Planet Drupal

Dear Readers,

Have you ever felt the transformative power of a teacher's or mentor's encouragement? Anatole France, the French poet and journalist, once encapsulated this influence by saying, 

"Nine-tenths of education is encouragement."

It's astonishing how teachers can nurture love or sow seeds of positivity, potentially steering an entire future. When a child moves beyond their family circle, teachers often step into a pivotal role. Their impact isn't confined to imparting knowledge; it extends to shaping perspectives, igniting passions, and defining life paths.

Just as many attribute their accomplishments to teachers who unearthed their hidden talents guiding their paths, the Drupal community thrives on mentors who play a pivotal role. Like educators, these mentors guide newcomers, share their expertise, and foster an environment conducive to growth within the Drupal ecosystem. They serve as pillars, offering invaluable guidance and insights enriching the community with their depth of knowledge and experience.

In this context, Michael Anello shines as a beacon within the Drupal realm. His trajectory, from teaching engineering to co-founding DrupalEasy—a hub for Drupal-centric training, career development, and consultancy—mirrors the impact of a guiding force.  The DropTimes had the opportunity to interview Michael Anello. He reflects on his journey, the evolution of Drupal, navigating challenges in the learning process and steering DrupalEasy through adaptations to accommodate various skill levels. In essence, his role echoes the influence of those pivotal teachers who shape destinies within the dynamic and ever-evolving landscape of the Drupal community.

In another enlightening interview, the multifaceted expertise of Lyubomir Filipov, a Group Architect and Deputy Program Manager at FFW, takes centre stage. His journey spans various roles—from organizer to academician to mentor—an embodiment of the diverse skills of an expert Drupal developer.

Lyubomir Filipov operates as a leader by example, orchestrating the convergence of talent with opportunity. He's instrumental in shaping career trajectories for over 800 professionals at FFW, ensuring that the right individuals find their niche within the company. 

Our adept sub-editor, Alka Elizabeth, skillfully conducted these insightful conversations, shedding light on the depth and breadth of Michael Anello's and Lyubomir Filipov's contributions within the Drupal sphere. Alka also delved into a Reddit discussion about the recent changes to not just Drupal alone but the economy, AI, and growth of other CMSs like WordPress, Wix, and Shopify. 

On a side note, I've compiled a thorough overview highlighting TDT's significant milestones of the past year.

Speaking of events, The DropTimes has been announced as the official Media Partner for Drupal Mountain Camp 2024, Switzerland. To learn more about the event, visit the official website. You can also follow our tag Drupal Mountain Camp to catch every update. 

February 06 is DrupalCon Portland's registration kickoff—don't miss out! Find all the essential details right here. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements as the event draws nearer. 

The highly anticipated return of the PHP Conference Kansai 2024—a momentous occasion for PHP engineers in Japan is back after a notable six-year hiatus. Do check out the details here. 

As MidCamp 2024 draws near, it invites organizations to unite and bolster the vibrant Drupal community together. 

FLDC 2024's countdown has commenced! Seize the early bird registration before January 12 and save $25 on your attendance fees. Don't wait—the deadline is approaching fast!  

Fan tickets for DrupalCamp Poland are available until November 1, 2024—grab yours before time runs out.  A list of the Drupal events for the week is published here.

Acquia's latest release, the e-book "Achieving Success with Headless and Hybrid CMSs," provides in-depth insights into the benefits of employing CMS in various architectures—traditional, headless, or hybrid. For more information, dive into this informative resource.

Some notable news highlights include WeebPal's celebration of its 12th anniversary, dubbed the Silk or Fine Linen Jubilee, featuring an enticing offer for website owners. They're offering 12 participants an opportunity to upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 free of cost.  

Centarro is rejoicing in its most substantial release yet: Drupal Commerce 2.37. Learn more about it here.

A groundbreaking addition to Drupal's arsenal is the newly launched Error Reporting module, poised to transform code analysis and debugging for effortless operations. Dive deeper into its capabilities here.

