Top Drupal blog posts from February 2025

Tim

Posted on07 Mar 2025in

Like every month, we’ve prepared an overview of the top monthly Drupal news and articles. We hope you enjoy revisiting our top picks from February!

Next-Drupal 2.0: A Leap Forward in Drupal-Powered Headless Front-Ends

This month we’re starting with an announcement from Chapter Three about the first stable release of version 2.0 of their Drupal/Next.js integration, Next-Drupal. With this release, businesses become even more empowered to leverage Drupal’s advanced content management capabilities together with the powerful front end features of Next.js.

Next-Drupal 2.0 provides support for Next.js 15 and Drupal 11, the latest versions of the two technologies. It also provides full support for the Next.js App Router, as well as introducing tag-based validation and other new features. All of this results in substantial improvements in performance and developer experience.

Read more about Next-Drupal 2.0

Drupal's Starshot initiative and its impact on my contributions… aligning the Webform module with Drupal CMS

Next up (no pun intended), we have another important announcement, this one coming from Jacob Rockowitz, maintainer of the Webform module and the Schema.org Blueprints module for Drupal. He writes regarding the future of his maintenance of the two modules in a Drupal landscape where the focus is on contribution to the Drupal Starshot initiative / Drupal CMS.

This particular article focuses on the future of the Webform module, which is part of the “Contact form” track for Drupal CMS. In it, Jacob focuses on the challenges of maintaining such a widely used module, especially now with it becoming a part of the Drupal CMS ecosystem.

Using Bootstrap in Drupal CMS

We continue with a tutorial on using Bootstrap in Drupal CMS, provided by Ivan Zugec / WebWash. The setup begins with making some configuration changes for front-end theming in Drupal CMS.

The next steps include configuring the Bootstrap5 Theme and compiling Bootstrap in the Bootstrap5 Subtheme. After that, Ivan focuses on Radix, a more advanced Bootstrap-based theme that uses single-directory components, which are now also part of Drupal Core.

The next section of Ivan’s article is dedicated to integrating Bootstrap with Layout Builder in Drupal CMS using Bootstrap Layout Builder. Finally, he shows how to add Bootstrap Grid to Drupal Views.

Mapping Your SEO Success: Why You Need an XML Sitemap and How to Configure It in Drupal

Moving on, we have an article from ImageX Media’s Nadiia Nykolaichuk who dives into the capabilities of the Simple XML sitemap module for Drupal. The module’s key features include: support for various entities; flexible settings; multilingual support; views integration; image and video sitemaps; default sitemaps; and more.

Nadiia breaks down all the steps of configuring a sitemap for Drupal websites with the Simple XML sitemap module. It consists of 3 submodules that enable content to be submitted to search engines and to integrate with Drupal Views. Nadiia also demonstrates how to use the module’s more advanced features, such as settings for individual content items and managing your XML sitemaps.

Navigating Burnout: Common Signs of Burnout among Drupal Contributors and Resources for Support

The next article, published by Matthew Tift on the Drupal Community Working Group’s blog, is less technical and instead focuses on how Drupal contributors can manage burnout.

Matthew’s article defines 4 main symptoms of burnout which are especially important for the Drupal community: a decrease in motivation, increased frustration & irritability, isolation & inactivity, and physical symptoms such as headaches, insomnia, etc.

To find support and deal with burnout, Matthew recommends the following: talking to the community, for example in the Drupal Slack; finding (or becoming) a mentor; taking better care of yourself; setting limits to how much you work; and talking to (mental health) professionals.

Unveiling the CKEditor AI Writing Agent in the Drupal Ecosystem

Another article from February that’s worth highlighting is the announcement from DXPR’s Jurriaan Roelofs of the CKEditor AI Writing Agent, which enhances content creation in Drupal with an AI-first approach.

The agent provides numerous advanced features for content creators and editors, the two most important ones being real-time streaming and context-aware writing. It also offers multilingual support, streamlined content moderation tools, and additional customization capabilities to ensure brand & style guide compliance.

Developers also benefit from the agent’s versatile API, enabling them to make project-specific customizations. The increased efficiency and improved user experience that it provides allows content creators to focus more strongly on the strategic aspects of their jobs.

AI-Assisted Translation Workflows in Drupal

A second interesting article about the use of AI in Drupal content workflows comes from Don Lalicon of Evolving Web, this one focusing on AI-assisted translation. Even with Drupal’s strong multilingual support, managing multilingual content comes with its own set of challenges, such as high costs, time-consuming processes, issues with scaling, and workflow management.

Evolving Web’s custom AI-assisted Translation Management Tool module addresses these challenges with automatic translation of referenced elements, centralized translation management, real-time translation status tracking, built-in human review options, and continuous translation automation. These also take care of other common translation pitfalls, such as ensuring the translation of key UI elements, and handling linked content such as referenced pages and media.

The future of Drupal CMS: an agency perspective

Lastly, we have an article from 1xINTERNET in which different Drupal agency leaders share their thoughts on the future of Drupal CMS. It features insights from Christoph Breidert of 1xINTERNET, Tiffany Farriss of Palantir.net, Stella Power of Annertech, and Imre Gmelig Meijling of React Online.

They all agree that Drupal CMS will help with user adoption and the learning curve of Drupal, bringing the platform closer to a broader audience, including marketers and other non-technical users. The new Drupal CMS will showcase existing Drupal capabilities such as no-code/low-code and other advanced site building functionality, including AI-powered site building and content management.

Drupal CMS: changing the game for ambitious marketers & site builders

On 07 Feb 2025 in Experience, Drupal