The Pathauto Module The Pathauto module helps you create SEO friendly paths for every page of your website. It is also useful when developing content silos, which is also helpful to your website's SEO. Tracy Cooper Tue, 05/11/2021 - 07:00

Top 9 Social Media Integration Modules for Drupal 9 Shefali Shetty 11 May, 2021 Top 10 best practices for designing a perfect UX for your mobile app

If you have a business to run, being active on social media isn't a choice anymore. You need social media to put yourself out there coz that’s where your audience is. There’s an increasing need to connect all the social media platforms with your website. Integrating social media with your website not only helps in an improved user experience, but you're also making it easier for users to share your content within their networks. Drupal, as usual, offers plenty of options to make your site more social. Improved collaboration between your Drupal site’s users means better engagement of visitors with your site.

 

In this article, we have curated a list of the top 11 social media integration modules in Drupal 9 (also compatible with Drupal 8) ordered by their popularity.

AddToAny Share Buttons Module

With this module, you can harness AddToAny's universal sharing buttons. These buttons are vector and SVG buttons that look great on any background. They're lightweight and scalable to fit even high-PPI screens. It allows for easy integration with your Drupal website and is also optimized to load asynchronously. With a minified script, cached and instantly served from CDN, this module is a great choice to integrate social sharing buttons to a Drupal website.

Image credits: Drupal.org

ShareThis Module

The ShareThis module has been based on the Drupal 5 Share project and integrates the ShareThis tool on the node types you want to display this on. It is extremely flexible and can be customized using the API. You can place the block anywhere on your Drupal website. It can also be customized to display the number of shares the page currently has. 

Image credits: Drupal.org

Social Media Share Module

This Drupal module lets users share the current webpage to various social media platforms like Facebook (share and messenger), Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, email client, and even Whatsapp. It is also flexible enough to add in more platforms of your choice. The Social media share module also enables you to modify or disable the services from the config page. It can be added as a field in entity and leverage the field API.

Shariff Social Media Buttons Module

The Shariff social media buttons module for Drupal integrates with the Shariff social media buttons library to offer a safe way to add social sharing buttons on a Drupal website. We call it safe because, unlike other social sharing widgets, this module does not leak user's personal data. Also because it does not inject iframes or call external Javascript. Once downloaded, it implements the Javascript library and you can display the buttons as a block or field.

Image credits: Drupal.org

Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons

As the name very clearly suggests, this Drupal module lets you add social sharing buttons to your website that are ridiculously responsive! They are SVG-based sharing icons, very lightweight, and compatible with most browsers. You do not need to add any third-party scripts to use this module. It can be added as a block or at the end of certain node types. They originally come with share buttons but can be also customized to turn them into follow buttons to enable users an easier way to follow you on social media. It is highly customizable where you can configure which buttons you want to display, the button sizes, number of rows to display, prefix a text (follow/share) that resizes automatically, and more.

Image credits: Drupal.org

Social Auth Google Module

This popular module lets users register themselves and login to a Drupal website via their Google account. The module adds a login path to google (user/login/google) which then redirects users to login to Google. This module is a part of the Drupal Social Initiative and harmonizing the social networking functionality in Drupal is its primary goal. It is based on the Social API that blends authentication with external services - in this case - Social Auth google. 

Image Credits: Drupal.org

Social Feed Module

If you want to display a live feed from your social media pages on your Drupal website, this module is just the one for you. The Social Feed module for Drupal 8 and 9 lets you integrate data from your social networking pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to your website. Configuring this is simple, where you will need to enter the social media platform page name, the App ID, a secret key, and user token, which you will easily find on your social media page. You can display the feeds using the Drupal block system.

Like & Dislike Module

Want to show your users how many of the readers liked and disliked your article? The Like and Dislike module for Drupal enables a like and dislike widget wherever you want to place it on your page. It used the Voting API to store, retrieve and tabulate votes. It works for Bundles and Entity types and comes with a  settings page where you can configure for which bundles you need the widget to work.

Image credits: Drupal.org

Twitter Embed Module

The Twitter embed module for Drupal allows you to embed a Twitter timeline or button to your website. You can expose Twitter widgets by embedding them as a block or a field. When you embed it as a block, you can choose to display your Twitter profile, list, collection, or likes from your Twitter page.

Image credits: Drupal.org

Social media marketing is the best form of marketing today. You need to use this social media weapon to the fullest to reap great benefits for your organization. Integrating Social media modules with your Drupal website will not only increase awareness about your business but you will also see a surge in website traffic. Want to make your website more engaging by harnessing the power of Drupal? Talk to our Drupal experts today!

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There are pros and cons to every type of software installation - from ease of use and maintenance, to separation of concerns, to division of expertise. Finding the system that works best for you or your company may require a lot of research and some weighty decisions. Does a single system meet your needs? Do you have a great back end setup, but you need to separate your front end from it for business reasons? In the second installment in our three part series on Laravel, Managing Director Michael Meyers talks with Senior Software Engineer Laslo Horvath about the challenges and pitfalls of systems - whether they’re decoupled or monolithic. Learn more about the factors of each, and if you really need to go one way or the other - or if a hybrid approach is the better way to move forward. * Part 1 --- For a transcript of this video, see Transcript: Laravel with Laslo - Part 2. --- Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Read more lynette@tag1co… Mon, 05/10/2021 - 06:56

The Merits of Open Source DXP: Can Drupal Provide Them? Gurpreet Kaur Mon, 05/10/2021 - 16:09

Digital experiences have become an integral part of everyone’s life today. Be it the provider of the experience, being the businesses or the receiver of those experiences, which would be the users; both benefit a great deal from a sound and seamless digital experience. 

For the business to provide an impressive digital experience and the user to enjoy it, a DXP or a Digital Experience Platform is somewhat necessary. Through the software’s management of multiple channels, devices and every user touchpoint, it is able to provide personalised user experiences. Its forte is its ability to converge multiple technologies to provide the best possible experience to the user, making their journey a memorable one. With the use of the latest technology, the people building the experience are also pretty gleeful since they get to explore whatever is new.