While more stories beckon for exploration, constraints compel us to halt further selection. To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Keep enjoying your Drupal journey! 
Thank you,

With warm wishes,
Elma John
Sub-Editor, TheDropTimes

In the second episode of our three-part series on the ETL Migration process, we delve into the most involved stage of Drupal migration: Transformation. This episode features insights from Tag1 Consulting’s experts, including Mike Ryan, co-creator of Drupal Migrate, and notable contributor Benji Fisher. They analyze the Transformation phase in the ETL process, specifically examining Drupal’s unique “row-by-row” approach, and the discussion session revolves around the advantages and challenges of this method, with a strong emphasis on optimizing performance within the transformation pipeline. The episode is a treasure trove for those considering or currently working on Drupal migrations, as it steps into the technical realm while touching on the practical aspects of transforming data during a migration. Benji expresses his fascination with this particular stage, describing it as a playground for innovation and detailing the intricacies that make it the heart of the migration process. This discussion is essential for developers and IT professionals seeking to understand or undertake large-scale Drupal migrations. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 - Coming soon! Please let us know if you have specific migration-related topics you'd like to see us cover. Or, reach out and let us know if we...

Read more janez Tue, 01/09/2024 - 07:33

The advantages of Drupal CMS always include its friendliness to users who cannot write code. In most cases, these users are content managers. How can you give more power to the content manager of your Drupal website? Add the Layout Builder module that makes building web pages as easy as putting Lego bricks together.

The restaurant sector has faced challenges amidst economic downturns, prompting a search for recovery through enhanced business agility. In fact, a staggering 71% of food establishments acknowledge the central role of digital transformation in achieving this objective.

In response to the growing influx of restaurants into the online domain, the demand for an efficient Restaurant CMS has become increasingly evident. A well-suited Restaurant website CMS, such as Drupal, proves instrumental in optimizing business operations.

What Makes Drupal the Right Choice for Restaurants? 

Drupal has over 20 years of experience in managing restaurant content and has become the top choice for many big companies and restaurants. 

Did you know? 

Around 89.2% of users believe that Drupal will become even more popular among different types of businesses in the next three years, not just in the restaurant industry. 

This means the demand for a Sports CMS and an Education CMS will also increase.

