024 has set the stage for a transformative 2025.

Dries Buytaert announced the Experience Builder Initiative earlier this year, with the aim to become the default Drupal tool for layout design, page building, and basic theming. The main goal is to create a tool that site builders love, with an amazing out-of-the-box experience. The development of Experience Builder is going very well with the first stable release expected in late 2025, at which point it is also planned to be part of Drupal CMS 2.0.

Complementing the tool, a month ago we published a call for partners to design and implement a comprehensive design system for Experience Builder and thus Drupal CMS. Now we’re thrilled to announce that we have selected Mediacurrent as the partner to collaborate with on this project!

We were amazed by the quality, creativity, and expertise demonstrated in the proposals submitted by our community. In the extensive evaluation process, the selected partner stood out for their thoughtful approach, in-depth understanding of user needs, and a clear actionable roadmap. Their proposal reflected a strong focus on usability, accessibility, and scalability, ensuring the design system will empower designers, developers, and content marketers alike.

To maintain transparency with the community and celebrate the exceptional quality of their work, we’re pleased to share the winning proposal. You can see an overview of activities and high-level timeline and their design system showcase. Thanks to Mediacurrent for being willing to share your proposal with the community.

Work on this exciting project will kick off in January, with an early preview of the work for DrupalCon Atlanta in March 2025 and a stable release later in the year.

We want to thank everyone who submitted a proposal and contributed their time, effort, and creativity to this initiative. We’ve had an impressive turnaround that shows how the Drupal CMS project is bringing the community together to work towards the same goals.

Stay tuned for updates as we progress on this exciting journey!

Drupal Advent Calendar 2024 Addendum - The Drop Times and 24 Days of Automation james Tue, 12/24/2024 - 23:30 Image Body

I hope you enjoyed this year’s Drupal Advent Calendar, and our whistle-stop tour of Starshot tracks. If you missed it, you can catch up here.

I want to touch on a couple of things that I missed during the regular calendar schedule.

The Drop Times

The Drop Times is a Drupal news site that covers everything happening across the Drupalverse. They do a superb job of covering DrupalCons and Drupal Camps around the world. Since the announcement of the Starshot initiative, they have been dutyfully covering all the news from the initiative, and they have been a valuable source of information when…

Automatically Geolocate Santa Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/24/2024 - 07:00 Tags Content Management Drupal Drupal Planet Map

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We've reached the last day of the calendar, and it's time for Santa's visit! Santa has been visiting some famous places all month. With the Geocoder module, Leaflet, a Geofield, and an Address field, you can automatically put each address Santa has visited on the map!

You do need to configure a geocoder source. We're using OpenStreetmap, from the geocoder-php/nominatim-provider.

The DropTimes interviews Tony Barker, a leading Drupal Frontend Specialist at Annertech and Media Management Track Lead for Drupal Starshot. Discover his journey, insights on media management, and how Drupal CMS is set to transform user experience with advanced features, accessibility, and AI-driven innovation.

The Twig tweak module in Drupal 10 is extremely beneficial for developers when working with twig templates. Find code snippets along with examples to implement Twig tweak in Drupal 10.

Drupal Advent Calendar day 24 - Experience Builder james Tue, 12/24/2024 - 09:00

Welcome back for the final door of the 2024 Advent Calendar. We’ve already covered all 22 tracks of the Starshot initiative, as well as some non-track aspects. For our final door, we are looking at something that is absent from the initial release of Drupal CMS, but is hoped to come to fruition in 2025 and revolutionise website theming. Let me introduce Lauri Timmanee, who is here to tell us about Experience Builder.

What is Experience Builder?

At DrupalCon Lille 2023, Dries announced a new strategic initiative to build a Next Generation Page Builder. The goal of the initiative was to improve…

Tags

• Experience Builder
• Drupal Starshot

Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 is a significant upgrade for your website. While the process can be complex, even for experienced Drupal developers, it’s essential to make informed decisions along the way. As a reliable Drupal development company, we understand that a successful migration requires careful planning and execution. In this guide, we’ll answer the most common questions about Drupal migration to help you navigate this transition smoothly.

