Did Someone Say Drupaldelphia? Philly Philly! Lindsey Gemmill Thu, 05/02/2019 - 16:27

Matt and Mike talk with Angie "Webchick" Byron, Gábor Hojtsy, and Nathaniel Catchpole about the next year's release of Drupal 9. We discuss what's new, what (if anything) will break, and what will remain compatible.

“After soliciting input and consulting others, I felt JSON:API belonged in Drupal core.”

Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal

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  In March, we finalized revisions to our policies.

At our annual retreat in February 2019, we'd conducted a feedback session to help us consider the viewpoints of all our team members regarding our policies.

The spring is in full bloom — and so is Drupal development. On May 1st, we officially meet Drupal 8.7.0 release that is bursting with new features. And, of course, they are worth a good review. After the previous release in September, we discussed media handling capabilities in D8.6 as one of many interesting updates. Today, let’s take a closer look at what’s new in Drupal 8.7.0.

SEATTLE (PRWEB) APRIL 23, 2019

The Drupal community has just announced the winners of the inaugural Global Splash Awards. Drupal development and design leaders from around the world gathered in Seattle for the awards ceremony in mid-April, where 14 winners across 13 categories were announced, with 1 tie. The awards were held in conjunction with DrupalCon Seattle 2019.

The Splash Awards recognize the best Drupal projects on the web. Each digital experience represents a step forward in digital innovation, and a new model for others to follow.

Michel van Velde, co-founder of the awards, said, "It is wonderful to see the Splash Awards come both to North America and to a global audience for the first time." Co-founder Baddy Breidert added, "With the wider reach of audience, we saw an outstanding level of projects nominated and showcased at this ceremony."

The Nominees

A total of 109 nominations were submitted, across 13 categories. In the tight field, there was a tie for project of the year: Lullabot for JSON:API and the City of Detroit, Michigan for their government municipal site detroitmi.gov. Other categories and winners include: 

• E-Commerce: Rob Edwards Freelance, Apex Running 
• Corporate: Elevated Third, Central Square 
• Design/UX: Burst, Chupa Chups 
• Non-Profit: Made It Digital, Memory of Nations 
• Education: Connect-i, Opigno 
• Government: City of Detroit, detroitmi.gov 
• Publishing / Media: Lemberg Solutions, Monda Magazin 
• Tools / Apps: Genuine Interactive, FotoOppTM 
• Social / Community: Phase2, Pinterest 
• Theme: Last Call Media, Mass.gov 
• Care / Healthcare: Mediamonks, Montefiore - Orthopedics 
• Best module: Lullabot, JSON: API

Edgar Montes from the City of Detroit, Michigan, and tied winner for Project of the Year, said, “We like to believe that our dedication to the people of Detroit has helped us deliver a website that can serve the needs of the city and its people; a majority of the web team lives within the city and we make a point of trying to understand the needs of every part of the site and how to best convey the information it contains. It's important to us to try to demonstrate that great things continue to come out of a city which has seen its fair share of struggles and triumphs.”

Both the Splash Awards and the DrupalCon conferences bring the world community together; big agencies and small independent developers, all using Drupal and harnessing the power of open source. The next European Splash Awards will be held in conjunction with DrupalCon Europe 2019, taking place in Amsterdam, Netherlands in October 2019.

About Drupal

Drupal is content management software. It is used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. What sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that ambitious web experiences need.

About the Drupal Association 

The Drupal Association is dedicated to fostering and supporting the Drupal project, the community and its growth. The Drupal Association helps the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, education, promotion, distribution and online collaboration at Drupal.org.

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At this year’s DrupalCon, held earlier in April in Seattle, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert gave attendees a preview of the newest version of Drupal: 8.7. Now, the wait is over. Drupal 8.7 is launching today, May 1, adding a new suite of features and fixes that will improve the Drupal experience for everyone with an up-to-date platform.

In his keynote, or “Driesnote,” Dries laid out what made this new release so special. Speaking to the Drupal community at large, Dries shared that the Drupal team had several core objectives when developing Drupal 8.7:

• Make Drupal easy for content creators and site builders
• Make Drupal easy to evaluate and adopt
• Keep Drupal impactful and relevant
• Reduce total cost of ownership for developers and site owners

Each one of these goals represented a major challenge, but the newest version has delivered a variety of updates that each make Drupal a more robust platform.

Empowering content creators

One of the biggest features in Drupal 8.7 is the newly stable Layout Builder tool. The product of the efforts of 123 contributors and 68 supporting organizations, Layout Builder makes designing pages more user-friendly. As the name implies, the Layout Builder tool enables editors to manually adjust the design and format of a page. With this tool, editors can make changes to the layout without having to involve developers every time. Dries displayed a demo of the Layout Builder tool during the Driesnote, which can be found below.

