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  • Promet Source: FAQs for this Week’s Drupal 8 Hard Stop

    Nov. 2, 2021 marks a first for Drupal. Never before has a Drupal version end-of-life date signaled a true hard stop, with no possibility of extended support and no commercial vendors that are in a position to provide off-grid security maintenance and bug fixes.  At issue is Drupal 8’s Symfony 3 dependency, which was also decommissioned on Nov. 2, 2021.

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  • Drupal Commerce: Commerce 1.16 released, 10 years on and going strong

    Drupal Commerce achieved its first full release at DrupalCon London 2011. I remember working on it beside Damien Tournoud, Commerce Guys’ CTO at the time – one of those rare true geniuses in his element helping me finalize a variety of last minute issues before we tagged and released. More than a few open source eCommerce projects have come and gone since then, but we haven’t slowed down yet!

    This past week, we packaged Commerce 1.16. It’s been over two years since the last release as we’ve focused primarily on the Drupal 8/9 branch, Commerce 2.x. However, we still found time to make significant performance improvements and incorporate longstanding feature requests like including the order e-mail address when the order is rendered, supporting the deletion of old order and line item revisions impacting the performance of sites with a tremendous amount of orders, and more. For the full list of updates, please refer to the release notes.

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  • Gábor Hojtsy: One day to go until Drupal 8 EOL: what if you stay on Drupal 8?

    With one day to go until Drupal 8’s end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites’ modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

    Given that there is only one day left, you will highly likely not be on Drupal 9 tomorrow. So what happens to your Drupal 8 site once the core software is end of life? As I wrote two days ago, unless you are on Drupal 8.9.x you are already running on end of life software. As prior versions of Drupal 8 don’t stop running, Drupal 8.9.x will also not stop running tomorrow. There is no expiring license key that will stop the site from functioning. There will not be a banner at the bottom of the page that the site is insecure. In fact the site will not even be insecure immediately. However, there will not be security fixes to Drupal 8 anymore. So the next time a fix comes out for Drupal 9 that may be applicable to Drupal 8, that fix will not be made anymore to Drupal 8. Depending on the nature of that security problem, you site may be in no trouble or big trouble, but the distinction will be left to you to decide.

    Using Upgrade Status and Drupal Rector automated code fixes, the upgrade from Drupal 8 to 9 is still the easiest in the last decade (assuming you are already on Drupal 8.9), so I would highly suggest to plan to do the upgrade soon and don’t risk staying on Drupal 8 for too long.

    There are also various changes to drupal.org projects and issues. These will likely not happen immediately tomorrow, but will be done soon. For contributed project maintainers on Drupal.org, releases that are only compatible with Drupal 8 will be marked unsupported as well, much like the same process that happened to Drupal 6 last time. Testing setups that are against Drupal 8 will be removed. Issues submitted against Drupal 8 will automatically be moved to Drupal 9.2.x (where bugfixes are still possible). If they are not applicable to Drupal 9 anymore, the issues will later be closed by people.

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  • AddWeb Solution: 25 Drupal Modules To Simplify Drupal Development

    Go to Source Author:

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  • rachel_norfolk: Talk: Core Contribution Mentoring – developments, challenges and opportunities as we move into a hybrid world

    Talk: Core Contribution Mentoring – developments, challenges and opportunities as we move into a hybrid world
    DrupalCamp Oslo

    I had the absolute pleasure to talk at DrupalCamp Oslo about Core Contribution Mentoring, where we are and what we have learned over the last couple of years of unusual times.

    If the slides are useful, you can find them attached. 

    Rachel Mon, 11/01/2021 – 11:25

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  • Web Wash: Getting Started with Metatag Module in Drupal

    The Metatag module allows you to configure structured metadata such as meta descriptions and meta keywords for your Drupal website. You can do this at the global level, on a per content type basis, per node basis and even on a per view page basis.

    In this tutorial we will show you how to:

    • Install the Meta Tag module
    • Configure meta tags for a content type
    • Override meta tags on a per node basis
    • Override meta tags for View pages
    • Have more granular permissions for meta tags fields
    • Specify meta tags for different favicons

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  • Gábor Hojtsy: Three days to go until Drupal 8 EOL: you may already be using an EOL version of Drupal 8

    With three days to go until Drupal 8’s end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites’ modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

    Unless you are on Drupal 8.8.x or Drupal 8.9.x, Upgrade Status will tell you to move to that version first, before you can upgrade to Drupal 9. (At this point it should really tell you that 8.9.x is the only acceptable version to upgrade to). Why is that?