So, if I had to define a DXP, I’d say it is a platform that is equipped to handle and deliver all the digital experiences of an organisation and perpetually work towards enhancing them. And if I had to mention DXP’s formal definition, I would quote Gartner. 

A DXP is an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.

In this blog, we’ll be talking about these Digital Experience Platforms and all that they come equipped with, however, we’ll be focusing on a particular category, which is open source DXPs. Before I get into that it would be more appropriate to compare open source DXPs to their counterparts, which would be proprietary. Let’s get started.

Open Source DXP in Comparison with Proprietary DXP Source: Infosys

Based on the above image, you can clearly see that a DXP encompasses every aspect of the digital experience that an organisation may want to be taken care of. 

From user touchpoints to targeted campaigns; 
From content services to social services; 
From commerce to searches; 

DXPs are pretty versatile in their offerings. 

Now that we have a basic understanding of what a DXP is and what it does, let’s look at two of its major classifications, being open source and proprietary software. 

In essence, the difference between open and closed source software lies in the ownership. Open source by definition means a platform that is open to everyone, everyone can use it and anyone can contribute to it and there are no restrictions in the form of licencing fees or other charges. On the contrary, proprietary software, or DXP in our case, would be closed in plain terms. It’s a software that would be used by people who pay for it and the majority of the development comes through the proprietor himself.

Talking in terms of DXP, there are three main differences between an open source and a proprietary DXP apart from the licensing fees and charges. Let’s look at them. 

Parameter  Open Source DXP  Closed DXP  Licensing fees Not required, it is free to use Mandatory Choice  Abundance of choices; you can pick and choose the features you want to use The choices are limited; you have to use the DXP in areas that were already optimised Integrations  Integrates seamlessly with other software Integrations are minimal  Growth  Has a faster growth rate due to heightened flexibility  Fast, but not as fast as the open source
Open VS Closed Choice

The first major difference between these two categories is the level of choice they offer. If I talk about the open source DXP, the choices are plenty. You’d never be locked inside the software. You do not even have to use the entirety of the software, you can simply select the aspects which require improvements and leave the rest. There is also the option of customisation, you can build on top of the DXP you are using without anyone questioning you. You could use it for one of these or all of them.

Web content management; 
Web personalisation; 
Data and analytics; 
Marketing automation.

Now taking the closed DXP into consideration the choice is pretty limited. You choose a closed vendor and you are locked inside of their software. There isn’t much or even leeway to explore outside that locked space. You are all in. 

Open VS Closed Integrations 

Next difference is in regards to the integrations. An open source DXP can also be described as a combination of multiple products provided by multiple vendors. Using a DXP like Drupal, which is open source, you can integrate your digital experience with a platform like SalesForce with ease.

For the closed DXP, the story is a little different as the integrations are pretty limited as it is a one stop destination. You will find the majority of the services a DXP can provide, but they’ll be from that one vendor only.

A closed DXP is like one single brand, wherein you’ll find the products and services of that brand only, while the open source is like a supermarket, wherein you can find the products of almost all the major brands.

Open VS Closed Growth 

Finally, the open and closed DXP’s growth also paces at different rates. This is because of the kind of flexibility and contributions they have respectively. 

The open source DXP would be immensely flexible because of its open foundation. This means that it’ll always be open for adaptation as per the changing market requirements and its growth seamless and quick. Add to this the fact that there is an entire community to contribute and make necessary improvements into the software. 

In comparison, the closed DXPs also continually evolve. There are certainly improvements made to the software. However, because it's not open, its level of flexibility isn’t as high as its counterpart. Perhaps that is why the open source software DXP is making strides in the closed spaces as an alternative to them.

Why should you choose Open Source DXP?

So, you know that an open DXP is quite different from a closed one. Since you can only choose one of them for your organisation’s digital presence and consumer experience, you will have to pick one. Based on the previous section, I am sure you would have come closer to a decision. To make it even easier, let me tell you about all the benefits of an open source DXP.

Open Source is malleable to the future 

The only thing we can say for certain about the future is the fact that it is uncertain and that there is high plausibility of change. Future cannot be predicted, so we should not even try. However, what we can do is make ourselves malleable enough to adapt to whatever the future might hold. 

And that is what open source DXP entails with its API-first infrastructure that has the ability to integrate with the future. Of course, by future I mean the tools and frameworks that would reign in the future. Open DXP’s technology stack is indeed ready for the future because it is always ready to adapt. 

An open source DXP’s malleability also helps in improving consumer experience. This is because it makes it easy for businesses to create solutions in accordance with the changing consumer needs. The said solution would provide the most optimal results if it is created with speed and here the open architecture comes extremely handy.

Finally, with open source DXP you have the power to eliminate and replace certain parts of the platform that either do not align with your strategy or are hindering your growth. This makes it highly efficient in the worst of times. To know more, read about the impact of open source in Covid-19, how open source remains recession-free and why large enterprises are leaning towards open source.

Open source lets you innovate to your heart’s desire 

Collaboration; 
Partnership; 
Shared goals; 
United ambitions; 

All of these mean mutual success, all of these mean more power for better innovations and all of that is what open source stands for. Open source is where innovation thrives. Let’s understand the why. 

Have you heard of JAMstack? It stands for JavaScript, APIs and Markup. Back in 2018, it made quite a noise in the realm of marketing site theming. Ever since then it has become the go-to design stack for developers. This stack of modern technologies gives the developer the room to innovate and spurs them on constantly, the results enhanced developer velocity. It creates just the right environment with its new tools and quickness for more innovation. 

If I were to talk in plain terms, I'd say that because open source does not confine the developers with one vendor and only its resources, there is a lot of freedom to innovate. It creates an open culture that allows the people in it to build as much as they want individually and with partnerships through the open connections of open source.