Along with layout builder, the other major content improvement ushered in by Drupal 8.7 is the updated media module. As of this most recent update, reusable media, images, video and drag-and-drop features for the media module are all stable, with the media library currently in the “experimental” state. Combined with layout builder, these updates make Drupal 8.7 a great update for content editors.

Out of the box functionality

While Drupal 8.7 certainly makes life easier for editors, it doesn’t stop there. New out of the box features make Drupal easier to adopt than ever. New to the Umami theme in Drupal 8.7  are demo articles containing Spanish translations by default and improved accessibility throughout the theme, with new labels and focus styles highlighted. This helps to show Drupal 8.7’s capabilities in terms of both multilingual and accessibility right out of the box. Additionally, the “Welcome tour” feature makes it easier for agencies to demo the platform. All of these features are included with the new update automatically.

Staying relevant

To remain a driving force in the market, Drupal needs to keep up with the times. The biggest breath of fresh air Drupal 8.7 brings to the platform is the addition of the JSON:API to the core. This development extends Drupal’s “API-first” philosophy, enabling decoupled and headless solutions. If this type of buildout is what your organization needs, the Drupal 8.7 update makes developing these popular solutions much easier.

Lowered costs

Because Drupal 9 (D9) is built on the same codebase as D8, the eventual upgrade process will be much easier than a conventional website upgrade. Previously, upgrades were major undertakings that required a lot of development effort. Now, as long as a site is not using any deprecated code, upgrading to D9 will be very straightforward. A tool called drupal-check is already available to check for deprecated code, so it’s already possible to start getting a site ready for D9. In the meantime, Drupal 8.7 offers a number of new features and enhancements and is another step toward the eventual D9 upgrade..

There’s certainly plenty to enjoy with this new release, but the updates don’t stop here. With Drupal on a six-month release cycle, there will be a new version of Drupal on November 1. Drupal 8.8 promises an updated WYSIWYG editor along with a potentially updated Admin UI, an ongoing project for the Drupal team. Beyond that is D9, the latest edition of the platform.

Duo can help you make the most out of Drupal 8.7’s newest features while also planning your roadmap for upgrading. If you’re ready to see what the future of Drupal has to offer, reach out to us today.

What’s new in Drupal 8.7.0?

This release introduces powerful features that will help us all take Drupal to a whole new level. The new stable JSON:API core module as well as the intuitive and accessible stable Layout Builder are game-changing.

Download Drupal 8.7.0

Layout Builder is stable

The Layout Builder module was originally introduced as an experimental module in Drupal 8.5.0. As of Drupal 8.7.0, Layout Builder is now stable and ready for production use! It provides a powerful, accessible, mobile-friendly page building tool that is fully compatible with revisions, workflows, and in-context previews.

The Layout Builder enables site builders to rapidly create layout templates for content that speed up the development process. It also permits content authors to easily customize individual pages with unique layouts.

The interface allows drag-and-drop management of your content blocks. It additionally supports keyboard controls and toggling the content preview on and off to give the content editor complete control of their experience while building their layouts.

The result of all these features is a state-of-the art content management solution that streamlines mass-production while also supporting unique creation. 123 individuals and 68 organizations contributed to this feature. More than 40 of the individual contributors volunteered some or all of their time.

Check out this demonstration based on the core Umami demo:

The team is working on implementing translation support for layouts in a future release.

New stable JSON:API support

JSON:API support is now included as a stable core feature. The JSON:API specification is an easy and fast way to build decoupled applications. Drupal core's JSON:API module is feature-complete and easy to use with robust out-of-the-box support and simple setup. JSON:API makes it simpler than ever to build ambitious projects. 147 contributors and 76 organizations contributed to this new feature. Among the individual contributors, more than 50 volunteered some or all of their time.

For example, by simply navigating to a URL like https://example.com/jsonapi/node/article, you can get a list of available articles on your site, and filter further from there, to display your Drupal content in decoupled websites, mobile applications, and so on.

Improvements in experimental Media Library

The experimental Media Library has numerous significant improvements in this release. The Media Library is built on top of the stable Media module, which allows reuse of images, documents, and even embedded remote media like YouTube videos. Items in the Media Library can be managed with drag-and-drop. This release improves the design and accessibility of the user interface, allows inline media creation in the library, and provides more flexible grid and table views. 310 contributors and 122 organizations contributed to this new feature. More than 100 individuals volunteered some or all of their time!

Check out this demonstration based the core Umami demo with Media Library enabled:

There are various tasks left to make Media Library stable in a future release, including WYSIWYG integration.

Revisionable menus and taxonomy terms

Custom menu links and taxonomy terms are now revisionable, which allows them to be used in editorial workflows (similarly to nodes, media, and custom blocks). The Entity system now also provides a new Update API to support conversion of further entity types. It supports converting the schema of any content entity type between non-revisionable or non-translatable and revisionable or translatable, which also works when there is pre-existing data for the entity type whose schema is being changed. All these changes improve core support for the Workspaces module.

