Drupal

Why Update to Drupal 10

John Clauss — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 20:31:11 +0000

Why Update to Drupal 10 John Clauss Fri, 04/14/2023 - 16:31

Why Update to Drupal 10

Drupal 10 was released to much fanfare in December, 2022. As one of the most popular and powerful web content management systems available today, it’s no surprise that the latest version of Drupal has updates to impress content creators and developers alike.

Along with those new features, however, this version also starts the upgrade clock: Drupal 9 will be deprecated at the end of November 2023. This relatively short time between Drupal 10’s release and 9’s end of life means it is even more important than ever to check in with your web developer and make sure your Drupal site is scheduled to be upgraded. Here's what’s new in Drupal 10:

Improved Site Building Experience

Claro - Drupal 10 introduces a new admin theme called “Claro”. The Claro administrative interface is visually appealing and more user-friendly, in particular in the area of accessibility. Developers with disabilities will have an easier time navigating and using the Claro interface.

Theme Starterkit – The Theme Starterkit is a new tool that provides a set of templates to use as a starting point for developing custom themes. Not only does this streamline the development of new sites, it also implements a more robust maintenance method, improving your site’s stability as base themes and customizations are updated.

Improved Multilingual Support – Developers can more easily translate content and manage translation workflows. This is especially anticipated by organizations that create and manage websites that serve visitors in multiple languages.

Updated Dependencies – Drupal 10 is built to take advantage of the latest version of Symfony, the PHP web application framework that Drupal uses to turn content into web pages. Features like Recipes will allow developers to quickly launch websites with similar sets of plugins and settings. Automatic updates will improve security and performance. Drupal 10 ensures that sites are compatible with the latest technologies and able to integrate with the latest platforms and tools.

Improved Content Creation

CKEditor 5 – Drupal 10 now includes CKEditor 5 with core distribution. This represents a significant improvement to the editing experience, making it easier for editors to create and edit content. A user-friendly WYSIWYG editor, enhanced media embedding tools, and content preview feature brings content creation even closer to a convenient and familiar “word processor” experience.

Modernized and Accessible Theme Defaults – The Olivero theme replaces Bartik as the new front-end default theme. Olivero features a simple and modern design that also puts accessibility front and center: it is WCAG AA compliant from the start. It’s an excellent option if not taking advantage of the theme starterkit.

Improved Content Management – Drupal 10 offers better tools for managing media – including images and videos – and streamlines the content creation and management process. New collaboration features such as simultaneous editing, change tracking, comments, and reviewing & approving will make it easier to develop content in team settings.

Improved Security and Performance

Faster Sites – Drupal 10 has improved both caching mechanisms and improved database performance so that high-traffic sites can deliver content quickly and reliably.

Improved Security – Drupal 10 includes several security enhancements such as requiring users to select more secure passwords by default and better security for third-party modules such as two-factor authentication and CAPTCHA. Up to date dependencies and Automatic Updates, mentioned earlier, are also a key strategy in protecting sites by ensuring that vulnerabilities are fixed before being abused, since security patches are automatically installed.

Don’t Wait to Migrate

Because of the upgrade demands of Drupal’s underlying dependencies, Drupal 10 represents a major update with some urgency. Drupal 7 and 9 will become unsupported as of November 2023, leaving those sites susceptible to downtime and potential security vulnerabilities. In most cases, the transition from Drupal 9 to 10 should be relatively easy as they share the same architectures. Sites built on older versions will likely require additional development and transition time, so it’s important to start planning that transition as soon as possible.

The good news is that Drupal 10 comes with more than just obligatory behind-the-scenes patches. Drupal 10 offers many exciting new features and a fresh, efficient user interface that is sure to make this maintenance investment worth it!

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Drupal

Marker Seven on the forefront of Drupal Releases

John Clauss — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Marker Seven on the forefront of Drupal Releases John Clauss Thu, 04/29/2021 - 12:00

At Marker Seven, our engineering approach embodies the concepts of Open-Source Software. We believe in the collective fostering of growth in web technologies, which is why for the last 12+ years we have been an active member of the Drupal Open-Source community. We have served as contributors, hosts, and sponsors for community events such as local Drupal Users Group meet-ups, BADcamp and the national DrupalCon.

With such a long history working with Drupal as a framework, we’ve skillfully navigated upgrades for our clients as they have moved between Drupal 5, 6, 7, 8 and now 9. In our experience, the structural differences between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8/9 are extreme and require careful planning for a successful migration. At the heart of the challenge is Drupal’s move to utilizing the Symfony framework and Twig templating. Our engineering team is well versed in both; we have worked with them in the context of Drupal development as well as custom non-Drupal implementations.

