Are you new to the world of Drupal, eager to dive into its powerful capabilities, but encountering obstacles in the form of outdated tutorials and confusing documentation? You're not alone. Beginning your Drupal journey can feel like navigating uncharted territory, leaving many feeling frustrated before they even begin.

Last month, we announced that depending on readiness of the codebase to 11.0.0 beta requirements today on April 26, 2024, Drupal 11 would be released either on the week of July 29, 2024 or the week of December 9, 2024.

The Drupal 11 codebase progressed a lot since then, it is based on Symfony 7 and jQuery 4, and the deprecated APIs have been removed. However, while we are making rapid progress on PHPUnit 10 support, we need to fully complete that update to PHPUnit 10 before a beta release, which will not quite be ready for next week.

To help the community prepare for Drupal 11, we decided to make Drupal 11.0.0-alpha1 available next week (on the week of April 29, 2024), alongside Drupal 10.3.0-beta1. This also means that those attending DrupalCon Portland 2024 the week after can already try out the first tagged version of Drupal 11, and modules can add Drupal 11 compatibility confident that all runtime APIs are stable.

We are giving ourselves an additional couple of weeks to run down the last PHPUnit 10 issues and any other remaining beta blockers ready for a stable Drupal 11.0.0 release on the week of July 29, 2024. Assuming all goes well, we'll make a final decision by May 10th and release a beta shortly afterwards.

In Drupal 10, you can create custom tokens using your custom module. Before creating custom tokens, you need to have the Drupal tokens module installed on your Drupal site. This contributed module already comes with some predefined tokens. These defined tokens can be used globally.

Steps to Create the Drupal Custom Tokens

1. Begin by creating a yourmodule.module file in your custom module directory.

2. Establish your custom token type.

 

Discover how DDEV, Docker, and NGROK can revolutionize your local development process. Our latest guide dives into the seamless integration of these powerful tools, offering you the most efficient way to set up, develop, and test your Drupal projects right from your local machine. Streamline your workflow and enhance productivity with our comprehensive insights!"

How to create a partial date field in Drupal (i.e. Year & Month without Day)

One of Drupal's main strengths is its data modeling.

But sometimes choosing the appropriate field type comes with a form widget that isn't what we're looking for. For example, using a Date field results in the form displaying a date "widget" (form input) which includes a full date consisting of a day, month, and year, and optionally a time.

How to remove the time from a date field in Drupal

Because removing the time from date fields is such a common request, Drupal allows its removal without writing any custom code.

How to hide the time Drupal's frontend

Fortunately, the date field has a highly configurable display on the frontend. By visiting the "Manage Display" page (or configuring the field's block, if using layout builder), you will have the option of selecting (or creating) a date format.

Follow these steps to change the date's output for your frontend:

ashrafabed Fri, 04/26/2024

It’s less than two weeks to DrupalCon Portland 2024, and the excitement is building! If you’re gearing up for the biggest Drupal event of the year, we’re here to help you maximize your travel experience to Portland. Let’s dive right in!

Hotel Bookings at Great Prices

You still have a chance to book your DrupalCon Portland hotel within the official hotel block. By staying within the hotel block, you'll get the best proximity to the conference center as well as the chance to run into other Drupalists on your floor! Book now:

• Hyatt Regency Portland 
• DoubleTree by Hilton - book by Sunday 28 April

When and where is DrupalCon’24 happening in Portland?

DrupalCon North America 2024 will be held from 6th to 9th May 2024 at the Oregon Convention Center (yes, in-person!). Located right in the heart of the city, it is a perfect hub for exploration. You'll find hotels, restaurants, and shops just around the corner. It's also super easy to get to fun stuff like entertainment and hiking. With endless possibilities, you're sure to find something that suits your fancy.

Things you should NOT miss out on in Portland

May is a delightful time to be in Portland, with spring in full bloom. Enjoy the sunny weather and mild temperatures, making it the perfect season to explore the city's vibrant outdoor scene. There are several must-visit places that capture the city's unique charm.

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Learning Drupal with the Help of an AI Tutor

TL; DR: Use this prompt and the text from a Drupalize.Me tutorial to experiment with using generative AI as a tutor for learning Drupal.

A while ago, I wrote an article and gave a presentation about why learning Drupal is so hard. One of the key challenges I identified is the “pit of despair”. It's that point in the learning journey where you can no longer rely on the hand holding of step-by-step tutorials. You need to step out into the chasm and come up with your own unique solutions to your specific problems. That point where you know just enough to realize the breadth of what you don’t yet know. And I had said, based on input from many peers, that the quickest way through the dip is real-world experience and drawing on the expertise of others. The advice could be summed up as: if you want to learn fast, get a tutor.

It can be hard to find a mentor. As much as we would love to be able to do so, our small team at Drupalize.Me can't scale personalized individual tutoring. So I've been thinking about how you might be able to use AI to help get at least some of the benefits of tutoring.

joe Thu, 04/25/2024 - 11:29

The Drop Times delves into the dynamics of the Drupal community with a detailed analysis of LinkedIn data, revealing the distribution and growth trends of Drupal professionals worldwide. This comprehensive study sheds light on regional concentrations and potential areas for community engagement.

Legal forms are often challenging to understand and fill-out. Breaking them into manageable chunks was essential for end users and content editors.

Authored by: Nadiia Nykolaichuk.

Drupal 7 was released 13 years ago, during the Jurassic period in the world of modern software. However, as of April 2024, there are 322,700+ websites officially listed on drupal.org as still running on Drupal 7, which sadly makes it the #1 installed Drupal major core version but, luckily, this number is steadily reducing.

One of the most impactful things to do in preparation for any migration project is to understand the source site. The more insight you gather into how the current site was built, the better equipped you will be to perform the migration.