New features in the Umami demo profile

The Umami food magazine demo is now more accessible and demonstrates more features out of the box, including a new welcome tour, Layout Builder integration for recipes, and multilingual features. The profile now includes a curated set of Spanish translations, and more languages are in the works. 187 contributors and 84 organizations have contributed to Umami, with more than 60 individuals volunteering some or all of their time.

Umami empowers first-time users to spin up a Drupal project in no time so that they can use to evaluate Drupal and learn about its major components.

On the way to Drupal 9

Drupal 8.7.0 includes optional support for Twig 2 (for sites that can patch their Composer configuration). Optional support for Symfony 4 also received a lot of contributions and should be complete in 8.8. This is important work, because Drupal 9 is planned for June 3, 2020 and will update various dependencies, primarily Symfony. Testing Drupal with updated third-party dependencies will help us get better feedback on our compatibility with these dependencies and any difficulties sites encounter when upgrading.

What does this mean for me? Drupal 8 site owners

Update to 8.7.0 to continue receiving bug fixes. The next bugfix release (8.7.1) is scheduled for June 5, 2019. (See the release schedule overview for more information.) As of this release, sites on Drupal 8.5 will no longer receive security coverage. (Drupal 8.6 will continue receiving security fixes until December 4, 2019.)

Note that new Drupal 8.7.0 installs now require at least PHP 7.0.8. Existing sites still work on at least PHP 5.5.9 for now, but will display a warning. Drupal security updates will begin requiring PHP 7 as early as Drupal 8.8.0 (December 2019), so all users are advised to update to at least PHP 7.0.8 now.

Updating your site from 8.6.15 to 8.7.0 with update.php is exactly the same as updating from 8.6.14 to 8.6.15. Drupal 8.7.0 also has updates to several dependencies. Modules, themes, and translations may need updates for these and other changes in this minor release, so test the update carefully before updating your production site. Read the 8.7.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your site.

Drupal 6 and 7 site owners

Drupal 7 is fully supported by the community until November 2021, and will continue to receive bug and security fixes throughout this time. From November 2021 until at least November 2024, the Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support program will be offered by vendors.

Drupal 6 is no longer supported.

You can now use the stable migration path for monolingual Drupal 6 and 7 sites with the built-in upgrade user interface. For multilingual sites, there is experimental support; please keep testing and reporting any issues you may find.

Translation, module, and theme contributors

Minor releases like Drupal 8.7.0 include backwards-compatible API additions for developers as well as new features.

Since minor releases are backwards-compatible, modules, themes, and translations that supported Drupal 8.6.x and earlier will be compatible with 8.7.x as well. However, the new version does include some changes to strings, user interfaces, internal APIs and API deprecations. This means that some small updates may be required for your translations, modules, and themes. Read the 8.7.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your modules and themes.

This release has advanced the Drupal project significantly and represents the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and contributors from various organizations, as well as testers from the Minor release beta testing program. Thank you to everyone who contributed to Drupal 8.7!

Welcome to review the principles of decoupled Drupal Commerce and how it helps online stores engage users.

Learning from Drupal 8 Books

Drupal is known to be a complex and great CMS. However, if you are planning on starting to learn Drupal 8, you will soon notice that it is more complicated than Drupal 7 and other content management systems. Drupal is known to have a steep learning curve, which makes it more challenging to pick up and get started. In this article, I’m going to show you some great books that help you learn Drupal in a systematic, beginner-friendly way. My blog post is going to include 7 Drupal 8 books that are covering the basics and are beginner friendly, books that will challenge the skills of seasoned Drupal developers and books that are teaching specific Drupal skills. Pick your poison!

Drupal 8 Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Drupal 8

The first from our list of Drupal 8 books is going to be Drupal 8 Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Drupal 8. This book can be a great introduction to the Drupal world. It covers a brief background of Drupal, it guides you through the installation process and through a simple site build. It has easy to follow explanations. This book will definitely jumpstart your Drupal 8 developer career!

Drupal 8 Development Cookbook

This book is another great source on our Drupal 8 books list from where you can deepen your development knowledge. Drupal 8 Development Cookbook covers some of the basics of Drupal 8. However, it is not a beginners book. This book will delve deeper in the Drupal development and cover topics such as forms, block, permissions, routing, field formatters, configuration management, themes, etc. This book is not for the beginner or developer that wants to build a site without touching a line of code. It is geared towards developers that want to build custom Drupal 8 modules.

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition is a great book that touches the topics of installing, modules and site maintenance. However, it goes in greater depth when it comes to describing on how to configure different modules to best appeal to a higher education audience. It manages to do this by introducing modules such as views, organic groups, media and concepts such as fields, display modes, entities and relationships. On top of that it also talks about more complex subjects such as PHP snippets and command line interactions. Overall, a great book for those who are in the education field and want to discover Drupal.