Looking for an assistant to handle all your routine Drupal tasks including checking for updates and clean-ups, without any manual intervention? We'd like to introduce you to Cron Jobs! Now let’s dive into the world of this behind-the-scenes helper, specifically in the context of task automation within Drupal. In this blog, we will delve into the fascinating realm of automation, explore the fundamental concept of cron jobs, provide an overview of cron jobs in Drupal, and discuss various essential aspects of crafting your first custom Drupal cron job. What is Automation Automation is the practice of utilizing technology, machinery, or software to perform tasks, processes, or operations with minimal or no human intervention. The primary objective of automation is to streamline and optimize workflows, reduce manual effort, improve efficiency, enhance accuracy, and increase productivity. In simpler terms, automation entails using technology to minimize the human effort required for task execution. As technology continues to advance, we can expect to see automated machines, technology, and software playing a more significant role in many industries and everyday tasks. Now, keeping all these things in mind and asking ourselves how we can automate something, we move to the next topic. What are Cron Jobs? The term "cron" is frequently encountered in the domain of computers, especially within operating systems like Linux. It serves as a tool for scheduling tasks based on time. In Unix systems, such as Linux, "cron" is a scheduling utility. A "cron job" is an automated task scheduled using the "cron" utility. Cron is a daemon – a background process that handles non-interactive tasks. In Unix-like operating systems, a daemon is a component, or a type of program, that silently operates in the background without requiring human interaction. It's like having a robot that wakes up and starts working when it hears a specific sound or when something specific happens. Cron jobs provide users with a powerful tool to automate system maintenance, monitor disk space, and manage backups at regular intervals. While cron job scheduling is widely favored by system administrators, it also offers significant benefits to web developers. It functions as a built-in alarm clock for your website tasks, ensuring that you can automate routine actions with ease. Cron is typically pre-installed on the system. However, in cases where it's not available, you can easily install it using the following commands: Update the package repository sudo apt updateInstall cron sudo apt install cronEnable the cron service to ensure it runs as expected sudo systemctl enable cronThe question arises: How can we activate cron or configure a customized cron to meet our specific needs? In this scenario, crontab comes to the rescue. Crontab A crontab is like a to-do list of tasks you want your computer to do at specific times, and it's also the name of the command you use to create and manage that list. Crontab stands for “cron table”. Each user in Linux has their own crontab, which may be used to schedule jobs that will be executed as that user. You can view, and update the crontab file using the crontab command. Example: To update the crontab file crontab -eTo list down or show the commands stored in the crontab file crontab -lCron Expression In simple terms, a cron expression in Linux is like setting an alarm for your computer to do specific tasks regularly. You have five fields to play with: minutes, hours, days of the month, months, and days of the week. By adjusting these fields, you can tell your computer exactly when to do things. There are also special characters like asterisks and slashes that let you be flexible with your schedule. For instance, if you set a cron expression like "0 * * * *," it means your computer will perform a task at the beginning of every hour. It's a handy tool that makes your computer do routine jobs automatically, like maintenance, backups, and running scripts. A job is represented by each line of a crontab file, which looks like this SYNTAX: # ┌────── minute (0 - 59)# │ ┌────── hour (0 - 23)# │ │ ┌────── day of the month (1 - 31)# │ │ │ ┌────── month (1 - 12)# │ │ │ │ ┌────── day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday;# │ │ │ │ │                7 is also Sunday on some systems)# │ │ │ │ │# │ │ │ │ │# *  *  *  *  *  command_to_execute Examples: At every 1 minute: * * * * * At every 2 minute:  * /2 *  *  *  * At every 15 minute: * /15  *  *  *  * At every 1 hour: 0  *  *  *  * At every 3 hours: 0  * /3  *  *  * At every 8 hours: 0  * /8  *  *  * Everyday (At 00:00):  0  0  *  *  * Hour range: Every hour between 11 am to 2 pm: 0  11-14  *  *  * Thanks to crontab Guru which is a simple editor for cron schedule expressions. For more examples, you can refer to this page. Drupal Cron Job Overview Drupal has a handy feature called Automated Cron. The Drupal automated cron job is an automatic task scheduler that handles regular website upkeep, including tasks like optimizing the database and clearing the cache, all at predetermined time intervals. It guarantees the website's smooth operation and data precision, minimizing the necessity for manual involvement. Some key features of automated cron: Scheduled Maintenance Tasks: In simple terms, Drupal's automated cron is like a behind-the-scenes helper that does regular chores for your website. It cleans up the website's storage, checks for important updates, and takes care of other routine jobs without bothering you. This helps keep your website running smoothly without you having to do these tasks manually. Configurable Frequency: If you're in charge of a Drupal website, you can decide how often the automated cron job should do its work. By default, it does its tasks every three hours, but you can change that to better suit your website's requirements. You can set this schedule by going into the Drupal admin settings, and it's kind of like adjusting the timing on a sprinkler system for your garden. Background Process: Think of automated cron in Drupal like a silent worker in the background. It gets things done without disturbing the part of your website that visitors see. It doesn't need outside tools to know when to do its tasks; it uses its internal