    While Drupal 8’s end of life in three days may sound too soon, it could easily happen that you are on Drupal 8 and are already on an end of life version. With the introduction of semantic versioning in Drupal 8.0.0, Drupal core went on a path of feature updates in minor versions (8.1, 8.2, etc) and bug and security fixes in patch versions (8.0.1, 8.1.3, etc.). However, bugfixes and security fixes are only released for older minor versions for a limited time. For bugfixes, that is 6 months, and for security fixes that is 12 months after release of the minor series. This one year support window started with 8.5.0, the end of life dates of prior minor versions of Drupal 8 were even sooner after their release.

    What does this practically mean? Let’s say your site is on some version of Drupal 8.5.x, that release series started with Drupal 8.5.0 in March, 2018. It then received bugfixes until 8.6.0 was released in September, 2018. Finally, it continued to receive security fixes only until 8.7.0 was released, that is March, 2019. In other words, Drupal 8.5.x has been end of life since March, 2019. It did not receive security fixes since then. So if your site is on Drupal 8.5.x, then you are already on end of life software and the end of life of 8.9.x will not materially change your situation.

    When Drupal 9 was released at the same time as Drupal 8.9, the only supported versions that remained of Drupal 8 were Drupal 8.8.x (security) and 8.9.x (bugfix and security). No more releases were made to 8.7.x and before. So in case there were some critical issue to fix for the upgrade path, that would not have been possible to fix in earlier versions. Also, by limiting the upgrade potential to these two release series, we could limit the potential upgrade bugs that could happen with unsupported earlier versions. However, to support the upgrade to Drupal 9, and thanks to the early release of Drupal 9, we also made Drupal 8.9.x a long term supported release, which is why it will go end of life an additional five months later, after a total support of 17 months.

    At this time we are supporting Drupal 7.x (bug and security fixes), Drupal 8.9.x (security fixes), Drupal 9.1.x (security fixes), Drupal 9.2.x (bug and security fixes), preparing to release 9.3.0 in December, already opened 9.4.x for development and will very soon open Drupal 10.0.x for development and eventual release next year. That is a lot of versions of Drupal to support! While we do everything we can to make the transitions between these easier, it does depend on you too to keep your Drupal sites up to date.

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  • Gábor Hojtsy: Four days to go until Drupal 8 EOL: use Drupal 9 on older MySQL/Percona/MariaDB versions

    With four days to go until Drupal 8’s end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites’ modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

    One of the benefits of using Upgrade Status is it will tell you about environment compatibility alongside extension compatibility. It will note if your PHP or Apache or database versions are out of date. Of particular note are Drupal 9’s MySQL/Percona and MariaDB version requirements. The MySQL/Percona/MariaDB driver that’s included in Drupal 9 core requires MySQL/Percona 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.3.7+. The intention with raising the bar from Drupal 8’s requirement of MySQL/Percona 5.6 and MariaDB 10.0 was to utilise some of the newer features in these database versions. There was also the risk of a dependency starting to require the new versions, given the end of life nature of the older database versions at this point. Neither happened yet but we did not know that ahead of time of course.

    MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 10.0 database driver for Drupal 9 to the rescue! If you are on a long term supported operating system and receive security coverage for your database, you might not need to update to MySQL/Percona 5.7 or MariaDB 10.3 immediately after all. Only a few contributed projects utilise the new capabilities, for example the JSON/JSONB field module. If you are certain that none of your modules require the newer versions, keep in mind that core itself can actually run fine with older database versions still. Follow the instructions on the project page to install this driver for Drupal 9. I would still suggest you plan an upgrade of your database, but now it can be decoupled from your Drupal major upgrade.

    Looking ahead, some of the Drupal 10 platform requirements are already defined, and MySQL/Percona/MariaDB requirements will not be raised further from Drupal 9’s minimum versions. However there are no guarantees that the new features will not be actually utilised then.

