A lot of important things happened for Drupal this May, including the annual DrupalCon North America. Read on to make sure you haven’t missed any key piece of news!
State of Drupal presentation (May 2024)
We’re kicking off May’s overview with Dries Buytaert’s State of Drupal keynote presentation from DrupalCon Portland 2024. The most significant announcement from this keynote is the upcoming Drupal Starshot which represents an important turning point for the CMS after 23 years.
Alongside a more user-friendly Drupal CMS aimed at ambitious site builders, Starshot will also include a refresh of the Drupal brand and its marketing strategy. The idea and presentation were inspired by former US president John F. Kennedy’s “Moonshot” speech about the United States’ goal of landing on the moon before the Soviet Union.
Read more about the DrupalCon 2024 Driesnote
XB week 1: 0.x branch opened!
We continue with an update on the work done on the Experience Builder initiative, coming from Acquia’s Wim Leers. Even before Dries’s announcement of the new initiative, the team was already working on the product requirements and developing proofs-of-concept for the highest risk areas.
One of the key factors in the success of Drupal Starshot and the Experience Builder will be the contributions of individuals and organizations. To this end, a 0.x branch of Experience Builder was opened in May, making it easier for people to already start contributing in this early phase of the initiative.
Read more about the work done on the Experience Builder
Drupal lead Dries Buytaert announces the guiding star for a new version of the Drupal CMS 23 years after its creation
The third article we’re featuring this month is more specifically about Drupal Starshot and comes from the Drupal Association. The article specifies that Starshot is not a fork of Drupal, but rather an aggregation of Drupal Core with the best of the contrib ecosystem and innovative strategic initiatives to greatly smoothen getting started with Drupal.
The goal is to make Drupal more accessible to non-developer and less technical users; Starshot will thus include the Next generation page builder (Experience Builder), automatic updates, key contrib modules, Project Browser together with Drupal Recipes, and other features that make Drupal more user friendly.
Read more about Drupal Starshot
The Comprehensive Guide to Drupal Recipes
Next up, we have a comprehensive guide to Drupal Recipes from Jim Birch of Kanopi Studios. Recipes solve the problems of using either installation profiles, distributions, or custom features and modules, and they are also a key component of the Starshot initiative.
Jim takes a look at the structure of a Drupal recipe and provides a brief overview of recipes’ limitations. He also shows how to apply a recipe, breaks down the four new Recipe APIs, and shows an example of what an actual Recipe looks like. Finally, he explains what config actions are and provides a list of currently available config actions.
Read more about Drupal Recipes
Polishing Drupal’s Admin UI
Moving on, this article from Mike Herchel walks you through some of the main causes of “jank” in Drupal’s administration UI and shows techniques for eliminating it and polishing the UI. Namely, the three most common causes are: lazy loading of an element; hiding an element with JavaScript; and moving an element with JavaScript.
The possible issues and solutions Mike’s article covers are: using <noscript> to eliminate jank within the dropbutton; using the new CSS media scripting features; fixing jank created by BigPipe lazy-loading content; and using the new CSS media feature with a fallback in the case when JavaScript loads but breaks.
Read more about polishing Drupal’s admin UI
Drupal Release Planning in the Enterprise
In the next article from May, Lullabot’s Andrew Berry dives into the peculiarities of Drupal release planning for enterprise projects and breaks down four key tips for effective release planning.
The reason why good release planning is particularly important for a Drupal project is the major changes to the Drupal release cycle that came with version 8. On top of that, other important technologies also have unique release and support schedules which all need to be aligned with your business.
So, Andrew recommends: building a schedule of key dates for your business, and of your stack and its support windows; using a dependency updater for security; and promoting the newly deployed features to stakeholders.
Read more about enterprise Drupal release planning
Drupal needs new, young developers
Approaching the end of our recap for May, we have an article from Michael Anello / ultimike who wrote about the importance of attracting new, younger developers to Drupal.
Michael’s article is based around the significant lack of Drupal developers with just a few years of experience, as showcased during Dries’s keynote from DrupalCon Portland 2024, as well as the results of the 2024 Drupal Developer Survey.
He proposes five priorities to improve this: keep Drupal's code modern; get more people using Drupal; introduce Drupal to students; promote hiring of new developers to organizations using Drupal; and attract good Drupal developers through something such as a scholarship program.
Read more about the need to attract new developers to Drupal
Announcing Drupal Starshot sessions
We’re rounding off this month’s overview with another article from Dries, this one announcing Drupal Starshot sessions which are helping people wanting to get involved to be up to speed with the project development. These have been held as five Zoom sessions, with one still left on Friday June 21st.