Open source elevates consumer experiences 

Today consumers do not have just one single touchpoint with the business. They can connect to it through mobile applications, IoT, voice assistants and even chatbots. And the consumer expects context awareness in all of these. So, what is the solution?

With an open DXP, you can deliver content that is created by content authors without special emphasis on the channel it’ll be used on. This sounds bad, but it, in fact, is a good thing as it allows content creators and front-end developers to create pieces that are aligned with the target audience’s needs.

Once a piece of content is created, it can be repurposed for the platform and its context can also be altered and further delivered across various channels. This eases the complexity of working with an open framework and makes content quite composable. Moreover, the open APIs make the centralisation of content consistent throughout the channels and devices. 

The result is a holistic consumer experience that has the consumer in control of his interaction with you.

Open source empowers consumer data 

Every time a consumer interacts with you, he leaves some information behind. It’s like meeting someone in real life, with every encounter you will get to know the person more and not the other way around, you can’t be asking the person to introduce themselves every time you meet, that’ll be rude on so many levels. Yet this is what happens when your digital presence has consumer data that is scattered in various departments in data silos that are often inaccessible.

An open source DXP comes equipped with an open Customer Data Platform, which would help you capitalise on the consumer information you already have with you. Consumer data from e-commerce, from customer support systems and CRMs gets accumulated and organised at one place, so that you can actually utilise the information you have about your consumers. These consumer insights are immensely helpful in building forward and an open DXP helps in that. 

Open source has room for microservices 

Imagine a suite of lightweight mechanisms like an HTTP resource API that would be responsible for running many small services within an organisation as one single application. This is called a microservices architecture and it is provided by the open source DXP.

You might think what is the point? 

The points are three benefits you will get from this architecture. 

1. You’ll get a better handle on your technology solutions; 
2. You’ll be able to enhance your productivity because of that; 
3. And you’ll also be able to achieve better scalability as the architecture will fit perfectly to your long term organisational goals. 

Open source caters to commerce needs 

For the gazillionth time, because an open source DXP is open, it can better cater to your commerce needs. Let’s understand this with a comparison to its closed counterpart. 

A closed DXP would have an already established, integrated and rigid commerce platform that you cannot mess with, while an open source DXP could integrate itself with any commerce platform that you want based on your needs. 

So, when the need to add a commerce capability to your digital platform arises, which it will, you would be glad to have chosen an open source DXP. This is because open source is never tightly coupled, so, you wouldn't have to compromise and adjust to the rigidness of a particular platform, rather you can stand your ground on your needs and capitalise on the platform that aligns with your needs.

Open source offers better security 

Security breaches and data leaks are far too common for anyone’s liking. And when you consider a software that is open to everyone, the threat of these security attacks should be all the more obvious, right? Wrong. 

Open source DXPs are far more secure than closed DXPs and the only reason for that is their openness. With an open DXP, you would always be aware of the vulnerabilities and can take action to improve on it, while a closed DXP, being a proprietary software would consider not telling about those vulnerabilities merely because it’d lose money. You decide, which is better?

Open source saves money 

When you choose an open source DXP, you choose to save money. This is because of two reasons. 

One is because it acts as central management tool that helps you manage multisite as well as give you flexibility, security, control and efficiency it needs. Once you get that, there would be minimal chances of duplicacy of resources, be it in IT or marketing. And that is going to be a worthy investment.

Secondly, an open source solution is a combination of microservices and SaaS, which essentially translates to you paying for only the services you choose and not a penny more.

How does Drupal fair as an Open DXP?

We know what a digital experience platform is, we also know what an open source digital experience platform is, now we’ll talk about a particular DXP that is open source and its Drupal. Having worked with Drupal myself, I can say for sure that it is up there in the list of most impressive DXPs and being a fan, I have to talk about it.

An open source platform that has been around for two decades and is still running strong, Drupal is meant to create the most amazing digital experiences and the support and contributions of its vast community makes that a possibility every day. 

If I had to compare Drupal to the benefits of open source DXP that we discussed in the previous section, I’d say that it fairs pretty well. Drupal as an open source DXP is always to work. Let’s see why. 

API-first build  

The best part about Drupal as an open DXP is its API-first architecture. This makes the creation of multi-channel experiences quite fulfilling. With an API-first approach, Drupal can decouple itself and provide room for new technologies like Vue, React and Angular. You will have the option of selecting the best-in-class products to integrate and build your digital infrastructure, adding the freedom of innovation for your developers. 

Extensible 

Drupal can very easily accommodate your needs and goals and that is what makes it extensible. You can have a small organisation or a global one, Drupal will be able to help you architect your digital presence the way you want, build it and expand it until you keep growing. 

Drupal’s modular architecture makes it all the more extensible. With upgrades being equivalent to installing a new module, building and improving a Drupal site’s digital experience is never going to be a mountainous task. 

Then there is the fact that Drupal, as an open source, allows customisation. You can very easily build your own DXP on top of Drupal. There are umpteen open source DXP vendors, who have actually done that. 

Community 

Drupal has a community of over a million and growing. With that many Drupalists in the world, you can be assured that there would be an answer to any Drupal conundrum you may be stuck in. Upon raising an issue, you can always expect the Drupal veterans and contributors to respond and help you out. The contributions from the Drupalist not only make Drupal a successful DXP, but also ensure that it is reliable. 

Here is a video that will help you understand the role of Drupal as an open source DXP. 

Nobody can deny that Drupal is a powerful DXP, however, denying that it doesn’t have any flaw would be unfair too. 

• Certain advanced features like creating customer profiles or building a neural network become a difficult task; 
• A/B testing and introducing personalisation is also something Drupal isn’t renowned for; 
• CDP, an important practical capability for a DXP is one that is missing from the DXP.

I wouldn’t say that these features make Drupal unworthy or hard to work with, not in the least. However, they are something that need to be mentioned. 