clock, much like an alarm clock that wakes you up at a specific time without needing help from another device. Limitations of Drupal cron: Simultaneous Execution of hook_cron Modules and Resource Challenges: When several modules use the hook_cron function, they all run simultaneously, either in alphabetical order or based on the weight assigned to each module. This can make a webpage request more resource-intensive all at once and has the potential to exceed memory limits on a complex site. Handling Errors in Cron Tasks and Identifying Culprits for Smooth Execution: If there's an error in one cron task, it can halt the entire cron process, preventing the execution of the remaining tasks until the issue is fixed. It's also challenging to identify which task is causing the problem. Optimizing Cron Execution by Analyzing Task Durations: To improve the efficiency of cron execution and to optimize the cron run time. It's important to examine which cron tasks consumed more time during their run. Now to overcome all these limitations, Drupal provides us with modules like Ultimate Cron, Super Cron (abandoned module), Elysia Cron (Drupal 7), etc.. All these modules are one or the same with more added features. Now Super Cron is unsupported, the module is abandoned due to some security issues. The module is no longer developed by the maintainer whereas Elysia cron is for Drupal 7. How does Ultimate Cron Help? Parallel Execution of Cron Tasks: Error Isolation and Independence: Tasks are no longer executed sequentially; they now run in parallel. This means that if one cron task encounters an error, it won't affect the independent execution of other tasks. Individual Configuration for Cron Jobs with Differing Schedules: You can configure each cron job separately. For example, you can set up your cron job to run every hour and another cron job (cron job B) to run every two hours. Independent Logging for Each Cron Job: Each has separate logs. Let's install the Ultimate cron module and create our first custom cron job. So, to install the module you can visit https://www.drupal.org/project/ultimate_cron and download the module using composer. Use this command: composer require 'drupal/ultimate_cron:^2.0@alpha'This will install the Ultimate cron module, the next step is to enable it. You can enable the module via the site or by drush command. Use this drush command to enable the module: drush en ultimate_cronAfter installing Ultimate cron, we get some predefined cron jobs that the module provides, for example, cleanups (cache, temp files), removing expired log messages, and history deletion. Path: xyz.domain.name/admin/config/system/cron/jobs How to Configure Custom Ultimate Cron Job Create a config/install directory in the root of your custom module’s directory. Make a new file called ultimate_cron.job.jobname.yml (replace jobname with the name of your job). In our case we are creating a custom cron job to publish all the unpublished article contents, therefore let's name our job as publish_article_job. 3. Next step is to edit the ultimate_cron.job.publish_article_job.yml file. Inside ultimate_cron.job.publish_article_job.yml, we’ll add the details which will include a callback function, cron job ID, and rules for scheduling the task. langcode: en status: true dependencies: module: - custom_cron_example title: 'Custom job for publishing articless' id: publish_article_job module: custom_cron_example callback: custom_cron_example_publish_article_job scheduler: id: simple configuration: rules: - '* * * * *'4. Once editing the configuration file, we will now define a callback function inside the custom_cron_example.module file. <?php use Drupal\node\Entity\Node; /** * Custom ultimate cron callback function. */ function custom_cron_example_publish_article_job() { $message = "Voila ! Ultimate cron works."; \Drupal::logger("custom_cron_example")->notice($message); // Query to fetch all article unpublished nodes. $query = \Drupal::entityQuery('node'); $query->condition('status', 0); $query->condition('type', 'article'); $entity_ids = $query->accessCheck(FALSE)->execute(); foreach ($entity_ids as $entity_id) { $node = Node::load($entity_id); $node->setPublished(TRUE)->save(); } }Once all steps have been completed, it's time to activate the module in order to ensure that the new configurations we've created are applied to the website. Once the module is enabled, you will be able to view your custom cron job on the cron job dashboard.   Now this cron job will run every 1 minute since we added the cron expression as * * * * *. You can alter the rule as per your requirement. Feel free to use crontab guru for references. I believe there’s no harm in that ;) Results: Before the cron run, the article was unpublished.   Once the scheduled task (cron) is completed, the article gets published on the website. Additionally, there's a record in the database log that displays our unique message, which we included in the custom callback function we created.   Enabling Cron using External Calls By using crontab on the server. External cron job services like easycron or cronless. You can configure the time as per your requirement.  Easycron Cronless It may be beneficial to disable the automated cron system for performance reasons or to ensure that cron can only ever run from an external trigger. To disable the automated cron: Change the value of "Run cron every" to "Never."                    (OR) Add the following line to your settings.php: (so that no other user can enable it). $config['automated_cron.settings']['interval'] = 0;Final Thoughts In today's world, Drupal's cron job system remains essential for automated site maintenance. However, its design limitations and potential resource impact are better addressed with modern alternatives like scheduled tasks in server or external cron services, ensuring smoother website performance and management. Automated technology and machines are fascinating aspects of the future that hold the potential to revolutionize various aspects of our lives. However, adopting automation will also require careful consideration of its impact on the workforce and society as a whole Is your online presence ready for an upgrade? Let's discuss how Specbee can be your strategic partner in Drupal development.  