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  • Drupal Association blog: Drupal Business Survey 2021: Drupal business is flourishing

    Posted on behalf of One Shoe and Exove

    What are the thoughts of Drupal Business leaders about 2021? For the sixth consecutive time, Drupal agencies One Shoe and Exove, together with the Drupal Association, took a deep dive into how Drupal business leaders experience the current state of Drupal business. We are still living in a time where there is constant change in our society. Year two of the pandemic has seen significant and most likely long-term growth in Drupal business for the second year in a row. Now it is time to look forward in order to see what we can do to keep this growth going for years to come.

    Characteristics of the participants

    77 people participated in this year’s edition of the Drupal Business Survey. 61,1% of the participants have a CEO/CTO/COO role in their company and 20,8% of the respondents are founders.

    A majority of the Drupal-centric businesses that participated in the survey have relevant business in Europe (61,1%) and North America (57,2%). The rest are (also) operational in:

    • South America (6,5%)
    • Australia (6,5%)
    • Asia (5,2%)
    • Africa (2,6%)
    • The Middle East (3,9%)


    A big part of this year’s respondents run a digital agency (42,9%), followed by consulting agencies (19,5%) and software companies (18,2%) respectively.

    Looking at the chart below, it is clear that small and mid-sized companies are well represented in this year’s survey. While the Drupal Business Survey does see quite a growth in the number of companies having 51-100 employees compared to last year, we also see a significant dip in the number of companies that have 101-500 employees this year. The reason for this change is hard to pinpoint and could very well be a coincidence in the composition of participants. Since Drupal business is doing very well in 2021, lay-offs are highly unlikely and not mentioned amongst the respondents in the survey.

    Growth is continuing during and most likely after the pandemic

    As the title of this article and last year’s survey showed, Drupal business is doing very well during the pandemic. Based on The Drupal Business Survey, we are happy to note that this year is no different in that regard. When asked what has been the biggest success during the last 12 months, 36% of participants said that their business grew. One respondent says in the survey: ”We have landed some large stable accounts across a wide spectrum of verticals giving us stability.” and “We eclipsed our targeted growth”. suggesting that this growth is bigger than usual and also looks like it is not a short-term ordeal.

    Quite interesting is the positive change in pipeline development as seen in the graphic below:

    This major increase in business and deal size is possibly happening because of the way clients have been forced into the digital space more in the past two years. As one participant states: “Digitalization is speeding up, and the demand for services like ours is increasing”. By looking at the numbers, this may certainly be the case. This is also reflected in the participants’ expectations for the next 12 months.

    Compared to last year’s survey, the outlook on the pipeline expectation is a lot more positive.

    How to sustain growth in a post-pandemic landscape

    The current situation of Drupal business is very strong. But with restrictions being lifted in most countries, things could change once more. How do we make sure to sustain the growth that we achieved in the past 12 months?

    1. Pricing

    To sustain growth, good margins on Drupal-related services are needed. That is why in the coming period, Drupal agencies need to upsell their services and Drupal itself. It is clear that for a lot of organizations, the need for digitization took a big leap in priority. This means that there are plenty of projects waiting to be picked up. It is essential that we are engaging in projects where Drupal has a good fit for customer needs in order to price projects with healthy margins.

    2. Salaries

    Growing your business means expanding your workforce. As you will read in this article and what you probably experienced first hand this year, is that Drupal talent is scarce. If you want to attract ample talent to take on the increased workload, you need to offer competitive salaries. Stagnating your growth in your workforce will lead to an overload of work and a halt in growth.

    3. Being able to handle too much work

    If you however still find yourself in a situation where you can no longer deal with the amount of work, don’t hesitate to act accordingly. You can easily decrease the amount of work without your revenue stream taking a hit by raising the prices of your Drupal services. This will of course attract fewer clients, but the clients that will request your services will pay more.

    Most popular Drupal industries

    Drupal business is thriving in 2021. But what industries are the most lucrative for the Drupal companies? Each year the Drupal Business Survey asks participants in which industries their company operates. This is the top 10 of 2021:

    The most popular industry for Drupal projects is the Charities and Non-profit sector with 68,8% of the Drupal companies having clients from this sector. This is a big change from last year, where the Charities and Non-profit sector was served by only 55.4% of the respondents.

    The runners-up are Education (59,7%) and Healthcare and Medicine (51,9%) finishing our top three.