The major difference between Drupal 8 and 9 is that Drupal 9 is on a new version of Symfony and Twig. It is a cleaner and more modern version in web development terms. It's also worth noting that Drupal 10 is on the horizon, and the technology intends to continue utilizing and upgrading versions of Symfony and Twig.

In a migration from Drupal 7 to 8 or 9 we have identified general key takeaways to keep in mind:

Templating upgrades to Twig in Drupal 8/9 would mean that any existing Drupal 7 templates would need to be rebuilt.
Many Drupal 7 Contributor modules do not have an equivalent or smooth upgrade path to Drupal 8/9. Suitable substitutes will need to be identified or implemented as custom code.
Fortunately, many of the widely used Drupal 7 Contributor modules have been made available as core functionality in Drupal 8/9. Custom modules will need to be assessed in terms of their function and whether a full rebuild will be required. This is particularly important for those that leverage Drupal 7 hooks.
Databased stored configurations and content can be migrated through Migrate Drupal (a Contributor module). However, it is important to keep in mind this generally gets us about 70% of the way there. Often the last 30% will need to be done by custom-built APIs.
In some cases, particularly with implementations that are heavily customized, it may be best to do the migration effort entirely through custom-built APIs.

Our team is actively ramping up on Drupal 10, targeted in June 2022, as we are receiving a lot of interst on this platform upgrade.

To learn more about these projects, watch this space for site launch news, or contact us today to discuss your own migration needs. You’ll be in good hands.

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Drupal

Drupal versus Wordpress

John Clauss — Sat, 24 Mar 2018 18:15:00 +0000

Drupal versus Wordpress John Clauss Sat, 03/24/2018 - 14:15

Every project we undertake has a unique set of demands, and we evaluate each on its own terms. When choosing a platform, we often find ourselves talking with clients about the merits of Drupal versus WordPress.

Both WordPress and Drupal work very well as content management systems. Each provides a robust mechanism for creating and delivering straightforward content. However, as an overarching framework for more than simple publishing, Drupal has far greater capabilities than WordPress, as it is designed to be leveraged and extended.

One of the main advantages of open source systems like WordPress and Drupal is the wide range of plugins and modules that are available to and created by the user community. When selecting a platform, it’s important to ask some key questions:

1. What does the core functionality of the system allow?

2. What additional functionality do existing plugins or modules provide?

3. What further functionality can we get by adapting core functionality, plugins and modules?

4. What remaining functionality needs to be completely customized?

The first question, scoping the core functionality of the system, sets the foundation to understand how much additional work will be needed, as well as what we would need to add to the system. Drupal far exceeds Wordpress in terms of options and flexibility, particularly with the following:

· Configurable content types and fieldsets within content types
WordPress requires additional development or plugins (such as the ACF plugin) to add or remove custom fields to a page or a post. Custom post types require additional custom-coded functions. Drupal provides all these capabilities via the content type and entity form functionalities available in the core.

· Granular user permissions and roles
By default, Drupal provides the option to define custom role types, as well as to provide granular user access to particular functionalities or pages. Drupal also enables all users to create profiles. To achieve similar functionalities in Wordpress requires a combination plugins (such as User Role Editor, Page Security and Membership), plus additional development labor.

· Configurable lists and reporting
Views, core to Drupal is a powerful tool that allows an administrator to build lists, reports, or queries based on anything that is either an entity or a field value within the system, which then can be translated into a page or a widget onto the site. Though WordPress has a few similar plugins (e.g. Query Wrangler), it does not compare to the native functionalities that Drupal offers with Views.

For the types of custom applications we typically create for our clients, we usually choose Drupal. By contrast, if we used WordPress for these applications, we would need to rely heavily on plugins, introducing unnecessary operational complexity, and possibly roadblocks, to our clients.

Another important consideration in choosing a platform is performance. Both Drupal and WordPress can be sped up by leveraging varying types of caching. However, depending on the platform, caching may be of limited benefit, in which case core application performance becomes more critical.

Plugins and modules are great, but they are often developed with a single task in mind. In a real-world scenario you often wind up combining multiple plugins and modules in a single application. They often interfere with one another, and also introduce security vulnerabilities to the system. This is why we look for core application performance rather than relying on multiple plugins and modules. This creates the most stable and reliable platform, which, when all things are considered, delivers the best overall user experience.

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Drupal