In this blog, we will shed light on some of the “what” and “how” of Drupal 7 to 10 Migration doubts and provide solutions from our experts. So, let’s get down to the most common Drupal FAQs.

Regardless of how many environments your application has, you need to be able to move changes between them reliably.

You don't want to configure each environment and make every change by hand.

You want to automate this as much as possible so your changes are the same every time.

In Drupal 7, the Features module was used to export changes once and apply them again using a features revert command - although its original use case was to extract reusable features for different applications.

I've also written a lot of update of update hooks, like mymodule_update_8001 to apply changes when database updates are applied.

Since Drupal 8, we've had configuration management - a first-class way to export and import configuration changes - which I think was one of the best additions to Drupal 8, and something not available in some other CMSes, frameworks and applications.

There's an ecosystem around configuration management, including Config Split for per-environment configurations and Config Ignore to ignore sensitive information or changes you don't want to manage via imported configuration.

I recently worked on a project where we didn't have a CI pipeline running configuration imports on each change and things were very difficult to manage. Once that was in place, though, things were much easier, more consistent and changes were quicker to release.

Today we are talking about Drupal Marketing, how it applies to Drupal CMS, and what a Drupal and Drupal CMS Marketing Future look like with guest Suzanne Dergacheva. We’ll also cover Drupal 11.1 as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/481

Topics

• Drupal marketing moves
• New brand
• Marketing people at the DA
• Goal of marketing
• How does this impact Drupal CMS
• Drupal CMS marketing
• How will you educate people about the differences between core and CMS
• Any challenges
• How do you like the new homepage
• Next steps to move the brand forward
• Case studies
• Why did you volunteer
• If someone wants to get involved how can they

Resources

• Brand Portal
• Drupal.org homepage
  • https://new.drupal.org/home
  • https://www.drupal.org/project/drupalorg/issues/3475832
• Case study guidelines
• Webinar with Suzanne and Rosie Gladden about Key Strategies for Expanding Drupal’s Reach
• Advent Calendar - Freelock.com - 24 days of Drupal automations

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Suzanne Dergacheva - evolvingweb.com pixelite

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you been wanting a version of Drupal with improvements to the recipes system, the ability to write hooks as classes, and an icon management API? The new Drupal 11.1 release has all of that and more.
• Module name/project name:
  • Drupal 11.1
• Brief history
  • How old: created on Dec 16 by catch of Tag1 and Third & Grove
• Module features and usage
  • We’ve talked a number times on this show about the recipes system, particularly because it’s at the heart of Drupal CMS. In Drupal 11.1 recipes can define whether or not to use strict comparison for provided configuration, and there are a ton of new config actions. These allow your recipe to place blocks, take user input, enable layout builder for content types, clone configuration entities and more. It’s a huge leap forward, and I think you’ll quickly see a number of recipes that require Drupal 11.1 or newer.
  • Hooks have long been a powerful Drupalism that allow for deep customization of how your website functions. These hooks can now be written as classes, thanks to the new Hook attribute on methods. This will bring many of the object-oriented benefits of modern Drupal to the hooks system, and should also make it easier for developers new to Drupal to understand the code to create these customizations.
  • A new Icon Management API allows themes and modules to define icon packs, with unique identifiers for each included icon.
  • Drupal 11.1 also includes PHP 8.4 support. I haven’t been able to find any data on speed improvements compared to PHP 8.3, but there are interesting new features like property hooks, asymmetric visibility, new functions for finding array items, and more
  • There are plans to use Workspaces for content moderation, so the UI for Workspaces is now in a separate module. For new site builds if you want your editors to be able to use Workspaces, you’ll need to remember to enable this new UI module as well
  • New installs of Drupal 11.1 will also see improvements to the initial experience. These include defaulting to admin-created user accounts only, not adding the body field by default when creating new content types, and more.
  • Drupal 11.1 also includes a new views entity reference filter, opt-in render caching for forms, and improved browser and CDN caching for Javascript and CSS, among a host of other improvements.
  • A number of these improvements will also find their way into the upcoming 10.4 release, ensuring, for example, that recipes built to use the new config actions can be used with Long-Term Support (LTS) versions of Drupal, that will be supported until the stable release of Drupal 12 in mid- to late-2026

A Christmas Message: Empowering Communities with AI for a Brighter Digital Future Jurriaan Mon, 12/23/2024 - 18:05

This Christmas, I want to share a vision for the year ahead—one rooted in the principles of openness, collaboration, and empowerment. Just as the spirit of giving inspires acts of kindness, the open-source community, including Drupal, shows us how collective effort can create tools that serve everyone. At this pivotal moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence, I believe it’s our responsibility to ensure that AI becomes a force for good.