    While serving the Charities and Non-profit sector is a noble effort, it should be noted that this sector focuses heavily on reducing operating costs to ensure most of the money flowing to the charitable or non-profit cause. Drupal can, of course, help them to reduce costs at other areas of their operations – but at the end of the day also Drupal agency costs will be on the line.

    The Education sector and Government & Public Administration – fourth most popular – are known for investing heavily in digitalization, especially now due to pandemic and public subsidies given to digital transformation. Prices in these sectors are typically lower than in private sectors. This is however balanced with long contracts, a steady flow of work, and certainty that the invoices are paid.

    Besides the top industry being different from last year’s edition, we do see a significant drop in the Media sector. This is a trend that requires attention because this is an industry that is usually good for some interesting contracts.

    Promising industries

    This year, the Drupal Business Survey also asked participants what industries they think are the most promising moving forward. This is what they had to say:

    The answers to this question are in line with the current most popular industries except for one major difference. The current number one, Non-Profit, only scores 5% of the answers here. This might be due to the high number of companies already working on it, or low-profit expectations. Another curious thing is that most people (19%) do not see any particular industry standing out. People elaborate with: “I think this is more a question of the size of projects not of their industry.” and “Drupal is pretty ubiquitous these days.” It is true that Drupal can be used in all industries, as all of them require communication platforms, and in smaller markets companies cannot be industry-specific. Going forward, industry focus is relevant to keep Drupal on the growth trajectory, as the harder to penetrate industries require attentive work within the industry to gain an understanding of the business and references to win new clients.

    Lack of Drupal talent is an ongoing struggle

    Like we mentioned above, the lack of Drupal talent is still one of the biggest challenges the Drupal business community is facing. When asked what the biggest challenges have been in the past 12 months, 27% claimed that recruiting has been their main concern. “We’ve been on a growth path so it feels like we’re forever recruiting” clearly states the case at hand and what this lack of talent means for the growth of Drupal businesses.

    Hardships in finding and hiring Drupal talent has been an ongoing theme in the past Drupal Business Surveys. The last 12 months have also shown us a new challenge in recruitment: employee churn.

    Employee churn fueled by the pandemic

    As one participant states: “Several long-term staff members have been enticed by other job offers. This appears to be a global issue of staff re-assessing their personal priorities.” and “It’s getting harder and harder to find and retain talent”. Looking at these answers, it seems that the pandemic has triggered people to rethink their situations and values, and take actions. For Drupal companies, it perhaps broke the normal cycle of daily work and started a period of employee churn.

    Beware of the vicious cycle

    The danger of an understaffed workforce can be the start of a vicious cycle that is tough to break. By not having a big enough workforce in a growing company, there will be too much work per individual. This overload in work, combined with the toll the pandemic took on people, could cause more people to develop mental health issues and burn-outs – a concern among 8% of the survey’s participants. This will leave you with an even smaller workforce thus the cycle begins anew.

    Take good care of your employees

    Based on the survey findings, a priority going forward is to invest properly in your workforce. The companies should do their utmost to make sure that their staff is healthy, happy, feel safe, and can handle their workload. This will help with stability, make it more attractive for new hires to stay and will prevent a lot of concerns cascading through your organization down the line. One participant stated that “Give raises through the pandemic.” has been their biggest success as it lays a great foundation for stability.

    Challenges regarding Drupal’s popularity

    One thing that stood out to us while viewing this year’s results was the number of participants being worried about Drupal’s popularity decreasing in the coming 12 months. When asked: “What are you most worried about regarding Drupal business in the coming year?”, 28% responded that Drupal’s popularity decreasing is their biggest worry. Leaving ‘Nothing’ (23%) and ‘Recruitment’ (19%) as a respective 2nd and 3rd place.

    The Drupal Business Survey dove deeper into the major reasons, and we found out that the competition from cloud CMS platforms is a big factor. “Competing products and content as a service CMS platforms are slowly gaining ground and eating into areas where Drupal was traditionally dominant such as sites/platforms that needed more than basic customization.” and “Clients currently on Drupal 7 choosing a different platform rather than migrating to Drupal 9” are clearly showing how people experience the current perception on Drupal in their day-to-day activities.