Part one in a series of posts introducing Symfony Messenger, its ecosystem, and unique Drupal integrations to Drupal developers.

by daniel.phin / 9 January 2024

The SM project brings Symfony Messenger and its ecosystem together with Drupal.

Symfony Messenger is a powerful alternative to Drupal’s @QueueWorker, enabling real-time or precise execution of scheduled tasks. It’s also a viable replacement for hook_cron enabling you to schedule dispatch and processing of messages according to crontab rules, again in real-time, rather than waiting for server-invoked or request-termination cron.

Messenger can be used as a user-friendly alternative to Batch API, as the user's browser is not blocked, while integrations such as Toasty can be programmed to notify when the last of a “batch” of messages completes, communicating to the user via user-interface toasts.

The Drupal integration includes additional niceties, such as intercepting legacy QueueWorkers for processing data through the Symfony Messenger bus, and end-user UI notifying a user when tasks relevant to them have been processed.

During this and the following series of posts, we’ll be exploring the benefits of real-time processing and user-friendly features that improve the overall experience and outputs.

The workerToasty displaying notifications.Messenger

First up, we’ll cover the main features of Symfony Messenger and how it works.

As a developer working with Messenger, the most frequent task is to construct message and associated message handlers. A message holds data, while a message handler processes the associated data.

A message is inserted into the bus. The bus executes a series of middleware in order, each of which can view and modify the message.

If a transport is configured, the message may be captured and stored for processing later.

Typically the bus, middleware, and transports are configured in advance and rarely changed. Message and message handlers are introduced often without needing other configuration.

• Message — an arbitary PHP object, it must be serialisable.
• Message handler — a class that takes action based on the message it is given. Typically a message handler is designed to consume one type of message.
• Middleware — code that takes action on all message types, and has access to the containing envelope and stamps.
• Bus — a series of middleware in a particular order. There is a default bus, and a default set of middleware.
• Envelope — an envelope contains a single message, and it may have many stamps. A message always has an envelope.
• Stamp — a piece of metadata associated with an envelope. The most common use case is to track whether a middleware has already operated on the envelope. Useful when a transport re-runs a message through the bus after unserialisation. Another useful stamp is one to set the date and time for when a message should be processed.
• Transport — a transport comprises a receiver and sender. In the case of the doctrine database transport, its sender will serialise the message and store it in the database. The receiver will listen for messages ready to be sent, and then unserialise them.
• Worker — a command line application responsible for unserialising messages immediately, or at a scheduled time in the future. Messages are inserted into the bus for processing.

The stars of the show are buses. One bus is ready out of the box, which comprises a series of ordered middleware. A message is dispatched into a bus, where each middleware has the opportunity to view and modify the message (and its envelope). It's unlikely you’ll need to think about middleware, as the default set may already be the perfect combination.

When a message is dispatched to a bus, you can choose to wrap it in an envelope and apply stamps like the DelayStamp . A message will always be wrapped in an envelope if you don’t do it explicitly.

Buses have a series of default middleware. The main middleware to note are the transport and message handler middlewares. When a transport is configured for messenger, the transport middleware will capture the message, serialise it, and store it somewhere. For example, a database in the case of the doctrine transport. Any middleware after the transport middleware are not executed, for now.

When running the worker, you are opting to choose which bus and transport to run. The command will listen for messages as they are stored, and if the time is right, messages will be unserialised and inserted into the bus. The message will begin its journey yet again, iterating through all the middlewares from the beginning. When the transport middleware is hit, it will detect the message has already been in the transport to prevent recursion. This is done by checking the ReceivedStamp stamp added to the message envelope.

Transports: synchronous, asynchronous

Out of the box, when a message is dispatched into the bus in a CLI or web request, it will be processed synchronously. All middleware will operate on the message in a set order, including the message handler middleware.

The greatest advantage of using Messenger is the ability to asynchronously handle messages outside of the thread they were originally dispatched. That is: asynchronously. This can be useful for improving the web request response times and reducing the memory usage and limit of web requests (allowing for more FPM threads on a machine). Bulky business operations that would typically, or should be, constrained by the limits of the web thread have more breathing room. A CLI runner/container may be set up with a little more memory and processing capability with the explicit direction to listen for messages and handle them in real-time, either as soon as possible or as scheduled.

Upcoming posts in this series will dive into aspects of Symfony Messenger and SM:

• Symfony Messenger’ message and message handlers, and comparison with @QueueWorker
• Real-time: Symfony Messenger’ Consume command and prioritised messages
• Automatic message scheduling and replacing hook_cron
• Adding real-time processing to QueueWorker plugins
• Making Symfony Mailer asynchronous: integration with Symfony Messenger
• Displaying notifications when Symfony Messenger messages are processed
• Future of Symfony Messenger in Drupal

The next post covers the implementation of a message and message handler, and a comparison with Drupal core’s @QueueWorker plugins.

