SEO Drupal + SuchmaschinenOptimierung @ Drupal Central

Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

In June the Drupal Association had our annual staff retreat, where the remote team members joined the Portland, OR team for a three day retreat. This year's retreat was particularly important as we found our feet as a smaller, leaner team, and focused on our organizational roadmap for the next twelve months.

For the engineering team in particular, our focus will be on maintaining the critical systems that make project successful: issue queues, updates, testing, packaging, etc, while at the same time finding new ways to support and enable Drupal's evolution.

These were some heady days, but even as we worked through the best ways to continue serving the Drupal community on a strategic level in June, we also found the time to keep making Drupal.org a better home.

Drupal.org updates Documentation Migration

A long running initiative this year has been the creation of a new Documentation system for Drupal.org, a topic we've touched on in many prior updates as it has begun to come online. We are very happy to say that we are moving to the next stage of the documentation project: moving from development to migration.

In June tvn recruited several volunteers to join our documentation migration team, and to become some of the first maintainers for the new Documentation Guides. General documentation, such as Understanding Drupal, Structure Guide, etc. will be migrated first. Documentation for contributed projects will follow in the coming weeks.

Maintainers of contributed projects, who currently have their documentation on Drupal.org, will be added as maintainers to respective documentation guides and are encouraged to clean/tidy up their documentation post-migration.

if you are interested in helping, or sign up as a maintainer for some of the new documentation guides.

Composer Repositories are now in Beta

Drupal.org's Composer repositories allow developers building sites with Drupal to use the Composer command line tool for dependency management. In June we collected feedback from a variety of users, as well as the community volunteers who assisted us with the Composer Community Initiative.

We spent the month iterating quickly on the alpha implementation: fixing bugs and rebuilding the meta data to ensure that users get consistent and expected results. Because of those fixes, and after gathering yet more feedback from the community, we were able to move the Drupal.org Composer repositories to beta.

We encourage you to begin transitioning your composer based workflows to use Drupal.org's composer facade. Package names are stable, and downtimes will be planned and announced. For more information on how to use Drupal.org's Composer repositories, read our documentation.

Better issue credit tools for maintainers

The Drupal.org issue credit system is a unique innovation of our community. By allowing users to attribute their contributions as volunteers, to their employers, or to client customers, we have an insight into the contribution ecosystem for Drupal that is unparalleled among open source projects. We've also already seen the impact of incentivizing organizations to give back to Drupal, by using the credit system as the basis for organization rankings in the marketplace.

In June we added two new tools for maintainers to improve how they grant credit to users. Firstly, maintainers can now deselect the automatic credit attribution for users who have submitted patches. This change was important to prevent gaming the credit system. Secondly, we've given the maintainers the ability to credit users who have not commented in the issue. Whether that help was provided in IRC, Slack, on a video call, or in a sprint room, maintainers can now ensure that those users who helped resolve an issue receive credit for their contributions. Any user who is credited this way can edit their credit attribution if they want to extend that attribution to a supporting organization or customer.

Friendly path aliases for release nodes

We also made a relatively small change that will have a big impact. Path auto is now enabled for project releases, so you for any project a specific release can now be found at:
drupal.org/project/[project_name]/[version]
And you can also find a list of all the releases for a project at:
drupal.org/project/[project_name]/[version]

Take, for example, the Token module:
https://drupal.org/project/token/

You can find the complete index of releases for this project at: https://www.drupal.org/project/token/releases and individual releases now have friendly urls, like this one: https://www.drupal.org/project/token/releases/8.x-1.0-alpha2

Spam Fighting Improvements

Fighting spam on Drupal.org is a never ending battle, but in June we deployed a refinement to our spam fighting tools that helps us to find patterns in registration behavior and prevent spam registrations before they've even started. After flipping on our latest iteration of this spam fighting tool we saw an immediate and dramatic drop-off in suspicious account registrations. With the additional data we've been able to collect we already see ways to improve this even further, so we hope to continue make Drupal.org a cleaner home for the community.

Highlighting Supporting Technologies

Drupal is many things to many different people, but one central function of Drupal is to be the hub of interconnected and complementary technologies. Several of the companies that build these technologies have chosen to support the Drupal project by becoming supporters. To better highlight some of these supporting technologies that work well with Drupal, we've added a supporting technologies listing to the marketplace.