Conclusion 

Having a digital presence has become pivotal today. However, having a digital presence that does not leave its mark on your consumer is as good as not having one. A DXP is what will help you leave that mark and lure your target audience towards you. And if that DXP is open source that mark would be all the more deeper and you’ll be all the more delighted because of it and I am pretty sure you’d like that.

blog banner blog image Open Source DXP Drupal Digital Experience Platform Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On

Drush CMI Tools was the standard approach for config management at PreviousNext prior to Drupal 9. For Drupal 9, Drush CMI tools has been deprecated and replaced by a community-supported project which provides the same functionality — Config Ignore 3.

by adam.bramley / 10 May 2021

Config Ignore version 3 removed the dependency on config_filter in favour of using core's new APIs available for Drupal 8.8 and above. Using this module, we are now able to achieve everything Drush CMI Tools did, with better integration with core's APIs and event subscribers. This is a huge improvement over the completely custom commands shipped with Drush CMI Tools, and ironed out some annoying bugs with it... No more pesky leftover field maps!

How to upgrade

The upgrade path is quite straightforward. You'll first need to require the 3.x version of Config Ignore and, at the time of writing this post, you'll need to apply a patch from this issue. Add the following to your composer.json patches section:

"drupal/config_ignore": { "fixes import (3117694)": "https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/2020-05-28/3117694-active-config-25.patch" },

And then run:

composer require drupal/config_ignore:^3

You can now enable config_ignore, and disable drush_cmi_tools

drush en config_ignore -y drush pmu drush_cmi_tools -y

Note: Config Ignore requires Drush 10, you'll be prompted to upgrade via Composer if on an earlier version.

composer require drush/drush:^10

The final step is to migrate your ignored config settings into config_ignore settings. This requires a manual upgrade path due to the fact that enabling the module and importing the module's config happen at the same time, if you do not use an update hook to import the settings your ignored config will be deleted.

First, move the yml file that listed your ignored config for drush_cmi_tools into config_ignore.settings.yml. For us this was in drush/config-ignore.yml

mv drush/config-ignore.yml YOUR_CONFIG_SYNC_DIRECTORY/config_ignore.settings.yml

Next, change the key in the file from ignore to ignored_config_entities

It should look something like this:

ignored_config_entities: - devel.settings - devel.toolbar.settings

Finally, add the following update hook to a module or profile:

/** * Migrate to config_ignore. * * For this to work, updb needs to be before config-import in your deployment. * Alternatively, use `drush deploy`. */ function MY_MODULE_update_N() { /** @var \Drupal\Core\Extension\ModuleInstallerInterface $moduleInstaller */ $moduleInstaller = \Drupal::service('module_installer'); $moduleInstaller->install([ 'config_ignore', ], FALSE); // Populate config_ignore initial values so we don't delete configs we need // in the first config import step after this. $syncDirectory = Settings::get('config_sync_directory'); $data = Yaml::decode(file_get_contents(sprintf('%s/config_ignore.settings.yml', $syncDirectory))); \Drupal::configFactory()->getEditable('config_ignore.settings')->setData($data)->save(); } Update your deployment scripts

Now that you're migrated, you need to change the commands you run in your deployment scripts. At PNX we generally use Makefile commands to run a deployment, e.g make deploy this runs update-db, config-import, cache-clear in that order.

Now that we are not using a custom drush command, we can simply change the config-import/config-import commands to:

# Old import drush config-import-plus -y --source=$(CONFIG_DIR) --install=$(CONFIG_INSTALL) --delete-list=$(CONFIG_DELETE) # New import drush config-import -y # Old export drush config-export-plus -y --destination=$(CONFIG_DIR) --ignore-list=$(CONFIG_IGNORE) # New export drush config-export -y

In fact, I would highly recommend you migrate your whole deployment workflow to using the new Drush Deploy command. This gives you the added bonus of being able to run post deployment hooks. These are really handy if, for example, you're deploying a new taxonomy vocabulary and need to create some default terms when deploying. Instead of having to manually import the vocabulary config in an update hook, you can simply add the following to my_module.deploy.php

/** * Add some terms. */ function MY_MODULE_deploy_add_terms() { $terms = ['Foo', 'Bar', 'Baz']; foreach ($terms as $term) { $term = Term::create(['name' => $term, 'vid' => 'new_vocab']); $term->save(); } }

And with that we can simply run drush deploy -y to run all of our deployment steps in the appropriate order.

Tagged drush, configuration management

A robots.txt file tells search engines spiders what pages or files they should or shouldn't request from your site. It is more of a way of preventing your site from being overloaded by requests rather than a secure mechanism to prevent access. It really shouldn't be used as a way of preventing access to your site, and the chances are that some search engine spiders will access the site anyway. If you do need to prevent access then think about using noindex directives within the page itself, or even password protecting the page.

The syntax of a robots.txt file is pretty simple. Each part must be proceeded with what user agent it pertains to, with the wildcard of * being used to apply to all user agents.

User-agent: *

To allow search engines to spider a page use the Allow rule. For example, to allow access to all spiders to the entire site.

1. User-agent: *
2. Allow: /

To disallow search engine spiders from a page use the Disallow rule. For example, to disallow access for all spiders to a single file.

1. User-agent: *
2. Disallow: /somefile.html

You can then apply rules to a single search engine spider by naming the spider directly.

Read more.

Giving hard recognition for notable contributions - an idea Rachel Fri, 05/07/2021 - 12:33

Whilst sat in our regular FOSS Foundations Working Group meeting, Duane O’Brien raised a tweet from Nicolas Zakas at ESlint:

Just sent out emails to various ESLint contributors letting them know that the team has awarded them cash for their contributions. ESLint values all contributions and the team picks the top outside contributors each month to pay for their help. 💵🙏😀

Tags

• Drupal
• OpenSource
• Sustainability

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It was around this time last year when the Drupal organization, in the midst of Covid-19 upheaval and uncertainty, decided to defer the Drupal 7 end-of-life date from Nov. 2021 to Nov. 2022. Twelve months fly by fast, and here we are, with many Drupal 7 sites that are still far from a Drupal 9 migration plan. 