Tagged Symfony, Symfony Messenger

Today we are talking about Portals, Community Websites, and Drupal with guest Ron Northcutt. We’ll also cover Private Message as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/432

Topics

• Why are you passionate about community sites
• Different types of portals you’ve worked on
• Common features
• Why is Drupal a great fit
• Why would you choose Drupal over a Saas or PaaS
• What is unique about each community
• How important is UX
• What common content models do you see
• Most important tip

Resources

• Lego sorting
  • https://news.lugnet.com/storage/?n=709
  • https://brickarchitect.com/guide/bricks/
• PHPBB
• discourse
• Open Social
• Monday

Guests

Ron Northcutt - community.appsmith.com rlnorthcutt

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

• Module name/project name:
  • Private Message
• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to include a full-fledged, ajaxified system for private messages between users on your Drupal site? There’s a module for that
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2017 by Jaypan, a fellow Canadian, but the most recent release is by Lucas Hedding, who hails from Nicaragua, and is a prolific contrib maintainer in his own right
  • Versions available: 8.x-2.0-beta18 and 3.0.0 versions available, the latter of which works with D9 and 10
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release in Oct 2023
  • Number of open issues: 130, 4 of which are bugs on the 3.0.x branch
  • Test coverage
• Documentation: does have a handbook, though the pages seem to date back to 2017, so hopefully the installation and setup hasn’t changed too much since then
• Usage stats:
  • Almost 2,000 sites
  • Maintainer(s):
• Module features and usage
  • With the Private Message module installed, users on your site can have permissions-based access to send private messages to each other
  • Messages and threads are fieldable entities, and in general the module is made to be highly configurable, so you can tailor it to meet your site’s specific needs
  • That includes the frequency for asynchronous operations like loading new messages, which can be done without a full page refresh. There’s also a companion module to use Node.js for the asynchronous operations, to reduce load on both the browser and the server
  • That also allows for browser push notifications, or you can use the integration with the Message module to send notifications via email, SMS, and more, including aggregating the notifications into digests
  • Companies often have a dedicated messaging solution like Slack or Teams that they use internally, but this can be a good solution for an extranet or vendor portal, where the users may represent a variety of organizations
  • It’s also worth mentioning that both Private Message and Message are included in the Open Social distribution, so that could be a way to try out a preconfigured setup

Drupal 7 security support will end - now is the time to plan a migration to Drupal 10! Nina Holzapfel Project Manager 08.01.2024

Drupal has been a robust choice for building and maintaining websites for decades. Like all other CMS systems, technological advancements and security requirements continually evolve at rapid speed and older software versions will be taken off the market.

In January 2025 Drupal 7 will finally reach its End of Life after 14 successful years and the necessity to transition to Drupal 10 has never been more critical.
Source: Drupal 7 End of Life | Drupal.org

What does Drupal 7 End of Life mean for your business?

This means the Drupal community and the official development team will stop providing support, including crucial security patches and updates. Without these updates, weaknesses in the system remain unaddressed, leaving websites vulnerable to dangerous cyber threats and data exploitation.

46,5% of all Drupal sites are still running on version 7

Source: Usage Statistics and Market Share of Drupal, January 2024 (w3techs.com)

Your company isn't just facing a hard deadline to relaunch your new site as January 2025 grows closer. You’re also competing with a vast number of organizations just like yours that need to coordinate the same migration process.

It is important to understand that depending on the complexity of the website the migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 is not just a simple update. The data structure and design need to be rebuilt and major technical updates executed. Ramsalt has migrated numerous of clients from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 and have built a team of migration experts for a successful migration process.

Get an offer for the migration and make sure that your company stays agile and competitive:
Yngve Bergheim, yngve@ramsalt.com

Get a Drupal 10 upgrade offer
Why should you migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10? 

The foremost reason to migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 lies in security. Yet, Drupal 10 brings automated updates, improved user experience, along with several other feature improvements. See our blog article: A new year, A new shiny Drupal 10 | Drupal | Ledende leverandør | Ramsalt.

Below we want to list some of the Drupal 10 highlights:

Improved content editing

CKEditor 5 update from CKEditor 4 - With a thorough rebuild and an exciting new feature set, CKEditor 5 gives Drupal 10 a modern, collaborative editor experience. Users of programs like Microsoft Word or Google Docs will be used to the new CKEditor's interface. It also offers common tools for collaboration like comments, change suggestions, version histories, and other accepted editing practices. 

CKEditor 5 in Drupal

Try it our yourself here: Feature-rich editor - CKEditor 5 demo

Gutenberg Editor - With the latest Drupal 10 update, we are capable of using the most loved content editor. Here are some key points about the Gutenberg editor in the context of Drupal:

User-Friendly Interface: Gutenberg provides a more intuitive and visual editing experience. It uses blocks to represent various content elements like text, images, and videos, making it easy for users to build and design their content layout.