Sustaining support and maintenance DrupalCon

DrupalCon Dublin is coming up soon, from September 26 - 30th. This year we smashed all our previous records for session submissions, and the caliber of speakers and topics is higher than ever before.

In June we opened registration for the event. We encourage you to buy your tickets now! Early bird registration will end soon.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is the bedrock of Drupal.org - and we're continuing to tune the infrastructure for efficiency, economy, and performance. Alongside the launch of registration for DrupalCon Dublin, we implemented APDQC to improve the performance of the Events website under heavy load.

We've also been upgrading our configuration management from Puppet 3 to Puppet 4, and continuing to standardize our configuration across all of our environments to make our infrastructure durable, consistent, and portable.

———

As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who made it possible for us to work on these projects.

If you would like to support our work as an individual or an organization, consider becoming a member of the Drupal Association.

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra

• Advisory ID: DRUPAL-PSA-2016-001
• Project: Drupal contributed modules
• Version: 7.x
• Date: 2016-July-12
• Security risk: 22/25 ( Highly Critical) AC:None/A:None/CI:All/II:All/E:Theoretical/TD:All
• Vulnerability: Arbitrary PHP code execution

Update: Release Annoucements

The following modules have security releases that are now available, listed in order of severity. There are no more releases planned for today.

• RESTWS - Highly critical - Remote code execution - SA-CONTRIB-2016-040
• Coder - Highly Critical - Remote Code Execution - SA-CONTRIB-2016-039
• Webform Multiple File Upload - Critical - Remote Code Execution - SA-CONTRIB-2016-038

Description

There will be multiple releases of Drupal contributed modules on Wednesday July 13th 2016 16:00 UTC that will fix highly critical remote code execution vulnerabilities (risk scores up to 22/25). These contributed modules are used on between 1,000 and 10,000 sites. The Drupal Security Team urges you to reserve time for module updates at that time because exploits are expected to be developed within hours/days. Release announcements will appear at the standard announcement locations.

Drupal core is not affected. Not all sites will be affected. You should review the published advisories on July 13th 2016 to see if any modules you use are affected.

Contact and More Information

The Drupal security team can be reached at security at drupal.org or via the contact form at https://www.drupal.org/contact.

Learn more about the Drupal Security team and their policies, writing secure code for Drupal, and securing your site.

Follow the Drupal Security Team on Twitter at https://twitter.com/drupalsecurity

Edited to add: approximate usage of the modules, links to the final releases, that there are no more releases for today..

Drupal version: Drupal 7.x

Drupal 7.50, the next release in the Drupal 7 series, is now available for download. It contains a variety of new features, improvements, and bug fixes (no security fixes).

Wait... Drupal 7.50?

Yes, there is a version jump compared to the previous 7.44 release; this is to indicate that this Drupal 7 point release is a bit larger than past ones and makes a few more changes and new features available than normal.

Updating your existing Drupal 7 sites is recommended. Backwards compatibility is still being maintained, although read on to find out about a couple of changes that might need your attention during the update.

Download Drupal 7.50 Notable changes

There are a variety of new features, performance improvements, security-related enhancements (although no fixes for direct security vulnerabilities) and other notable changes in this release. The release notes provide a comprehensive list, but here are some highlights.

New "administer fields" permission added for trusted users

The administrative interface for adding and configuring fields has always been something that only trusted users should have access to. To make that easier, there is now a dedicated permission which is required (in addition to other existing administrative permissions) to be able to access the field UI.

For example, you can now assign the "administer taxonomy" permission (but withhold the new "administer fields" permission) to allow low-level administrators to manage taxonomy terms but not change the field structure. Read the change record for more information.

Protection against clickjacking enabled by default

Clickjacking is a technique a malicious site owner can use to attempt attacks on other sites, by embedding the victim's site into an iframe on their own site.

To stop this, Drupal will now prevent your site from being embedded in an iframe on another domain. This is the default behavior, but it can be adjusted if necessary; see the change record to find out more.

Support for full UTF-8 (emojis, Asian symbols, mathematical symbols) is now possible on MySQL

If content creators on your site have been clamoring to use emojis, it's now possible on Drupal sites running MySQL (it was previously possible on PostgreSQL and SQLite). Turning this capability on requires the database to meet certain requirements, plus editing the site's settings.php file and potentially other steps, as described in the change record.