If you have been following my blog, you know that my current work situation has made my free contribution of maintaining the Webform module for the Drupal community no longer sustainable. I want to start using the Webform module's Open Collective funds to compensate me for my time and encourage organizations to hire me to assist with their Webform-related projects and even proposals. On the Webform module's project page, issue queue, and in the module's UI, I am encouraging people to get involved, fund development, or hire me. All funding is going to be handled transparently via the Webform module's Open Collective.

Like many Open Collective projects, I am going to track my monthly work and expense it. After a few months of invoices and ticket tracking, I should be able to surmise how many hours it takes to resolve most issues and requests in the Webform module's issues queue. Knowing exactly how collected funds are spent hopefully will encourage people and organizations to continue backing the collective, and inspire new people and organizations to become backers. Because there is already a diverse group of backers of the Webform module's Open Collective, it is essential to have the backer and sponsorship tiers reflect the community and opportunities for anyone supporting the Webform module.

Who is backing the Webform module's Open Collective?

Looking at the current backers, I see individuals, small Drupal shops, and a few large Drupal agencies and providers.

Individuals make up most backers either making a one-time donation or a small monthly $5 contribution. Drupal is built and maintained by individuals, and making it easy for individuals to contribute something can collectively make a difference. I think the $5 tier...Read More

The Quick Tabs Module

is handy when there is a need to add tabbed content and the possibility to switch between content displayed on your web page.

This blog post is  entirely devoted to the Quick Tabs Module, how to add tabbed content and what benefits you will get from creating tabbed content on your Drupal website. The Drupal support team does not guarantee that you will become a professional after reading the blog, but you will definitely get the basics.

Quick Preview: This will be an informative guide on what web forms are, how to add a web form to a website, and why you need them.

It is simply impossible to imagine a site without web forms. They are everywhere. Customers fill them out when:

• making a purchase
• leave a review about a product or company
• go through various kinds of surveys
• registering when taking quizzes. 

We could even say that web forms are the main source of information on potential customers. Below, the Drupal website development support agency has prepared information about web forms, how to embed a form to a web page, and many other useful things.

What is a web form?

A webform / HTML form is a form consisting of fields to be filled in. Most often, it requires a name and login, such as a password. Users enter their details to get some benefit from this. 

With a string of successful Acquia certifications amongst the development and support team at Ixis, including several Grandmasters now, it felt like a great time to share the knowledge and experience of the team to help others who are preparing for their Acquia certifications. There’s been many articles on exam revision content and question structure - but not so many that talk about the exam experience and being ready for the test day. Our Drupal development team lead Paul Byrne has had his fair share of technical challenges when sitting down to take the test - something you don’t need right before the start time of your exam!  Here are some details of how he’d advise to best prepare yourself before entering the exam, from Paul’s own experiences:

Community Update - May 2021

Continuing our series highlighting the work of initiative groups across the Drupal community, this month we are catching up with six more groups:

1. Documentation and Help, by Jennifer Hodgdon
2. Contribution Mentoring, by Elli Ludwigson
3. Drupal Swag Shop Working Group, by Will Huggins
4. Discover Drupal Initiative, by Angie Sabin
5. Local Drupal Associations, by Leslie Glynn
6. Accessibility, by Rain Breaw Michaels

The takeaway message this month seems to be that there are some great things happening in the Drupal community but they could be even more awesome, and help to grow our community, if more people were able to contribute, even an hour a week.

Whilst some people have more available time than others, for those that do have the privilege of time, then please do read carefully and think about where your time could be best spent.

If you spot a place where your skills fit, don’t hesitate to contact either the group’s spokesperson, or Community Liaison, Rachel Lawson.

Documentation and Help, by Jennifer Hodgdon What have been your priorities in the last three months?

1. Migrating the remaining content from the old Getting Involved Guide.
2. Adding new content (task, role, and area pages) to the Contributor Guide.
3. Making it more obvious how people can contribute to Documentation.
4. Moving the Help Topics in Core project towards completion.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

We recently added a block to the sidebar of Documentation pages that clearly states what you can do if you find a problem in a page. I've been seeing many more people following the suggestions in the block by either editing pages to fix problems, or setting the page status to Needs Work (along with a comment stating the problem they found) since the block was added. I'm also very proud of the fact that all of the content in the old, disorganized Getting Involved Guide has now been migrated to new locations (with redirects in place for people with old links and bookmarks).

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

1. Finding people to review help topics patches for Drupal core.
2. Connecting with leaders of other initiatives and working groups so that we can add content to the Contributor Guide for these areas.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

We have only 3 more open issues for adding topics to the Help Topics project, which all have patches that are waiting to be reviewed. If you're interested in reviewing, the open issues are listed near the top of this issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3041924 -- and each individual issue has review instructions in its issue summary.

Contribution Mentoring, by Elli Ludwigson What have been your priorities in the last three months?

Getting ready for DrupalCon North America 2021, updating first time contributor workshop videos, and setting up the open social contribution platform.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

During DrupalCon North America, we spent a lot of time in OpenSocial which gave us a chance to learn, make changes on the fly, and adapt to the needs of new contributors and mentors. The team did an amazing job making this happen and learning how to leverage the existing functionality in the platform to create and coordinate contribution time and space. The OpenSocial contribution space is reusable for future events so we can continue to iterate on this success.

There are lots of great updates in the contributor guide, take a stroll through some of the pages: http://drupal.org/community/contributor-guide

The mentoring leadership has added two provisional coordinators, a big welcome and thank you to AmyJune Hineline and Chris Darke. AmyJune has done an extraordinary amount of work at virtual events in the last year, giving contributors a place to get started with Drupal. Chris Darke gave his time and expertise to update and segment the First Time Contributor Workshop videos, which are available any time.