Mastering Drupal 8 Views

Mastering Drupal 8 Views is a great book that shares the knowledge of creating views in Drupal. What is interesting about this book is the fact that the story is told from the point of view of Lynn, a small business owner and protagonist of the book. In the book, the struggles of Lynn are presented when she is faced with the Views module. This approach to the book makes it possible for the reader to be able to realise the real life scenarios in which the Views module can be used. Overall, this book is a great Views master course that every Drupal developer should read if they aim to broaden their knowledge on the Views module.

Drupal 8 SEO: The Visual, Step-By-Step Guide to Drupal Search Engine Optimization

If you want to improve your search engine optimization for Drupal, then this is the book for you. Drupal 8 SEO, covers all the necessary knowledge required to be able to launch a successful SEO campaign for your Drupal website. The book contains a large number of pictures that are designed to guide you through the process of optimizing your website for SEO in a visual and easily understandable way. On top of that, it covers the topics of all the necessary modules and settings that your Drupal website needs in order to climb the rankings of Google. So, if you’re in need of some SEO optimization knowledge and you happen to have a Drupal 8 website, then this is the book for you.

Drush for Developers, 2nd edition

Drush is basically the “Drupal Swiss Army Knife”. Drush should be a tool in the arsenal of every Drupal backend developer. Drush is basically a command line shell of Drupal where if the correct code is inserted, then the function will be activated without having to be on the site. This can basically improve the efficiency and speed with which a Drupal developer can build and maintain websites. Drush for Developers, teaches exactly this knowledge, how to basically leverage the simplicity and efficiency of Drush. So if you’re new to Drush or you are a seasoned Drupal developer in search for new Drush tips and tricks, then you should give this book a read.

Drupal 8 Module Development: Build modules and themes using the latest version of Drupal 8, 2nd Edition

If you want to build your own modules, then Drupal 8 Module Development is the right choice for you. This book is a really in-depth and comprehensive guide to building your own modules. The book aims to bring Drupal 7 developers up to speed with module development for Drupal 8. It introduces the reader to the Drupal 8 architecture and its subsystems before learning to develop a module with basic functionality. The book also goes into detail about Drupal 8 APIs, on how to manage and display data and also about the theme system. This book is definitely a must if you are a Drupal 7 developer and you want to hone your Drupal 8 module development skills in a fast, comprehensive way.

Conclusion

This list of Drupal 8 books should pave an easier to follow road for every Drupal 8 beginner. On top of that, this list also contains information about specific topics that might be of interest for already initiated Drupal developers. So, pick a book that piques your interest and give it a read. Remember, knowledge is power!

Web development has moved forward from writing websites by developing codes to a place where people can assemble the websites. And that is where the Drupal community is focusing on to advance - building assembled web experiences.

Drupal 8.7 releases today, on 1 May. It is in sync with that same roadmap (building assembled websites) providing enhanced customization, stable features, better UI and what not?

Here’s a quick and comprehensive guide for you to track what’s new in version 8.7 and how it paves the way for Drupal 9.

Every year at DrupalCon, we aim to bring together people with a common interest who need to move a potential initiative forward or work together in other ways to help grow Drupal.

In Seattle, we brought together a room full of event organizers. This is the story of two hours locked in a room, deep in the heart of the Seattle Convention Center…

Invitees

Thomas Scola, Michael Miles, Karthik Kalimuthu, Jessica Dearie, April Sides, Aimee Decker, Aimee Degnan, Michael Hess, Kaleem Clarkson, Jesse Hofmann-Smith, Jared Stoneberg, Rick Hawkins, Michael Anello, Leslie Glynn, Dan Moriarty, Kevin Thull, Jeremy Rasmussen, Quincy Austin , Brian Gilbert, Dori Kelner, Suzanne Dergacheva, Gábor Hojtsy, Steven Hughes, Raul Solano, Owen Lansbury, Dane Rossenrode, Juan Pablo Novillo Requena, Stephanie Lüpold, Kazu Hodota, Baddy Sonja Breidert, Nick Switzer, Elli Ludwigson, Matthew Saunders, Kelly Albrecht, Narcisse Mbunzama, Shawn Duncan, Pat Gilbert, Oyekan Abiodun, Mark Casias, Darren Oh, Gregg Marshall, Anson Han, Raed Al-khurayji, Gaurav Mishra, Shadab Ashraf,, Hussain Abbas, Jordana Fung, Josef Dabernig, Tushar Thatikonda, and myself - Rachel Lawson.

If I have missed any of your names, I apologise. Please let me know and I will update. Thank you to all who attended and especially to Avi Schwab who volunteered to take notes.

Process

Some weeks before DrupalCon Seattle, I consulted with a number of people and devised a series of questions to pose to the room, to get the conversations started. I then divided the audience into groups and assigned each one of the questions, asking them to get together and prepare a five-minute “presentation” without recourse to audiovisual aids like a screen. I want to hear what they have to say, not look at fancy slides. There then followed 15 minutes of discussion including the whole room.