AI and the changing dynamics of influence

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how communication happens. Governments and corporations use AI to dominate narratives, leveraging its power for hybrid warfare, infodomwarfare, and highly targeted campaigns. These tools amplify their voices and shape public opinion at an unprecedented scale.

But while some benefit from this technological leap, countless others are left behind. Grassroots movements, small organizations, and individuals working for positive change often lack access to the same advanced tools. This disparity risks creating a digital landscape where only the most powerful can influence and persuade.

AI has the potential to level the playing field—but only if we act now to make it accessible to everyone, not just those with vast resources. The Drupal community has long championed the idea that technology should empower rather than exclude, and this belief continues to inspire our work.

AI as a tool for empowerment

AI offers powerful capabilities for creating, translating, and distributing content. But to truly empower communities, we must focus on making these tools both affordable and usable for all.

Here’s where AI can make the greatest impact:

• Empowering human rights advocates: AI tools can protect their causes, amplify their messages, and counter deceitful propaganda campaigns effectively.
• Breaking language barriers: Advanced localization features allow for accurate and culturally resonant translations, opening up global audiences.
• Countering misinformation: By identifying and responding to false narratives quickly, AI can help protect the credibility of those working for truth.
• Streamlining communication: Automation of repetitive tasks, such as content generation or scheduling, frees up time for more impactful work.

These applications make AI a practical and transformative tool, not just for large organizations, but for anyone looking to make a difference.

AI’s role: a realistic perspective

Let’s be clear: AI will continue to play a significant role in shaping narratives, both for good and ill. It will be used for propaganda, hybrid warfare, and to amplify echo chambers. We cannot completely control this reality.

However, we can ensure that AI is also a force for good—a tool that enables collaboration, fosters mutual understanding, and empowers those working for positive change. By giving more people access to these tools, we can shift the balance away from dominance and toward dialogue.

This isn’t about revolutionizing AI’s role overnight; it’s about giving more people the resources they need to participate in the conversation.

Looking ahead with optimism

AI is here to stay, and its impact will only grow. While challenges remain, the potential for AI to empower individuals and communities is enormous. By democratizing these tools, we can help bridge divides, amplify diverse voices, and foster a digital world that values collaboration over competition.

In this rapidly evolving landscape, the key to a fairer future is accessibility. With the right tools, anyone—whether a grassroots organizer, a small business, or a passionate advocate—can create, influence, and inspire. The Drupal community and the spirit of open-source collaboration remind us that technology can serve everyone, not just a privileged few.

As we celebrate this Christmas season, let’s also look forward to a new year filled with opportunity—where AI tools bring us closer together and empower us all to shape a brighter future. The work we are doing right now is shaping the world of tomorrow that is changing so rapidly.

Category Drupal Community Jurriaan Roelofs

Automatically moderate comments using AI Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/23/2024 - 07:00 Tags Content Management Drupal ECA Artificial Intelligence Drupal Planet

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When you allow the general Internet to post comments, or any other kind of content, you're inviting spam and abuse. We see far more spam comments than anything relevant or useful -- but when there is something relevant or useful, we want to hear it!

With the AI module and the Events, Conditions, and Actions module, you can set up automatic comment moderation.

Like any use of AI, setting an appropriate prompt is crucial to getting a decent result. Here's the one we're trying out:

Drupal4Gov also provides extensive resources, including tutorials and training materials, to empower government agencies and developers.

On-page job application forms allow you to quickly and efficiently collect information from candidates interested in job opportunities, facilitating the process of selecting resumes of future employees. In this article, I’ll show you how to build a recruitment form with the Webform module and embed it on a Drupal landing page. All this without having to spend hours on tedious configuration. I invite you to read the article or watch an episode of the  “Nowoczesny Drupal” series.