Rachel Lawson, Kristen Pol, and Gábor Hojtsy also did a lot of work to make sure the contribution space ran smoothly during DrupalCon. Thank you to all the folks who mentored and contributed!

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

Learning more of the ins and outs of the OpenSocial platform! We set up some initial spaces for each initiative and directed everyone to them but had some kinks in the pipeline from Hopin. These were quickly resolved by collaborating with the Drupal Association.

Managing participation on the platform during DrupalCon week required significant time and effort from the existing mentor team, every day of the week. In particular, Matthew Radcliffe went above and beyond in terms of his time and energy. Having four days of contribution was amazing! But, we need more hands on deck in order to make this happen in a sustainable way in the future.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

The mentoring group particularly needs more hands on board! Share your ideas and your help coordinating and mentoring at events. There are meetings in the #mentoring Slack channel every month.

Be on the lookout later this year for a dedicated mentor orientation event before DrupalCon Europe!

Drupal Swag Shop Working Group, by Will Huggins What have been your priorities in the last three months?

DrupalCon is the peak time for the Swag Shop when demand goes through the roof, so the build up to DrupalCon NA 2021 was no exception. It starts with agreeing the designs which this year included sponsor logos on the back of the clothing items as well as the logo on the front. Everything after that is about raising awareness and promoting the swag.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

So far this year Swag Shop has driven over $700 directly to Drupal Association which will rise even higher after all the DrupalCon swag sales filter through. The range of products on offer is growing and perhaps most importantly, we have proved we can create a sustainable, community managed swag shop that both promotes Drupal and drives revenue for DA.

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

Marketing and awareness is still our greatest challenge, which is funny because when we started, we thought that would be the easy bit! We also want to engage more DrupalCamps to see if we can work with them to provide the swag for their activity like we did for NEDCamp 2020 last year.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

The main areas we need help with are:

1. Marketing: help us promote Swag Shop - at least 10% of all sales goes directly to DA
2. If you are organising a Drupalcamp or community event - get in touch, we would love to work with you to provide the swag for your event
3. Got a design idea for our swag? Create an issue and once it gets approved by the Drupal Association, DA we will get it on sale right away!

Discover Drupal Initiative, by Angie Sabin What have been your priorities in the last three months?

We’ve been working to get all materials organized, launch pages on Drupal.org, align and finalize schedules for trainings, and spread the word to potential students and sponsors.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?
We are optimistic about the excitement building for the program. The community members that have learned about Discover Drupal are enthusiastic about it.

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

Pulling the schedules together and finding alignment on how the program should function was a challenge. Every trainer has a slightly different approach so we had to find a system that would work well with their existing content rather than creating new content. For now, we determined that each trainer should take one student pathway (site-builder, front-end developer, or back-end developer) so that a group of students within a specific pathway would have the same experience.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

We need mentors for our upcoming cohort that starts in July! The application for becoming a mentor is open now through May 31. Mentoring is an opportunity to inspire a new generation of Drupal contributors and bring new perspectives to the Drupal project. You can apply here: https://www.drupal.org/association/discover-drupal/become-a-mentor
We also need financial support. You can become an individual sponsor or ask your organization to support Discover Drupal as a sponsor. https://www.drupal.org/association/discover-drupal/support-the-program
Finally, if you have a laptop you want to donate you can reach out to us: drupaltalent@assocation.drupal.org

Local Drupal Associations, by Leslie Glynn What have been your priorities in the last three months?

To become more familiar with the Local Drupal Associations across the globe and to start to lay out objectives for how we can increase communication and sharing of content across the Local Associations.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

DrupalCon and DrupalFest have provided opportunities for Local Drupal Associations to share information about their groups to the global Drupal Community. DrupalFest presented a great opportunity to host events in local time zones and in languages used locally.

I attended the Drupal Africa Meet and Greet on April 22nd with folks from across Africa and around the globe. Other DrupalFest events outside North America included: Drupal 20 years Mexico, Drupal DACH Online Meetup, DrupApero, Drupal Buenos Aires, Drupal Austria Remote Drinkup, Drupal CS Meetup, Drupal Israel April Meetup, DrupalPeru Meetup, Drupal Chile, and Meet Drupal France. Based on the number of global events, DrupalFest was embraced by Local Drupal Associations and was a great success.

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

The greatest challenge continues to be determining a strategy for increasing both communication and sharing of content across all of the Local Drupal Associations, both new groups and those that have been around for many years.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

It would be great if each of the Local Drupal Associations could:

1. Attend an Event Organizer Working Group meeting - We meet on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. Times alternate between 12 pm UTC and 12 am UTC. The May 2021 meeting is at 12am UTC
2. Add their local events (camps, trainings, meetups) to the new Community Events page on Drupal.org (https://www.drupal.org/community/events)
3. Join the Drupal Camp Organizers slack channel (drupalcamporganizers.slack.com)

Accessibility, by Rain Breaw Michaels What have been your priorities in the last three months?

Our priorities have been to support Olivero in passing all critical accessibility gates and to get more people looking at the backlog of accessibility issues in the queue.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

Olivero has made significant advances, and the maintainers office hours are starting to see more attendance. We've even begun to see more community members contributing accessibility-focused modules, such as @itmaybejj's EditorA11y.

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

We continue to struggle with having enough time and people to make the kind of progress we want (and frankly, need) to make in order for Drupal to be the accessible framework it aims to be. Additionally, given this complexity, staying up to date with Slack conversations has been complicated, and we hope that we can find a better and more accessible communication method moving forward.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

Join us! Become an accessibility champion. If you have something you'd like to present at office hours, sign up on the agenda or contact Rain Breaw.

If you have time to pick up a core issue tagged with accessibility, please do, and consider bringing your work to office hours to review or discuss.

We also need help with our Accessibility Contrib Guide, if anyone who is strong with documentation has time to pick this up.