Once the round table began, we initially did a quick voting exercise to ensure we worked on the topics in priority order, plus some custom ordering to take into account not everyone can be in the room for the whole two hours. It is DrupalCon after all!

Topics

More topics were initially set than were discussed. We took a group decision to spend more time on each topic, so lower priority items fell off the bottom until another day.

The following represent notes taken during the day and some reflection on the general flow of the discussion.

Event Organizers as an “Official” Group?

We discussed whether we should look to form an “official” group, with a charter etc, that looks to help events coordinate and collaborate.

• Fostering the next generation of Drupalists

• Surfacing smaller events on Drupal.org
• Marketing camps to students and young people
• More case studies and paired sessions “How Disney/WWE/J&J made their website”

• Get agencies to engage clients. Win (camp) win (agency) win (client).

• How do we create value?
• We already have revenue, discussed below how we might turn that into value?
• Regional financial entities
• But maybe higher level organization to help create them
• Example: National Endowment for the Arts - national grants
• Regional, local all their own organizations
• Group representation:
• Globally diverse
• Diverse among camp sizes
• Intentionally contracting to do work and solve our problems
• Two separate things
• Global “Just enough” organization to support events
• Fiscal sponsorship & financial
• Who should this organization report to?
• Dries? DA?
• The DA is listening now. They’re good at doing events.
• Dries is only one Human Being
• Fewer and fewer working groups are reporting to him
• Global working group as CONNECTORS between groups. Some groups need very little, some need help being lifted up. How do we pool our resources together to solve event org problems?

There was certainly the will to create an official group and to put the necessary work into making it representative of the global event community. I’m highly encouraged by this and looking forward to this happening.

What can we (Dries + DA) do to help you get your event to the next level?

We wanted to understand how the Drupal Association especially could provide the right support to events.

Summary:

• Form for organizers to fill out before and after the event

• Drupal Association could help organize resource library for organizers
• Events would like to have some consistent opening slides that describe and promote the Drupal Association
• DA to promote Ticket sales
• Events want to be able to register as Drupal Association Supporting Partners under a new level just for them.

Discussion:

• DATA is worth its weight in gold - we all benefit by collecting data about each event in terms of numbers of attendees, sponsorship revenues, speakers, etc.

• Data could go into standardized letter for requesting sponsorship
• Templates for requesting sponsorships, also for saying thank you.

• Educate potential sponsors the value of these events
• Should a standardized CoC be required for DA support? What happens if someone doesn’t check the “We have a CoC” checkbox? Is it just required?
• Could we enforce participation through enforcement of the trademark?
• That might make more work for Dries in defending it
• Put other value behind agreement
• Could tie into CWG initiative to train CoC people
• Create a Speaker Directory for diverse speakers
• Incentivizing getting into the “Speaker Directory” could be a great honor
• Add to form: where did we find the speaker?
• Speaker Selection Panels
• D.o profile list speaking engagements
• Site distro for camps/starter kits/COD
• Drupal Europe is out there
• We have the resources in $$$, could gather resources and hire someone to do it
• Separation of Tasks from the Drupal Association

It seems that the greatest input the Drupal Association can have right now for event management is related to data and, especially, on Drupal.org. We should look to create a plan that takes input from this discussion, Suzanne Dergacheva (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QZppszEs_7J5P4gzXnCjHSfDoCZD0TfCDntXyGyhgzM/edit#) and Rachel Lawson’s (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Su5spAtDg_viKsCqxcaWg9DZ-T08DNot9MAOJRUCVek ) discussion documents on what that data should be. 

We should look to represent data on Drupal.org wherever possible, rather than Google docs.

Define a mission statement for why we organize events and how to measure success

One of the key factors to success of the project is coordination across all the places people interact with it. Having a common agreed-upon description of what in-person events are attempting to achieve would help. We wanted to know what would be involved in reaching such a common understanding through a mission statement.

• Taxonomy?

• Set up focus group to define a common taxonomy.

• What kind of sessions does a camp want?