Improved support for recent PHP versions, including PHP 7

Drupal core's automated test suite is now fully passing on a variety of environments where there were previously some failures (PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, and 7). We have also fixed several bugs affecting those versions. These PHP versions are officially supported by Drupal 7 and recommended for use where possible.

Because PHP 7 is the newest release (and not yet used on many production sites) extra care should still be taken with it, and there are some known bugs, especially in contributed modules (see the discussion for more details). However anecdotal evidence from a variety of users suggests that Drupal 7 can be successfully used on PHP 7, both before and after the 7.50 release.

Improved performance (and new PHP warnings) when Drupal is trying to find a file that does not exist

When Drupal cannot find a file that it expects to be in the filesystem, it will no longer continually search for it on a large number of page requests (previously, this could significantly hurt your site's performance). Instead, it will record a PHP warning about the problem.

Read the change record for more information, and make sure your production site is not configured to show warning messages like this on the screen, since it is not desirable for site visitors to see them. (In order to configure this, go to "Administration" → "Configuration" → "Development" → "Logging and errors" and set the "Error messages to display" option to "None".)

Improvements to help search engines index your site's images/CSS/JavaScript

Modern search engine web crawlers read images, CSS and JavaScript (just like a regular web browser) when crawling a site, and they use this information to improve search results.

Drupal's default robots.txt file now includes rules to allow search engines to access more of these files than it previously allowed them to, which may help certain search engines better index your site. See the change record for additional details.

More information

• You can find the full list of changes between the previous 7.44 release and the current 7.50 release by reading the 7.50 release notes.
• Also see the release notes for additional update information and known issues discovered after the release.
• You can find a complete list of all changes in the stable 7.x branch in the git commit log.
• Translators should be aware of a few administrative-facing translatable string changes and additions in this release.

Security information

• We have a security announcement mailing list and a history of all security advisories, as well as an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.
• Drupal 7 includes the built-in Update Manager module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.
• There are no security fixes in this release of Drupal core.

Future releases

• Drupal 7 is being actively maintained, so more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.
• We will consider continuing to do larger Drupal 7 releases like this one every six months or so (where the next larger release will be 7.60, in keeping with Drupal's new release cycle) if there is interest and continued contributions from the community. See the ongoing discussion for further details.

New Drupal 7 co-mainainers

In case you missed the news earlier, we recently added two new Drupal 7 co-maintainers: Fabianx (@fabianfranz) and stefan.r (@stefan_arrr)! Despite only having been official maintainers for the past two weeks, they put in an enormous amount of effort and skill into Drupal 7.50, which was essential in getting it out the door with all the improvements mentioned above.

Credits

Overall, 230 people were credited with helping to fix issues included in this release:

akoepke, alanburke, Alan D., alberto56, Albert Volkman, alexmoreno, alexpott, amontero, andypost, ar-jan, arosboro, askibinski, attiks, basvredeling, beejeebus, benjy, Berdir, bmateus, borisson_, botris, bradjones1, brianV, broeker, c960657, Carsten Müller, catch, checker, chintan.vyas, chirhotec, Christian DeLoach, ChristophWeber, chx, cilefen, ciss, ckng, colinmccabe, corbacho, criz, cspitzlay, cwoky, dagmar, DamienMcKenna, damien_vancouver, darol100, Darren Oh, das-peter, Dave Reid, davic, david_garcia, David_Rothstein, dawehner, dcam, DerekL, donutdan4114, droplet, DuaelFr, e._s, eesquibel, eiriksm, Elijah Lynn, emcniece, Eric_A, EvanSchisler, ExTexan, Fabianx, felribeiro, fgm, fietserwin, forestgardener, gcardinal, geerlingguy, gielfeldt, Girish-jerk, greggles, GrigoriuNicolae, Gábor Hojtsy, hass, Henrik Opel, heyyo, hgoto, hussainweb, idebr, ifrik, imanol.eguskiza, IRuslan, izaaksom, jackbravo, jacob.embree, jbekker, jbeuckm, jduhls, jenlampton, jeroen.b, jhodgdon, jibran, joachim, joegraduate, joelpittet, johnpicozzi, joseph.olstad, joshtaylor, Josh Waihi, jp.stacey, jsacksick, jthorson, JvE, jweowu, kala4ek, Kars-T, Ken Ficara, kenorb, kevinquillen, Kgaut, KhaledBlah, klausi, klokie, kristiaanvandeneynde, kristofferwiklund, ksenzee, k_zoltan, leschekfm, Liam Morland, lOggOl, lokapujya, Lowell, lucastockmann, Lukas von Blarer, maciej.zgadzaj, marcelovani, mariagwyn, Mark Theunissen, marvin_B8, maximpodorov, mayaz17, MegaChriz, mfb, mgifford, micaelamenara, mikeytown2, Mile23, mimran, minax.de, miro_dietiker, mistermoper, Mixologic, mohit_aghera, mondrake, mpv, mr.baileys, MustangGB, Neograph734, nevergone, nicholas.alipaz, nicrodgers, NikitaJain, nithinkolekar, nod_, Noe_, onelittleant, opdavies, orbmantell, oriol_e9g, ParisLiakos, pashupathi nath gajawada, Peacog, Perignon, Peter Bex, peterpoe, pfrenssen, PieterDC, pietmarcus, pjcdawkins, pjonckiere, Polonium, pounard, presleyd, pwaterz, pwolanin, rafaolf, rbmboogie, realityloop, rhclayto, rocketeerbkw, rpayanm, rupertj, Sagar Ramgade, sanduhrs, scor, scottalan, scuba_fly, sdstyles, snehi, soaratul, SocialNicheGuru, Spleshka, stefan.r, stovak, sun, Sutharsan, svanou, Sweetchuck, swentel, sylus, s_leu, tadityar, talhaparacha, tatisilva, tbradbury, therealssj, travelvc, TravisCarden, TravisJohnston, treyhunner, tsphethean, tstoeckler, tucho, tuutti, twistor, TwoD, typhonius, vasi1186, Wim Leers, Xano, xjm, yannickoo, yched, YesCT, zaporylie, Zerdiox, and znerol.