Enhanced Content Creation: With Gutenberg, content creators can design more complex layouts without needing any extensive technical knowledge. It offers a wide range of customization options within each block, making it easier to design diverse and dynamic web pages, we even have our own Gutenberg landing page builder in-house. the limits are your imagination.

Responsive Design: Blocks in the Gutenberg editor are inherently responsive, ensuring that content created in Drupal looks good on all devices.

Extensibility: Just like Drupal, Gutenberg is highly extensible. Developers can create custom blocks to add new functionalities, tailored to specific needs.

Gutenberg in Drupal

Try it out for yourself: Drupal Gutenberg demo

Improved Admin and Design Themes

Drupal 10 introduces a significantly enhanced theming system, characterized by its streamlined single-directory component structure. This advancement not only boosts overall performance but also accelerates the rollout of new features. Furthermore, it offers comprehensive editing capabilities, enabling a seamless top-to-bottom customization experience. This modernized approach in Drupal 10 ensures a more efficient, user-friendly, and agile development process, catering to the evolving needs of end-users and editorial teams alike.

Improved Website Performance & Security

Drupal 10 improves your site security by including up-to-date protocols and technical dependencies such as PHP 8.2, Symfony 6.2. This means a faster and more modern website out of the box.

With enhanced dynamic caching (BigPipe) reduces page load times by invalidating only the content that has changed and therefore provides a faster and better user experience.

Drupal 10 also marks the end of Drupal 7’s jQuery. A large JavaScript library, jQuery was a powerful tool, but modern browsers perform many of the same functions. The up-to-date JavaScript used by Drupal 10 also decreases page load times and snappier behavior for the end users.

Source: Drupal 10 | Drupal.org & Drupal 10.2 is now available | Drupal.org

The Goal

In Drupal Commerce, carts do not have order numbers. Order numbers are not set until checkout completion, when the order is placed. If the order type has been configured with a number pattern, that pattern is used to generate the order number; otherwise the order entity ID is used. As a result, when a credit card payment is added during checkout, the cart/order may not have its final Order Number yet. For some payment gateways, this is fine--only the order entity ID is needed.

The Goal

A Drupal Commerce website may want to offer the same payment terms provided to customers purchasing products offline. If up-front payment is not required, then we need to create an option for customers to complete checkout without providing payment. Additional information may need to be collected during checkout for the "payment on account" option in lieu of a traditional payment method. For our business needs, this additional information takes the form of a Purchase Order number entered by the customer.

The Goal

When a customer completes checkout on a Drupal Commerce website, the cart order is "placed." No additional changes can be made to the order by the customer. Administrative users, with access permissions, can typically edit these "placed" orders. However, significant changes like the addition/removal or an order item or an order item quantity/pricing change can be problematic. The changes can be made, but... afterwards, things like taxes, discounts, shipping charges, etc. may not be correct.

The Goal

When a store has customers that are businesses or institutional, the standard Address field properties and formatting may not align well with actual billing and shipping addresses. For example, a business address may not include the customer's first and last name as the first line; instead, an organizational name may be used. If a contact name is included, it may be an "Attention" line. Additionally, businesses may require a line with reference or purchase order number.

The Goal

Drupal Commerce order types can be configured to email the customer a receipt when an order is placed, with or without a BCC copy sent to a specified email address. Additionally, administrative users can use a "Resend receipt" button to send a receipt to the contact email address set for the order; no copy is sent to an additional email address.

When re-sending an order receipt, administrative users may want to:

The Goal

Administrative users creating and updating orders in the backend may want to:

• Preview the order receipt before emailing customers.
• Send a copy of the order receipt to an email address other than the contact email address for the order.

Developers may want to:

• Preview the order receipt for testing purposes when working on environments with outgoing emails disabled

A Solution

We can add a button to the right of the existing, "Resend receipt" button that appears on Order View pages, like this:

The Goal

Core Drupal Commerce provides Order Receipt functionality. An Order Receipt is an email notification sent to a customer when an order is placed. It lets the customer know that the order has been received and includes a summary of the order. For each Order Type, you can turn order receipts on/off and, if enabled, specify that a copy be sent to a specific recipient.

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Recently, Randy Fay of the DDEV project blogged about two new Docker providers available (and supported by DDEV) for MacOS: Rancher Desktop and OrbStack. Both of these join Colima and Docker Desktop as supported Docker providers for DDEV on MacOS. 

What is a Docker provider?