• Is the event mission-based or just regional

• Global mission statement and Camp-based sub-mission-statement
• Mission statement isn’t just a sidebar on the site
• Events should be able to report back on how their event connects back to the mission
• https://www.drupal.org/association/mission: The Drupal Association unites a global open source community to build, secure, and promote Drupal.
• India - over 50 camps that don’t have cohesive messaging
• A similar concept was discussed in a BoF in 2018 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q5vNIlKQUUvAiJv36XaRWu365QaOJ7uQVLwDkCez4-g/edit#heading=h.70uw2e6zxslr

• Grow the community, awareness thereof, and lead collaboration across open source communities

• Scaling only happens when there’s demand
• Focus on the higher-level goals will pull up the lower ones
• We’re not doing any benefit to ourselves if we just keep talking to the same group of people
• How do we implement the data collection?
• Define & measure our KPI’s.
• Cross-pollinate camp participation
• Dashboard to improve visibility and encourage participation

• “Help people exploit and promote drupal”

• Improve skills

• Improve the product
• Connect people to resources, clients to solutions, providers to clients, etc
• How do we measure success?
• D.o signups for the event (groups.d.o is… not super)
• Add Drupal Ladder status to profile pages (and track how that coincides with event attendance)
• How do you use Drupal? (and check change over time)
• Reporting how many people participate in contribution
• Social media mentions
• Connect to a tag 

A good discussion on exactly why we run events and defining what we want to achieve with them. Great to hear people saying that it is not enough to simply keep talking to the same people - part of an event’s mission should normally be attractive to people new to Drupal so we continue to grow.

The room agreed that a good mission statement for events would be “Help people exploit and promote drupal”

Focussed Output

Dries had a very powerful slide in his Driesnote that set the focus for the upcoming year, for the whole project.

Slide from the Driesnote, photo by Rachel Lawson 

I was keen to walk out of the room with an agreed focus for the group and we settled on the following, in order:

1. Let’s do what’s needed to make the group official
2. Let’s work on the ecosystem - how do we provide things like fiscal sponsorship across events of all sizes in US?
3. We need to start collecting data from events in a single place.

Next Steps

Sticking to the focus above, the group who attended and others will be looking into the requirements for an official group to be formed, with a charter etc. Activities here should be updated as blog posts in www.drupal.org/community/event-organizers

Lessons Learned

My own lesson out of the exercise is that everyone has a very full timetable at DrupalCon and to make the invites much earlier before the event, to give people lots of preparation time. This also needs to be more clear of the facilities available in the room!

I will also look into adding the round tables into the official program, still as invite-only events but at least people can see them more easily and plan their days.

I Want to Hear from You

I want to continue to hold round tables in the future on this and other topics of interest in the community. 

What community initiatives should we be getting people together to look at the future? Let me know in the comments!

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.

The Drupal Association is announcing that Heather Rocker, former CEO of Girls, Inc. and Executive Director of Women in Technology, is joining as its next Executive Director.
 

The Drupal Association announced today that Heather Rocker has been selected as its next executive director.

This is exciting news because it concludes a seven-month search since Megan Sanicki left.

We looked long and hard for someone who could help us grow the global Drupal community by building on its diversity, working with developers and agency partners, and expanding our work with new audiences such as content creators and marketers.

The Drupal Association (including me) believes that Heather can do all of that, and is the best person to lead Drupal into its next phase of growth.

Heather earned her engineering degree from Georgia Tech. She has dedicated much of her career to working with women in technology, both as the CEO of Girls, Inc. of Greater Atlanta and the Executive Director of Women in Technology.

We were impressed not only with her valuable experience with volunteer organizations, but also her work in the private sector with large customers. Most recently, Heather was part of the management team at Systems Evolution, a team of 250 business consultants, where she specialized in sales operations and managed key client relationships.

She is also a robotics fanatic who organizes and judges competitions for children. So, maybe we’ll see some robots roaming around DrupalCon in the future!

As you can tell, Heather will bring a lot of great experience to the Drupal community and I look forward to partnering with her.

Last but not least, I want to thank Tim Lehnen for serving as our Interim Executive Director. He did a fantastic job leading the Drupal Association through this transition.

For many of us in the U.S., the GDPR is still a mystery. Although it had been in the works for a long while, it seemed to appear out of nowhere, cause a sudden rush of panic as the deadline to comply arrived, and then disappear without a trace.

At first blush, it seems like the kind of thing we could ignore. That’s Europe’s law, and not America’s. But a closer look suggested it would apply to any site doing business with Europeans, even if it was simply receiving site visitors from Europe. Here at Electric Citizen, that seemed to be a fairly small part of our client base, but something we took seriously nevertheless.

Heather Rocker will lead the Association in supporting the global Drupal community.

Washington DC, April 30, 2019 - The Board of Directors of the Drupal Association has voted unanimously to appoint Heather Rocker as Executive Director to lead the Drupal Association.

Adam Goodman, chair of the Drupal Association Board, said, "Drupal is for ambitious digital experiences. Heather’s experience matches this ambition as we seek to increase adoption, diversify and invest in our community, and grow opportunities for builders, agencies, content creators and marketing decision makers. Heather brings seriousness of purpose, character consistent with our values and principles, and lively good humor — just what the Board and I were seeking out for our next leader."

The Drupal Association's mission is to unite a global community to build, promote, and secure the open source Drupal software. Since 2008, the organization has supported a global network of open source contributors; a robust business ecosystem; and has hosted events across 4 continents and more than 20 countries.