(This list was auto-generated, so apologies if anyone was left out.)

Your name could be on a list like this in the future; see the Ways to get involved page to find out how.

Thank you to everyone who helped with Drupal 7.50!

Republished from buytaert.net

In one of my recent blog posts, I articulated a vision for the future of Drupal's web services, and at DrupalCon New Orleans, I announced the API-first initiative for Drupal 8. I believe that there is considerable momentum behind driving the web services initiative. As such, I want to provide a progress report, highlight some of the key people driving the work, and map the proposed vision from the previous blog post onto a rough timeline.

Here is a bird's-eye view of the plan for the next twelve months:

8.2 (Q4 2016) 8.3 (Q2 2017) Beyond 8.3 (2017+) New REST API capabilities
Waterwheel initial release New REST API capabilities
JSON API module GraphQL module?
Entity graph iterator? New REST API capabilities

Wim Leers (Acquia) and Daniel Wehner (Chapter Three) have produced a comprehensive list of the top priorities for the REST module. We're introducing significant REST API advancements in Drupal 8.2 and 8.3 in order to improve the developer experience and extend the capabilities of the REST API. We've been focused on configuration entity support, simplified REST configuration, translation and file upload support, pagination, and last but not least, support for user login, logout and registration. All this work starts to address differences between core's REST module and various contributed modules like Services and RELAXed Web Services. More details are available in my previous blog post.

Many thanks to Wim Leers (Acquia), Daniel Wehner (Chapter Three), Ted Bowman (Acquia),Alex Pott (Chapter Three), and others for their work on Drupal core's REST modules. Though there is considerable momentum behind efforts in core, we could always benefit from new contributors. Please consider taking a look at the REST module issue queue to help!

Waterwheel initial release

As I mentioned in my previous post, there has been exciting work surrounding Waterwheel, an SDK for JavaScript developers building Drupal-backed applications. If you want to build decoupled applications using a JavaScript framework (e.g. Angular, Ember, React, etc.) that use Drupal as a content repository, stay tuned for Waterwheel's initial release later this year.

Waterwheel aims to facilitate the construction of JavaScript applications that communicate with Drupal. Waterwheel's JavaScript library allows JavaScript developers to work with Drupal without needing deep knowledge of how requests should be authenticated against Drupal, what request headers should be included, and how responses are molded into particular data structures.

The Waterwheel Drupal module adds a new endpoint to Drupal's REST API allowing Waterwheel to discover entity resources and their fields. In other words, Waterwheel intelligently discovers and seamlessly integrates with the content model defined on any particular Drupal 8 site.