I know that I certainly have asked this question - more times than I care to admit. As Randy explains in the blog post:

All of the Docker Providers on every platform (except Linux) are actually wrappers on the open-source Docker/Moby project, which is supported by Docker, Inc.

In other words, in order for DDEV to talk to Docker, it needs a provider. But, not all Docker providers are created equal. Neither Docker Desktop nor OrbStack are open-source - both have free versions (with restrictions); for most commercial use cases, there is a cost involved. Colima and Rancher Desktop are both open-source.

Features vary between Docker providers as well, so it only makes sense that performance differences also exist. Fortunately, Randy has written another blog post summarizing the performance differences between the various Docker providers on MacOS.

tl;dr if you have Mutagen enabled with DDEV, then they're all pretty fast, with OrbStack having the edge.

Why switch Docker providers?

While Colima is (IMHO) heads-and-tails better than Docker Desktop for Mac, upgrading Colima itself has been a bit of a rocky road. I have learned to never assume that my databases will remain intact during a Colima upgrade. This usually isn't a deal-breaker, but for me, it is squarely in the inconvenience category.

I'm hoping that the situation is smoother with Rancher Desktop.

Getting started with Rancher Desktop

As I (currently) use DDEV on MacOS with Colima (and Mutagen enabled,) I decided to give Rancher Desktop a try, as it is an open-source option. 

Using the instructions provided by the DDEV project, I downloaded Rancher Desktop from the official site. A bit surprisingly, the recommended installation method was not Homebrew, but rather a bit of an old-school MacOS .dmg file.

After downloading Rancher Desktop (but before installing it,) the steps I took to install and change over from Colima began with:

$ ddev poweroff $ colima stop

Next, I double-clicked to install Rancher Desktop - making sure to uncheck the "Kubernetes" checkbox as the DDEV instructions suggested. I didn't touch any other settings during the Rancher Desktop install.

Once that was installed, I restarted my Terminal app, then navigated to one of my DDEV projects.

$ cd ~/sites/d10 $ docker context use rancher-desktop $ ddev start

If you haven't used it before, the docker context use rancher-desktop bit basically tells Docker which provider to use. In other words, you can have multiple providers installed (like I do with Colima and Rancher Desktop) and switch between them using the docker context use command.

With that, installation was complete. 

My experience with Rancher Desktop

In short: uneventful (in a good way)

I didn't have any issues at all - it all went very smoothly. From a performance standpoint, Drupal 10 sites feel a little bit snappier than with Colima, but this is purely qualitative, not quantitative. 

The (minor) downside

When switching Docker providers, while project code isn't touched, unfortunately, project databases don't automatically come along. In his blog post, Randy suggests using ddev snapshot --all as an initial step in the process to back up all databases. I tend to take a more piecemeal approach - individually exporting databases while using Colima, then importing them while using Rancher Desktop. For example, here's my process for moving a database from Colima to Rancher Desktop (assuming my system is currently using Rancher Desktop):

$ cd ~/sites/d10 $ ddev poweroff $ colima start $ docker context use colima $ ddev start $ ddev export-db > db-backup.sql.gz $ ddev poweroff $ docker context use rancher-desktop $ ddev start $ ddev import-db –file=db-backup.sql.gz $ ddev drush cr

Granted, it's a bit wordy, but it works for me.

So, Orbstack?

At the present time, I have no plans to test-drive Orbstack. While Randy's blog post does indicate I would experience a minor performance boost, at this time, I'd rather just stick with an open-source solution.

One of our Professional Module Development course graduates, Jay Volk, recounted his recent experience with Orbstack:

My experience is that OrbStack is really fast and while not open source (it's $8/mo.) it seems well worth the cost and I'm happy to support this project.  Orbstack will take your existing Docker settings and move them to Orbstack when starting up (it asks your permission.) This proved to be no problem for DDEV but occasionally causes problems with the other solution I sometimes need, Lando.  Easy enough, Docker can reclaim settings back from OrbStack and with a Docker restart you're good to go again with that (albeit slower) solution.

Conclusion

I wrote the first draft of this blog post about 2 weeks ago - since then I've stuck with Rancher Desktop and have no plans to go back to Colima. I'm pretty sure the performance is a bit better than Colima and I've had absolutely zero issues. The real test (for me at least) will be when it comes time to update Rancher Desktop - assuming it is a smooth experience, I doubt I'll be returning to Colima. 

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