Heather Rocker said, "It’s an incredible honor to serve the Drupal Association in this capacity.  This opportunity is not only in alignment with my skills and experience but also with my core belief that outstanding things can be achieved through a dedicated and diverse community of volunteers and partners.  I look forward to building on the solid foundation and collaborative spirit that exists today. "

Heather will begin her work with the Association at the beginning of June.

About Heather

Heather Rocker joins the Drupal Association with a strong history of leadership in technology and the nonprofit world. She was the first executive director of the Women in Technology Foundation, as well as the CEO of Girls Incorporated of Greater Atlanta. Most recently she acted as the Managing Principal of Systems Evolution, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia. She also serves as Immediate Past-President of the Board of Directors of Georgia FIRST Robotics.

Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project, said, "I’m confident that Heather will move the Drupal Association into its next chapter. Her skills and experience at building relationships in both the non-profit and technology spaces will be a tremendous asset.  I also believe she’ll be a great partner with me to move forward the Drupal project as a whole."

About Drupal

Drupal is content management software. It is used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. What sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that ambitious web experiences need.

About the Drupal Association

The Drupal Association is dedicated to fostering and supporting the Drupal project, the community and its growth. The Drupal Association helps the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, education, promotion, distribution and online collaboration at Drupal.org.

###

Media Contact: Rebecca Pilcher
Phone: 503-405-1159 x 705
Email: rebecca@association.drupal.org

The Drupal Association announced today that Heather Rocker has been selected as its next executive director.

This is exciting news because it concludes a seven month search since Megan Sanicki left.

We looked long and hard for someone who could help us grow the global Drupal community by building on its diversity, working with developers and agency partners, and expanding our work with new audiences such as content creators and marketers.

The Drupal Association (including me) believes that Heather can do all of that, and is the best person to lead Drupal into its next phase of growth.

Heather earned her engineering degree from Georgia Tech. She has dedicated much of her career to working with women in technology, both as the CEO of Girls, Inc. of Greater Atlanta and the Executive Director of Women in Technology.

We were impressed not only with her valuable experience with volunteer organizations, but also her work in the private sector with large customers. Most recently, Heather was part of the management team at Systems Evolution, a team of 250 business consultants, where she specialized in sales operations and managed key client relationships.

She is also a robotics fanatic who organizes and judges competitions for children. So, maybe we’ll see some robots roaming around DrupalCon in the future!

As you can tell, Heather will bring a lot of great experience to the Drupal community and I look forward to partnering with her.

Last but not least, I want to thank Tim Lehnen for serving as our Interim Executive Director. He did a fantastic job leading the Drupal Association through this transition.

Heather Rocker will lead the Association in supporting the global Drupal community.

Washington DC, April 30, 2019 - The Board of Directors of the Drupal Association has voted unanimously to appoint Heather Rocker as Executive Director to lead the Drupal Association.

Adam Goodman, chair of the Drupal Association Board, said, "Drupal is for ambitious digital experiences. Heather’s experience matches this ambition as we seek to increase adoption, diversify and invest in our community, and grow opportunities for builders, agencies, content creators and marketing decision makers. Heather brings seriousness of purpose, character consistent with our values and principles, and lively good humor — just what the Board and I were seeking out for our next leader."

The Drupal Association's mission is to unite a global community to build, promote, and secure the open source Drupal software. Since 2008, the organization has supported a global network of open source contributors; a robust business ecosystem; and has hosted events across 4 continents and more than 20 countries.

Heather Rocker said, "It’s an incredible honor to serve the Drupal Association in this capacity.  This opportunity is not only in alignment with my skills and experience but also with my core belief that outstanding things can be achieved through a dedicated and diverse community of volunteers and partners.  I look forward to building on the solid foundation and collaborative spirit that exists today. "

Heather will begin her work with the Association at the beginning of June.

About Heather

Heather Rocker joins the Drupal Association with a strong history of leadership in technology and the nonprofit world. She was the first executive director of the Women in Technology Foundation, as well as the CEO of Girls Incorporated of Greater Atlanta. Most recently she acted as the Managing Principal of Systems Evolution, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia. She also serves as Immediate Past-President of the Board of Directors of Georgia FIRST Robotics.

Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project, said, "I’m confident that Heather will move the Drupal Association into its next chapter. Her skills and experience at building relationships in both the non-profit and technology spaces will be a tremendous asset.  I also believe she’ll be a great partner with me to move forward the Drupal project as a whole."

About Drupal

Drupal is content management software. It is used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. What sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that ambitious web experiences need.

About the Drupal Association

The Drupal Association is dedicated to fostering and supporting the Drupal project, the community and its growth. The Drupal Association helps the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, education, promotion, distribution and online collaboration at Drupal.org.

###

Media Contact: Rebecca Pilcher
Phone: 503-405-1159 x 705
Email: rebecca@association.drupal.org

Drupal is to release its latest version, Drupal 8.7, on the 1st May 2019. Review the entire Drupal product roadmap here.