Finally, you do not need to be an expert to help make this happen. We have plenty of experts who can answer questions along the way.

Selecting a CMS for a university can be a challenging decision. There are so many needs and nuances to consider - costs of implementation and maintenance, a wide range of technical ability among site administrators, developers, and content editors, a variety of end-users looking for different information...and the list goes on and on. While your answer likely isn’t as easy as, “let’s just do what everyone else is doing,” better understanding why other universities made the choice they did can shed light on your decision-making process. 

Drupal is far and above the most used CMS in higher education - 26% of all .edu domain sites are in Drupal, including 71 of the top 100 universities. 

So why are universities like MIT, Georgia Tech, Butler, Stanford, Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League universities choosing Drupal? 

Simply put, Drupal makes good business sense, especially with the added benefits of Drupal 9. At Mediacurrent, we believe your website is your greatest digital asset and can be leveraged to accomplish organizational-wide goals. Drupal makes that possible. Here’s how:  

Communicate With All Students - Prospective, Current, and Alumni 

If you want to reach your full recruiting and fundraising potential, you need to communicate with your entire audience. There are a variety of Drupal features that ease the stress of common communication challenges. 

Language

Not only are their multiple languages spoken within the U.S., but our country hosts over a million international students. Drupal makes creating a multilingual digital experience simpler. Native language handling is built directly into Drupal 8 and 9 core APIs, giving you over 100 languages to choose from. With that functionality, it is easier than ever to engage with prospective students across the globe in a meaningful way.

Accessibility

The CDC estimates that 20% of U.S. adults identify as having a disability. These disabilities often hinder people’s ability to interact with the average website. Drupal is an inclusive community and has committed to ensuring that all features of Drupal conform with w3C and WCAG 2.0. Pair Drupal’s built-in accessibility tools with a strong higher-education-focused accessibility strategy and your potential audience could grow by 20%. The Siteimprove Drupal module can help you keep a close and proactive eye on your overall web accessibility. 

Technology

 According to the College Explorer Market Research Study, the average college student owns 5.6 devices and spends 137+ hours on them! This may seem like common sense now, but if you want to engage with students, you need to account for a variety of screen sizes. Thankfully, Drupal 8 was designed with a mobile-first mentality and includes out-of-the-box responsive functionality.  And that mobile mindset continues with Drupal 9. Features like editorial workflows, Layout Builder, and media management can support content delivery that is optimized for mobile access.  

Personalization

 Universities face added complexity when it comes to digital strategy due to the broad audiences they appeal to. With so many unique people coming to the same pages, content strategy, conversion path mapping, and optimization, and defining strong calls to action can be a struggle. By incorporating personalization into your content strategy, whether that is personalized based on user authentication or by integrating tools like Acquia Personalization or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can speak to the masses but make them feel like you’re speaking specifically to them. 

Reduce Overhead Costs + Increase Operational Efficiencies with Drupal

Drupal can have a dramatic impact on reducing overhead costs and increasing operational efficiency. Universities have a big need for multiple websites: departments, colleges, libraries, and student organizations all want their own website. The direct cost of supporting this many sites along with resourcing the training and support is expensive and encourages unnecessary technology sprawl. As an open source technology (no licensing fees!) along with the multisite feature, creating sites for these different groups is exponentially easier, more cost-effective, and ensures brand consistency. 

You can also increase efficiency, ensure content consistency and improve the user experience by creating a “source of truth”.

Write content once and publish it anywhere it’s relevant.

Having to update content such as a curriculum or an academic calendar on multiple pages is inefficient and unnecessary. Write once, publish everywhere, save time. 

Improve Brand Equity + Amplify Digital Strategy

As a university, your brand is a powerful asset. You spend significant energy and resources on building loyalty to bolster several organizational goals from recruiting efforts, engaging current students on campus and fundraising among alumni.

With your website being the hub of your marketing strategy, it is critical for your CMS of choice to play nice with your marketing efforts.

Drupal is very SEO friendly out of the box. There are also advanced configuration options available to support a more sophisticated SEO strategy. You can amplify your digital strategy by integrating your marketing tools and communication platforms directly with Drupal. And the 26% percent of other .edu sites using Drupal make integrating your university-specific tools to your website easier. 

Reduce Risk

I’d be remiss without mentioning open source security and GDPR compliance. As a university, you hold sensitive information about the students who have attended your school and they are trusting you to keep that secure.

The Drupal community is passionate about security and has an industry leading global security team to ensure your site is protected.

Additionally, as the landscape of privacy rights changes around the world, it’s in your best interest to stay on top of it and reduce the risk of being penalized for data collection practices. 

Speed up Your Time to Launch 

From the moment of install, Drupal has a lot to offer to universities. We created RainU CMS to bring that out-of-box experience to the next level with a tailored approach. RainU is Drupal-based development platform that helps colleges and universities accelerate the web development process. Have questions about how Drupal and RainU can benefit your university? Let us know. We’d be happy to chat. 

In this second part, Linus offers insight and perspective gained from managing a large open source project for three decades. He also talks about his employment at the Linux Foundation, and describes what he does with his spare time when he's not focused on kernel development.

Read more Jeremy Wed, 05/05/2021 - 06:00

The Unlikely Drupalists : From aeronautical engineering to Drupal development Akanksha Mehta Wed, 05/05/2021 - 16:42 “Your time is limited. So don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
Steve Jobs

A personification of this quote is Vinit Kumar, Technical Lead at OpenSense Labs. He had started off as an aeronautical engineer, but life took several turns and he somehow ended up being a Drupal developer! Let’s skim through a story that talks about conventions, ups and downs, and most importantly, following your dreams.

Q : Hi Vinit! So let’s start with talking about your education. Why did you choose aeronautical engineering in the first place? 

A : I had been pursuing aeronautical engineering more for its professional aspect, and always had more interest in graphic designing and consequently, web development. While still in college, I took up a course in graphic designing and also took up some commissioned projects that were offered to me by the teacher himself. While working on these projects, soon I realized that web development and graphics go hand in hand, and started trying my hands on development as well.

