Top Drupal blog posts from January 2023

Tim

Posted on14 Feb 2023in

We’re back with an overview of our favorite Drupal articles from last month. We hope you enjoy January’s selection!

How to Use Cypress for Testing Drupal

The first article we’d like to highlight this month comes from Jordan Graham of Aten Design who demonstrates how to use the Cypress testing library for performing tests in Drupal. In the first section, Jordan shows how to install Cypress in your Drupal project and configure it for end-to-end (E2E) testing.

Next, he shows how to write and run basic tests with Cypress, before concluding with a section on customizing it for Drupal. Here you’re able to write custom commands, giving you neat user experience benefits such as logging users in based on their uid and thus not having to store or read passwords during testing.

Get Involved: Ways to Contribute to Drupal, No Experience Required

Next up, we have a great article from Greg Boggs intended primarily for people who are hesitant to contribute to Drupal or another open-source project because they lack development expertise.

He breaks down a list of ways to get involved, many of which consist of very much needed non-developer contributions, e.g. writing/improving documentation, helping with translations, design and user experience, promoting and marketing, etc.

In addition to these, Greg also includes a list of resources where new contributors can get additional help and/or places where they can start easily contributing to Drupal.

Hot New Feature in Drupal 10: Views Responsive Grids!

In the next article from January, Nadine Nykolaichuk of ImageX presents an important new feature in Drupal 10, Views Responsive Grids. It is an enhancement of the new front-end theme Olivero developed by Olivero lead Mike Herchel, who also announced it in an article and presented it during DrupalCon Prague last year.

As its name suggests, the feature enables users to easily create responsive grids using Drupal’s Views UI. This is achieved using modern CSS features which are now possible thanks to the inclusion of Olivero in Drupal Core and the end of support for Internet Explorer 11.

Microsites in Drupal

We continue with an article from Lullabot’s Matt Robison about implementing microsites in Drupal. He starts off by defining the concept of microsite and giving a few examples where microsites might be used, e.g. for specific departments of higher education / government institutions, or for the top shows of a television network.

The next section shows how to change the look and feel of a website section in Drupal, a key feature for microsites. Another thing to consider is how content is treated under microsites, and Matt also shows everything in practice with an example of a product company developing separate microsites for each individual product.

To Drupal, or Not to Drupal

Next on our list is not a single blog post but a series of five posts written by David Kirkwood of Electric Citizen about migrating off Drupal 7, and what options and considerations to keep top of mind here.

A key point in the series is that migrating from Drupal 7 will be difficult no matter what platform you decide on, and so ease of upgrade should not be among your main criteria.

Instead, you should consider things such as recent developments and updates in Drupal, as well as how much you need to outsource and how you’re going to handle knowledge attrition.

Read To Drupal, or Not to Drupal part 1

Drupal 10: Using Context Definitions To Create Context Aware Plugins

Moving on, this article by Philip Norton on his blog #! Code shows how to use context definitions to easily inject context awareness into plugins without bloat and/or relying on custom logic.

The first half of Philip’s article is a guide to adding context to a block, which allows this block to find the node entity and render a field from it. The method he shows also takes care of injecting caching information into the block.

In the second half, Philip takes a look at a few different ways of using annotations to add context definitions, e.g. by adding a label.

Drupal 10 - Everything You Need to Know

Approaching the end of this month’s overview, we have an article by Heather Hawkins of Ixis who goes through the new features of Drupal 10 which are relevant for marketers and site builders.

These novelties include: an improved text editor with CKEditor 5; a new core admin theme, Claro; the addition of the Layout Builder; streamlined Media management; and other improvements, i.e. in security, performance, etc.

A lot of these improvements are a response to stats about Drupal usage showing that beginners tend to have a hard time getting familiar with it, and so the Easy out of the box initiative was created to bundle some key modules and make them easily accessible to marketers.

Migration, Upgrade or New Build?

Last but not least is an article by Barbara Buckley of Amazee Labs who summarizes key insights from her teammates Gareth McWilliams and Mustapha Ben Ellafi about what moving from Drupal 7 means for clients. The key takeaway is that moving from Drupal 7 to version 9 or 10 generally means a new build rather than a straightforward migration.

Since Drupal’s upgrade path has been greatly simplified since version 8, it makes sense to upgrade straight from Drupal 7 to 10, both in terms of difficulty and performance. The article also includes a breakdown of what actually happens in a move from Drupal 7 so that clients get a clearer picture of the entire process.

Read more about moving off Drupal 7