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We’re bringing you our latest monthly overview of top Drupal articles and news. We hope you enjoy this month’s selection!
Drupal 11.3.0 is now available
Let’s start this month’s recap with Gábor Hojtsy’s announcement of the third feature release of Drupal 11. One of the first things he highlights about the Drupal 11.3.0 release is the biggest performance boost in a decade, now being able to serve from 26% to 33% more requests with the same database load.
Other new features include: native HTMX, a stable Navigation module, optimized content editing functionality, the introduction of object-oriented hooks into themes, native support for content export, and support for PHP 8.5. Additionally, a new experimental database driver for MySQL/MariaDB was also added, facilitating parallel queries.
Native HTMX in Drupal 11.3.0: Rich UX with up to 71% less JavaScript
In the next article from December which we wanted to highlight, Shawn Duncan takes a closer look at native HTMX coming with Drupal 11.3.0 and what it means for Drupal developers.
HTMX is an extendable, dependency-free JavaScript library that enables developers to access modern browser functionality directly from the HTML, using significantly less JavaScript than traditionally. In the case of Drupal 11.3.0, the use of HTMX results in up to 71% less JavaScript.
Shawn’s article provides an overview of HTMX and its core principles, as well as a Drupal-independent example to demonstrate its functionality. He then also shows how it works now fully featured in Drupal 11.3.0.
Read more about native HTMX in Drupal
Drupal Canvas is Now Available: Inside Drupal's New Visual Page Builder
Let’s continue with another important milestone for Drupal: the release of Drupal Canvas, the modern visual page builder for Drupal. It introduces powerful yet user-friendly drag-and-drop visual editing, enabling both developers and less tech-savvy users to create high-level digital experiences with Drupal, no matter if they’re familiar with the Drupal ecosystem or entirely new to it.
Built with React on the front end while integrated with Drupal’s core APIs, Drupal Canvas makes site building more intuitive, with no code complexity tradeoffs for top-tier functionality. In addition to drag-and-drop editing, Drupal Canvas 1.0 also provides key features such as (multi-page) live preview and in-browser code components.
Read more about Drupal Canvas 1.0
Are recipes replacing Drupal installation profiles?
Moving on, we have an article from Bálint Pekker of cheppers, who gives an excellent demonstration of Drupal Recipes by comparing them to the traditionally commonly used installation profiles.
The chief difference between the two, as Bálint points out, is profiles’ limitation to be used exclusively during initial installation, without being able to be reused in any way later on, making them lack in flexibility.
In contrast, Recipes were designed specifically to address this particular shortcoming. They aren’t restricted to the installation/initial build and so can be applied at any stage of a project, they can be easily reused, and even combined to provide an even easier starting point through Site Templates.
Read more about Drupal Recipes and how they compare to installation profiles
Reflections from the Drupal AI Summit in Paris
Next up, we have Witze Van der Straeten’s recap of the first-ever Drupal AI Summit, which took place on December 9th in Paris, France as part of the larger FOST conference. The event attracted a large and diverse audience, coming from different important sectors such as government, higher education and manufacturing.
Witze’s article gives a breakdown of the main topics covered, such as agents and automation, optimization and search, and trust, sovereignty and UX. He highlights a few of the most noteworthy sessions for each, and also provides links to the slides for all 11 presentations.
Read the whole Drupal AI Summit recap
Adaptable Drupal modules: code meant to be adapted, not installed
We continue with a post from Dries Buytaert who shares his thoughts about a promising new perspective on site- and/or user-specific Drupal modules – namely, making them “adaptable” modules.
While contributed modules have been more generalized in order to work out-of-the-box for everyone universally, adaptable modules would instead provide a baseline specific to a particular use case, which could then be adapted to different use cases, either manually or with the help of AI.
As Dries points out, it is exactly the potential of AI that makes these case-specific opinionated modules worth sharing with the community, thanks to the efficiency it provides in adapting them compared to manual development work.
Read more about adaptable Drupal modules
Open Source Needs an Attribution Standard
Nearing the end of our recap for December, we have a post by Emma Irwin / Sunny Developer about expanding the Drupal Contribution Credit system into the attribution standard for open source projects at large.
Emma briefly describes Drupal’s credit system, noting how the ongoing iteration has addressed challenges such as people trying to game the system. As she states, this is an easy way for both companies and individual contributors to get recognition for their contributions.
Right now, this is something that’s not as easy to do for other open source software projects. Drupal’s unique system provides visibility into things such as client-sponsored contributions and non-code contributions, which could then be adapted to specific open source communities.
Read more about making the Drupal Contribution Credit system the standard for OSS
GitLab CI: Drupal's strategy to empower a whole ecosystem
Lastly, we have an article from Fran Garcia-Linares about another feature of the Drupal ecosystem that has the potential to be adopted by the broader open source ecosystem – GitLab CI.
Fran starts off his article with a general overview of how the GitLab CI strategy works in Drupal before proceeding with a look into the implementation process and how other open source projects could make use of it.
The key thing he highlights is to have one central place from which to control the default setup, and from there projects are free to adapt the system to their own unique needs.