Q : I see. Had you ever developed interest in programming beforehand or was it a spur of the moment decision to transform? 
A : It was a rather extended transformation process. Pritam has been my friend since we were in school, and he was the one who was more into web development. During the years I spent being an aeronautical engineer, the aeronautics sector was not looking good - a big airline like Kingfisher was on the verge of closing. It was rather chaotic! Pritam knew about my interest in graphics and web development, and insisted that I pursue that instead - as the web was only going to expand in the upcoming years and moreover, it was something that had spiked my interest since the very beginning. Pritam helped with the basics when I was still a fresher in the domain. Subsequently, I joined a company in Hyderabad as a developer, but left within a month because my skills weren’t competent enough to keep up with the profile. After that, I brushed up my knowledge a bit and joined another company where I worked the night shift for a year. By the end of the year, due to consistent hard work and toil, I made a rather smooth switch and felt that my life was finally getting in order.
 

Q : As you said, you left the first company that you had joined within a month as you lacked the skills to keep working. What made you pursue the field despite not finding success anytime sooner?
A : I think that the approach makes all the difference. I wasn’t bummed by the fact that I didn’t have the supposed skillset but rather took all that as a part of my learning curve. I appeared for numerous interviews and all the questions that I couldn’t answer, I would go home and prepare those. Hence, I accepted that I was still learning. The added bonus was that web development was something that I actually wanted to do - so work never felt like work. It felt like a yearlong training procedure.

Q : That is such a great perspective! While we’re still in the topic of transformation, was there a moment of instigation that prompted you to switch from aeronautical engineering to Drupal development? How easy/difficult was it to take the call?
A : Sometimes, an outsider’s perspective is required to make the picture clearer. While working in Bangalore in a job dealing in technical publication (publication of different kinds of user manuals for the maintenance of aircrafts), I occasionally used to skip going to work as an engineer to stay home and create websites. On one such event, one of my friends realised that I had been sitting creating the website since early morning when he was going to work - and was still on it by the time he returned in the evening. I still remember when he looked at me, a little astonished, and said that I should go on and pursue something that I really wanted to. It was a turning point in my life. I called Pritam that very day and left for Hyderabad - where I took up my first job as a developer.                                                                         

Q : So that is how it started! When I look back at your journey - that has eventually led you to becoming the tech lead, how has the experience with Drupal been so far?
A : It has been working pretty well for me. I still consider myself a student in the domain and focus on learning more than anything else. I have definitely grown a lot in the past 8 years and gathered knowledge in every step - and I want to keep it that way.

Q : Do you ever wonder how different life would have been had you remained an aeronautical engineer? 
A : Quite different. I don’t really have any regrets though, I followed my heart and landed in a decent place. I don’t think that any of the jobs I had taken up in aeronautical engineering really spoke to me as much as Drupal development has done so far. Not once in these years have I been prompted to go back to become an aeronautical engineer.

Q : Glad it worked out for you. Lastly, what would you tell someone who wants to make a career switch like you did?
A : I’ll tell them the same thing that my friend had told me - follow your heart and it will lead you to the right path.

While we may believe that following conventional guidelines is the ‘safer’ way to live life, Vinit also highlights that we can step onto different boats and examine the best one for ourselves while we are still young and agile. There’s a time suitable for experimenting as well - we just need to identify it!

blog banner blog image The Unlikely Drupalists Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On

In addition to the annual DrupalCon NA, April featured a lot of great Drupal articles. Here’s a recap of some of our top picks.

READ MORE

The N1ED module works as a bridge between Drupal 8 and 9 versions, and the N1ED library – which is a multi-plugin for CKEditor, the basic text editor in this system. The library itself is built based on Bootstrap and its classes. In this text, we'll take a look at it and at the module itself.

N1ED library

The N1ED library is available in free and paid versions. The former has limited functionalities, but you can use options such as:

• full screen text input,
• widgets which introduce new buttons to the editor, such as Font Awesome icons, easy table insertion and HTML code insertion,
• easy addition of headings and paragraphs, which allows you to better control the entered text.

Full screen version of the free editor version

Apart from the free version of the library, there are three different paid plans that provide additional functionalities. The most interesting of them is Bootstrap Editor, thanks to which you can easily design what the website will look like in the desktop or mobile version.

N1ED module

Before the installation, you can see and feel for yourself how the N1ED module works and only then decide if it's worth starting to use it on your own website.

Dates

It's a relatively young module. It appeared on Drupal.org in early 2019, but it's already a stable version monitored by the Drupal Security Team. The first release of the N1ED library was earlier – on 18 December 2018.

Popularity of the module and the library

According to the official statistics, the module is being used by more than 150 websites. The library itself can be used in any system that uses CKEditor or TinyMCE, for example in Symfony, Laravel or Magento.

Configuration and use

Download the N1ED module from Drupal.org. The module is installed in the typical way:

composer: composer require drupal/n1ed

drush: drush dl n1ed

drupal console: drupal mod n1ed

After executing the command you need to enable N1ED on the page with modules using Drush or Drupal Console. Support for a new plugin in CKEditor is automatically enabled for the Full HTML filter.

N1ED can be enabled for any text format. Just set the switch to the desired position in the text format edit options.

In the same place, you can set your own API key which is required for the plugin to work. After the installation, you use the default key provided with the module which gives basic free functionality.

  Summary

Although the free version of the library is very limited in terms of available functionalities, it provides a new look and feel for adding content in Drupal. In addition, it helps you to control the text and elements you enter. We use both the library and the N1ED module as part of our Drupal development services.

I proposed this session to DrupalCon, but it was not selected. I think that is good. I have had my fair share of stage time in DrupalCons in the past, new contributors should take the lead. However, I still did the work of creating the presentation, then recorded myself giving the talk.