A wider ecosystem around Waterwheel is starting to grow as well. Gabe Sullice, creator of the Entity Query API module, has contributed an integration of Waterwheel which opens the door to features such as sorts, conditions and ranges. The Waterwheel team welcomes early adopters as well as those working on other REST modules such as JSON API and RELAXed or using native HTTP clients in JavaScript frameworks to add their own integrations to the mix.

Waterwheel is the currently the work of Matt Grill (Acquia) and Preston So (Acquia), who are developing the JavaScript library, and Ted Bowman (Acquia), who is working on the Drupal module.

JSON API module

In conjunction with the ongoing efforts in core REST, parallel work is under way to build a JSON API module that embraces the JSON API specification. JSON API is a particular implementation of REST that provides conventions for resource relationships, collections, filters, pagination, and sorting, in addition to error handling and full test coverage. These conventions help developers build clients faster and encourages reuse of code.

Thanks to Mateu Aguiló Bosch, Ed Faulkner and Gabe Sullice, who are spearheading the JSON API module work. The module could be ready for production use by the end of this year and included as an experimental module in core by 8.3. Contributors to JSON API are meeting weekly to discuss progress moving forward.

Beyond 8.3: GraphQL and entity graph iterator

While these other milestones are either certain or in the works, there are other projects gathering steam. Chief among these is GraphQL, which is a query language I highlighted in my Barcelona keynote and allows for clients to tailor the responses they receive based on the structure of the requests they issue.

One of the primary outcomes of the New Orleans web services discussion was the importance of a unified approach to iterating Drupal's entity graph; both GraphQL and JSON API require such an "entity graph iterator." Though much of this is still speculative and needs greater refinement, eventually, such an "entity graph iterator" could enable other functionality such as editable API responses (e.g. aliases for custom field names and timestamp formatters) and a unified versioning strategy for web services. However, more help is needed to keep making progress, and in absence of additional contributors, we do not believe this will land in Drupal until after 8.3.

Thanks to Sebastian Siemssen, who has been leading the effort around this work, which is currently available on GitHub.

Validating our work and getting involved

In order to validate all of the progress we've made, we need developers everywhere to test and experiment with what we're producing. This means stretching the limits of our core REST offerings, trying out JSON API for your own Drupal-backed applications, reporting issues and bugs as you encounter them, and participating in the discussions surrounding this exciting vision. Together, we can build towards a first-class API-first Drupal.

Special thanks to Preston So for contributions to this blog post and to Wim Leers for feedback during its writing.

Republished from buytaert.net

What feelings does the name Drupal evoke? Perceptions vary from person to person; where one may describe it in positive terms as "powerful" and "flexible," another may describe it negatively as "complex." People describe Drupal differently not only as a result of their professional backgrounds, but also based on what they've heard and learned.

If you ask different people what Drupal is for, you'll get many different answers. This isn't a surprise, because over the years the answers to this fundamental question have evolved. Drupal started as a tool for hobbyists building community websites, but over time it's evolved to support large and sophisticated use cases.

Perception is everything

Perception is everything; it sets expectations and guides actions and inactions. We need to better communicate Drupal's identity, demonstrate its true value, and manage its perceptions and misconceptions. Words do lead to actions. Spending the time to capture what Drupal is for could energize and empower people to make better decisions when adopting, building, and marketing Drupal.

Truth be told, I've been reluctant to define what Drupal is for, as it requires making trade-offs. I've feared that we'd make the wrong choice or limit our growth. Over the years, it's become clear that not defining what Drupal is used for leaves more people confused, even within our own community.

For example, because Drupal evolved from a simple tool for hobbyists to a more powerful digital experience platform, many people believe that Drupal is now "for the enterprise." While I agree that Drupal is a great fit for the enterprise, I personally never loved that categorization. It's not just large organizations that use Drupal. Individuals, small startups, universities, museums, and non-profits can be equally ambitious in what they'd like to accomplish, and Drupal can be an incredible solution for them.

Defining what Drupal is for

Rather than using "for the enterprise," I thought "for ambitious digital experiences" was a good phrase to describe what people can build using Drupal. I say "digital experiences" because I don't want to confine this definition to traditional browser-based websites. As I've stated in my Drupalcon New Orleans keynote, Drupal is used to power mobile applications, digital kiosks, conversational user experiences, and more. Today I really wanted to focus on the word "ambitious."