National Rural Health Resource Center brandt Mon, 04/29/2019 - 17:13

How we helped NRHRC conduct user testing to validate an audience-centric navigation. 

ruralcenter.org User Testing to Validate an Audience-Centric Navigation On

The National Rural Health Resource Center (The Center) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to sustaining and improving health care in rural communities by providing technical assistance, information, tools, and resources. Users on The Center’s site are looking for information relating to services they provide, programs and events they coordinate, and resources that have been developed to guide and support rural health stakeholders, like webinars, articles, and presentations.

The Center had been making iterative modifications to their Drupal site to improve wayfinding for their visitors, but the team had not yet been able to conduct any user testing on the organization of the site. The Center partnered with Palantir.net to build on previous architecture work and test, validate, and provide recommendations for a more effective, user-centric navigation that lowers user effort on their site.
 

The goals of the engagement were to: 

 

• Make navigation labels and structure relevant and intuitive to users
• Test and validate hypotheses with real user data
• Have the web team partner hands-on with Palantir, so they could see how the user testing processes and tools work and execute these research methods on their own for future optimization efforts

The project had two key constraints:

• Testing needed to focus on copy and labeling rather than new features. The Center’s goal was to surface UX improvements that their team could implement within the Drupal CMS by iterating on menu labels, menu structure, and copy.
• Limited budget. The Center’s budget could cover a limited set of tests, so Palantir needed to formulate a testing plan that maximized the value of the user testing.

Palantir and the Center teamed up to run a Top Task survey to inform a new Information Architecture (IA) and then ran a tree test to validate the new IA.

Key results with the new Information Architecture and the optimized tree:

• 17% higher success rate overall for users completing tasks
• 8% increase in overall “directness” rate (tasks completed with fewer backtracks)

How did we get there?

Palantir implemented a three-step process:

1. Work with key stakeholders at the Center to identify key metrics.
2. Design and implement tests.
3. Handoff our recommendations for the Center to implement.

Step 1: Work with key stakeholders at the Center to identify key metrics.

It was imperative to understand the Center’s goals as they relate to their user’s goals to be able to optimize the site structure and test against what users find important. 

Because the Center’s site is a resource site first, the goals focused on users being able to find the resources they are looking for.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

How we planned to measure success against our established goals:

• Customer-reported satisfaction with “findability”
  • “Did this content answer your question?” feature (example)
• Improvement in task performance indicators
  • Webinar participation
  • Completion of Self-Assessment form
  • Download of publications
• Qualified, interested service leads

Step 2: Design and implement tests.

Our testing approach was two-fold, with one underlying question to answer: what is the most intuitive site structure for users?

Test #1: Top Task survey

During the Top Task survey, we had users rank a list of tasks we think they are trying to complete on the site, so that we have visibility into their priorities. The results from this survey informed a revised version of the navigation labels and structure, which we then tested in the following tree test. The survey was conducted via Google forms with existing Center audiences, aiming for 75+ completions.

We then used these audience-defined “top tasks” to inform the new information architecture, which we tested in our second test.

Test #2: IA tree test

During the tree testing of the Information Architecture, we stripped out any visuals and tested the outline of the menu structure. We began with a mailing list of about 2,500 people, split the list into two segments, and A/B tested the new proposed structure (Variant) vs. the current structure (Benchmark). Both trees were tested with the same tasks but using different labels and structure to see with which tree people could complete the tasks quicker and more successfully.

Step 3: Handoff our recommendations for the Center to implement.

Once the tests were completed, users’ behavior was compared to an “ideal” path, and success rates were analyzed. The test results informed our recommendations to help the Center think about label changes that are more user-centric as opposed to internal jargon. 

The Center has worked with Palantir on multiple projects. Palantir delivers their service in close partnership with our small team. This approach has allowed us to build our internal website development capacity and repeat success even after Palantir’s contract work was completed.

Phillip Birk

Senior IT Specialist

The Outcomes

Overall, users had a 17% higher success rate with the optimized tree, and they completed the tasks with fewer “backtracks” (less second-guessing their path) on the variant.

One of the most impressive results for the Center was that 29% more users could find recorded webinars with the newly proposed tree. 
 

Next steps for the Center will be to implement the top-level navigation recommendations made by Palantir, and then select KPIs to monitor long-term. They’ll also follow up with program-specific tree test projects.

The greatest mark of success for this project is that the Center’s web team now has knowledge of the tools and processes needed to run these tests on their own, so they can continue to make iterative improvements over time. Websites are one of the most important tools used to deliver business value, and just like your business’ needs evolve over time, so do the needs of your audience. It’s never too late to perform user testing and improve upon your user experience.

Modules we like: Menu Link Attributes Niall Morgan Mon, 04/29/2019 - 13:41