Read more mauricio Wed, 04/24/2024 - 06:00

Welcome back to “Skills Upgrade” a Talking Drupal mini-series following the journey of a D7 developer learning D10. This is episode 8.

Topics

• Review Chad's questions

  • What is the process of creating a new issue, reviewing automated tests, and creating a merge request for review by the project maintainer?

    • https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/git/using-gitlab-to-contribute-to-drupal
    • https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/git/using-gitlab-to-contribute-to-drupal/creating-issue-forks
    • My example issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/smart_date/issues/3432819
    • My example merge request: https://git.drupalcode.org/project/smart_date/-/merge_requests/94

  • If we're not using Composer to pull the contrib module, how do we make sure that all dependencies are handled?

  • How can someone navigate so many complex issues without getting lost or "barking up the wrong tree"?

• Tasks for the upcoming week

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This is part 1 of a series of articles that defines our approach to frontend performance optimization. In this part we get into the details of an effective cache policy.

Imagine a world where installing Drupal instantly launches you into a creative experience, allowing you to build and style pages right out of the box, without any need for additional modules or configuration.

The introduction of Drupal's Layout Builder in 2018 was an important milestone toward this vision, but it was just the first step. Layout Builder provides site builders with a powerful drag-and-drop interface for creating and arranging content within customizable layouts.

Despite its success, there is a clear and pressing need to improve the existing Layout Builder. The numerous community-developed modules enhancing Layout Builder highlight the need for a more comprehensive solution.

That is why at DrupalCon Lille last year, I was excited to announce the "Next Generation Page Builder" initiative, aimed at improving and expanding the Layout Builder to provide a truly intuitive, out-of-the-box page-building experience.

Since announcing the 'Next Generation Page Builder', led by Lauri Eskola (Acquia), a Drupal Core Committer, we've done extensive research and planning.

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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 and expand Layout Builder to provide a truly intuitive out-of-the-box page building experience.

We have started defining what experience would look like by identifying user journeys from beginning to end, from customizing Drupal to match a brand and content strategy to creating and editing pages. We have identified that to provide the desired experience, we need to define a standardized way for builders and creators to transform designs into optimized digital experiences. To realize the Ambitious Site Builder vision announced by Dries in 2022, we are providing visual, browser-based tools that require minimal technical expertise. This will make it easier for users without prior knowledge about Drupal or coding to implement a digital experience with Drupal. Our working name for this is Experience Builder to highlight that the module seamlessly integrates a page builder and a theme builder.

With the Experience Builder, site builders can create fully customized pages and themes using no-code/low-code tools in the browser. It provides site builders, developers, and content creators a single platform to collaborate. Content creators are empowered to create and update content without having to reach out to a developer. Site builders can balance brand consistency and creative freedom by selecting which visual editor controls to expose to the content creator. As a result, anyone in your organization can easily build and update sites, accelerating time to market while remaining brand compliant.

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TDT hired a full-time journalist intern to cover DrupalCon Pittsburgh in 2023. Aidan F. Dean Dunn, just out of college, did a commendable job. Aidan talks about his experiences reporting at the tech conference in this conversation with Varun Baker.

While preparing the recent Markdown Easy 1.0.1 release, I utilized a couple of tools that I hadn't used before in order to help improve code quality as well as the quality of the release notes.

cspell

cspell is a Node.js spell-checker for code that was made available to the default Drupal GitLab templates in February, 2024. There is a new SKIP_CSPELL variable that can be set if you'd like your project to completely ignore cspell (it is enabled by default.) Documentation on using cspell in Drupal GitLab pipelines is available. I'd wager that most Drupal contrib maintainers will have the need for a custom word list (as I did,) so I took a few minutes to learn a bit more about it.

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Drupal 9 to 10 Transition Made Simple: Real Code Insights kanapatrick Tue, 04/23/2024 - 10:31

Have you found yourself gearing up for the transition from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10, only to be met with complexities and uncertainties along the way? You're not alone in this journey. Making the switch between major versions of a CMS can feel like navigating through a maze of code and updates, leaving you puzzled and overwhelmed.

As a content writer, one thing that poses a serious concern for professionals in this field is plagiarism. It refers to the act of using someone else’s work and calling it your own. It can be frustrating and is ethically and legally unacceptable. Duplicate content is no less than plagiarism. In fact, it can cause concerns not only for content professionals but also for website owners and SEO professionals. Surprisingly, 25-30% of the content on the internet today is duplicated without people even realizing it. In this blog, we’ll talk about duplicate content, the significance of this issue in today’s metrics, and how Drupal helps you solve the problem with convenience. What is duplicate content Duplicate content simply means identical content that exists across various URLs on the internet. When identical content shows up on different URLs, search engines typically face confusion in determining which URL to prioritize in their search results. This leads to low-ranking issues for all the URLs that display similar content, while preference slides over to alternative web pages. Why is it a significant problem As mentioned earlier, duplicate content can cause issues for marketers, website owners, and SEO professionals. Let me categorize the types of issues it can bring you: For Search Engines Identification: Search engines struggle to determine which version(s) of content to include or exclude from their indexes. Link Metrics Distribution: They face uncertainty in distributing link metrics like trust, authority, anchor text, and link equity among multiple versions or a single page. Ranking Ambiguity: It becomes unclear which version(s) should rank for specific search queries. For Website Owners Search Engine Optimization: To enhance user experience, search engines tend to display only one version of duplicated content.

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Join us as we delve into the realm of Dropsolid with Dominique de Cooman. Discover the driving forces behind their innovative integration of Drupal and open-source technology, and gain insights into the evolving landscape of digital experiences. From their founding principles to navigating Drupal's future, Dominique offers a candid exploration of Dropsolid's journey and its impact on the digital realm.