    How to overcome these challenges

    Drupal is naturally still a very strong option in a lot of situations, and it has its own edges, such as high flexibility and configurability to cope in different situations. So, it is up to Drupal business owners to make sure we play to Drupal’s strengths and market Drupal in a way that attracts the best kind of projects. The SaaS CMS platforms are getting better and are attractive to a lot of people, and their development should be followed closely to maintain Drupal’s competitive edge. We need to make sure that we are not competing with these new platforms – or WordPress for that matter – in fields where Drupal has additional challenges to overcome. It is also extremely crucial to compete with value and not with prices, as the race to the bottom will erode companies’ ability to develop themselves and their offering further.

    That is why it is very important to take a close look at what the client is looking after, and check whether Drupal would be a good fit. It is also good to know whether people are enticed by the open-source ecosystem or would rather work with something else.

    Reasons for clients to (not) choose Drupal

    What makes clients pick Drupal? The Drupal Business Survey is happy to report that ‘having used Drupal before’ is no longer the number one reason for working with it. This means that people have other motives to choose Drupal and it’s not just out of habit. Drupal being open source is the number one reason with 63,6%. Another great development is the fact that more companies use Drupal because it is the best fit for their business requirements, and that it is no longer picked because of low costs. This again plays well into the narrative of upselling your services and Drupal to the right organizations.

    The main reasons for clients not choosing Drupal are still playing a part in the well-known points of improvement. The top three reasons are:

    1. Price. Prices can increase significantly compared to competitors because Drupal is on the higher end and more time-consuming to develop. As one respondent said “Prizes and the amount of necessary efforts to drive drupal projects.”
    2. Inferior UX. Competitors like WordPress and SaaS CMSes are seen as a lot more user-friendly.
    3. Maintenance costs. Again a cost-related challenge where maintaining a Drupal site is usually more expensive than with its competitors.

    It is important to know why companies choose Drupal for projects and why they choose other CMSes. With this knowledge, it is possible to reassess Drupal’s position in the market and adjust the proposition if needed.

    Contribution

    Drupal’s strength has always been an active development community that builds the product further. Drupal companies play a major role in the contribution, as they pay the salaries for most of the people contributing back to the platform.

    The Drupal Business Survey researched how and why companies contribute. The diagram below shows the amount of companies contributing to the certain facets of the project.

    Almost all companies (80-85%) contribute documentation and code changes, and around half of them help to fund the community with donations and sponsoring events. The share of companies contributing has stayed roughly the same compared to the previous year. Major drops are in organizing events, which is natural due to pandemic, and donations, which is explained by a bigger funding drive that took place in spring 2020.

    The main reason for not contributing is lack of time, mentioned by several companies that do not give back to the community. This resonates well with the overall situation with finding and hiring Drupal talent.

    Fortunately, these companies are a small minority and the company support towards open source Drupal project continues to stay on a high level.

    Conclusion

    As said multiple times already, Drupal business is at a high. But it is now up to all of us to keep it that way. Pick your learnings from this past year and make sure you market your services and Drupal to the right organizations. This will help you increase your pricing, keep a close eye on your workload and attract more talent with interesting salaries.

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  • Gábor Hojtsy: Five days to go until Drupal 8 EOL: automated code fixes

    With five days to go until Drupal 8’s end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites’ modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9.

    If you took my advice a couple days ago and took on co-maintainership of a project, you may be wondering about the fastest way to get drupal.org projects Drupal 9 compatible. Last year, we introduced the Project Update Bot that submits compatibility issues with patches to drupal.org projects. If it detects all compatibility issues identified are fixed, it will also suggest updating the core compatibility information for the project within the same patch. Committing such patches will potentially entirely fix extension compatibility. Hundreds of those issues have been reviewed and marked as tested by folks in the community and a lot more are waiting for review or are under discussion.

    For your own custom code, I highly advise that you use the tools behind the update bot, specifically the Drupal Rector tool funded by Palantir.net. It will attempt to fix as many deprecated API uses as possible. According to our analysis of all contributed projects, almost half of all identified Drupal 9 incompatibility issues on drupal.org are covered by Drupal Rector automated fixes. So running Drupal Rector on your own code first will save you a lot of manual work and time. Upgrade Status will help identify the rest of the problems too and link to documentation to help fix them.

    You can and should make all of these changes on your Drupal 8 site, given that the fixed code will keep running fine on Drupal 8. Once you updated contributed projects used on your site, fixed your custom code and ensured a compatible environment, you can upgrade to Drupal 9.

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