Outline of Driesnote for DrupalCon Europe 2021

Dries Buytaert talking at a DrupalCon
https://dri.es/album/drupal-europe-darmstadt-2018/

Dries Buytaert founder of Drupal

As always with much anticipation we got to hear Dries Buytaert deliver the State of Drupal keynote at the DrupalCon Europe 2021 held online. The talk gives us a good overview of the present state of Drupal and what we can look forward to moving forward. Anything and everything that is important in the Drupal and associated world was touched upon in the talk.

Dries talk revolved around 4 main aspects

  • End of life of Drupal 7, 8 & 9
  • What to look forward to in Drupal 10
  • Dynamics of Drupal Contributions
  • State of Contributions and the Cause and Effect

Dries talked about the pressing urgency for sites still in Drupal 8 to move before November 2nd, 2021. Since this migration to Drupal 9 is almost like a minor upgrade site owners should not have much of a problem. He also talked about why Drupal 7 EOL is extended for another year and the need for it. He also talked about the tools and automations that can help ease the migration to Drupal 9.

As per the plan charted out, Drupal 10 will be released sometime between June and November of 2022.

Drupal Core Strategic Initiatives

Dries talked about six key strategic initiatives under the radar right now, namely

  1. Project Browser
  2. Decoupled Menus
  3. Easy Out Of The Box
  4. Automated Updates
  5. Drupal 10 Readiness
  6. New Front End Theme

Below is a summary on the present status of these initiatives.

Project Browser

Dries introduced the Project Browser initiative in his April 2021 Dries note. It is to make it easy for site builders to find and install modules right from their Drupal site: The same concept as an app store on a smartphone. Goal is to make it easy for site builders and for evaluators to integrate.

Just 6 months into the project, there is already a prototype in place. The work on this initiative is almost forty percent complete.

Decoupled Menus

Drupal works well as a headless CMS with REST, JSON: API and GraphQL. The plan is to expand the number of web service endpoints Drupal offers and to have a large repository of web components and JavaScript framework integrations.

For such an ambitious target, Dries and the team felt that Decoupled Menus was the best initiative to start the work with. It was chosen because it was a web component which is comparatively small, can be created easily and used by one and all or was needed in all sites. The focus was on this one component so that by this one task, the plan was to improve on the development infrastructure and policies. This in turn should be helpful in creating more web service endpoints and JavaScript components.

Improvements were made to Drupal.org to help in the development and management of more JavaScript components. There are now Drupal menu components for React, Svelte et cetera.

Dries anticipates that with the momentous growth in the use of independent, API first micro services or composability, Drupal will become an even more powerful and tailored fit for developers. With that aim in mind, the power of Drupal need to be increased through improved headless features and composability. The Association is working to increase the number of web services that can be called and the use of more JavaScript components. Fifty percent of this initiative was completed by April of 2021 and ten percent of the work is left to complete.

Easy Out of the Box

Through this initiative, the plan is to have Layout Builder, Media and Claro added as default features in the standard Drupal CMS. By reducing the scope of the work, the idea is to make it shippable/ deliver it without having to put too much effort into it. Eighty five percent of the work was completed before April of 2021, five percent more before the October DrupalCon 2021. There is a pending work of ten percent to complete.

Automated Updates

The goal of this initiative is to make it easy to do security updates on the Drupal site, so that Drupal sites can be free from vulnerabilities. Quarter of the work was completed before the April 2021 DrupalCon, another quarter by this DrupalCon Europe 2021 and half of the work is still pending.

Drupal 10 Readiness

The focus here is on the upgrade of third party components that Drupal depend on. The tedious work of removal of deprecated code has been made easy by Rector, a CLI tool written in PHP. Rector allows changes in up to 5000 files in under a minute. Forty percent of the work was completed by April of 2021, another thirty percent completed before the October DrupalCon 2021.

New Front End Theme: Olivero

The new front end theme Olivero which is compliant with accessibility standards is almost ready for release. The National Federation of the Blind, USA gave a good report on its low vision accessibility. They found the content easy to navigate and were happy with the contrast, focus and scaling. Ninety percent of the work on this initiative was completed before April of 2021, now only close to 2% left to complete before release.

Dries found the contributions data alarming but the metrics quickly annulled any fear of out of the norm attrition rate. He attributed the decrease in contribution to the Covid-19 pandemic, the slowness that comes normally after a major release, and Rector reducing the work needed among others. So in conclusion, we have a lot of new improvements to look forward to in Drupal. Long live Drupal, even as Drupal celebrates 20 years of progressive development!


 

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