"Ambitious" is a good word because it aligns with the flexibility, scalability, speed and creative freedom that Drupal provides. Drupal projects may be ambitious because of the sheer scale (e.g. The Weather Channel), their security requirements (e.g. The White House), the number of sites (e.g. Johnson & Johnson manages thousands of Drupal sites), or specialized requirements of the project (e.g. the New York MTA powering digital kiosks with Drupal). Organizations are turning to Drupal because it gives them greater flexibility, better usability, deeper integrations, and faster innovation. Not all Drupal projects need these features on day one—or needs to know about them—but it is good to have them in case you need them later on.

"Ambitious" also aligns with our community's culture. Our industry is in constant change (responsive design, web services, social media, IoT), and we never look away. Drupal 8 was a very ambitious release; a reboot that took one-third of Drupal's lifespan to complete, but maneuvered Drupal to the right place for the future that's now coming. I've always believed that the Drupal community is ambitious, and I believe that attitude remains strong in our community.

Last but not least, our adopters are also ambitious. They are using Drupal to transform their organizations digitally, leaving established business models and old business processes in the dust.

I like the position that Drupal is ambitious. Stating that Drupal is for ambitious digital experiences, however, is only a start. It only gives a taste of Drupal's objectives, scope, target audience, and advantages. I think we'd benefit from being much clearer. I'm curious to know how you feel about the term "for ambitious digital experiences" versus "for the enterprise" versus not specifying anything. Let me know in the comments so we can figure out how to collectively change the perception of Drupal.

PS: I'm borrowing the term "ambitious" from the Ember.js community. They use the term in their tagline and slogan on their main page.

Drupal 8.1.3 and 7.44, maintenance releases which contain fixes for security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

See the Drupal 8.1.3 and Drupal 7.44 release notes for further information.

Download Drupal 8.1.3 Download Drupal 7.44

Upgrading your existing Drupal 8 and 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features or non-security-related bug fixes in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 8.1.x release series, consult the Drupal 8 overview. More information on the Drupal 7.x release series can be found in the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Security vulnerabilities

Drupal 8.1.3 and 7.44 were released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:

• Drupal Core - Moderately Critical - Multiple Vulnerabilities - SA-CORE-2016-002

To fix the security vulnerabilities, please upgrade to either Drupal 8.1.3 or Drupal 7.44.

Change log

Drupal 8.1.3 is a security release only. For more details, see the 8.1.3 release notes. A complete list of all changes in the stable 8.1.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Drupal 7.44 is a security release only. For more details, see the 7.44 release notes. A complete list of all changes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Update notes

See the 8.1.3 and 7.44 release notes for details on important changes in each release.

Known issues

See the 8.1.3 and 7.44 release notes for details on known issues affecting each release.

Security information

We have a security announcement mailing list and a history of all security advisories, as well as an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 8 and 7 include the built-in Update Manager module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

Bug reports

Both Drupal 8.1.x and 7.x are being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports) more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Why test?

The goal of automated testing is confidence: confidence in application stability, and confidence that new features work as intended. Continuous integration as a philosophy is about speeding the rate of change while keeping stability. As the number of contributing programmers increase, the need to have automated testing as a means to prove stability increases.

This post is focused on how the automated testing infrastructure on Drupal.org works, not actually writing tests. Much more detail about how to write tests during Drupal development can be found in community documentation:

• Testing (D7 and D8) / SimpleTest (D6)
• Drupal's implementation of PHPUnit

Categories of testing

DrupalCI essentially runs two categories of tests:

Functional tests (also called blackbox testing) are the most common type of test run on DrupalCI hardware. These tests run assertions that test functionality by installing Drupal with a fresh database and then exercising that installation by inserting data and confirming the assertions complete. Front-end tests and behavior driven tests (BDD) tend to be functional. Upgrade tests are a type of functional tests that run a full installation of Drupal, then run upgrade commands.

Unit tests run assertions that test a unit of code and do not require a database installation. This means they execute very quickly. Because of its architecture, Drupal 8 has much more unit test coverage than Drupal 7.

These test categories can be broken down further into more specific test types.

What testing means at the scale of Drupal

Drupal 8, with its 3,000+ core contributors and 7,288 contrib developers (so far), needs testing as a means to comfortably move forward code that everyone can trust to be stable.

Between January and May 2016, 90,364 test runs were triggered in DrupalCI. That is about 18,000 test runs requested per month. Maintainers set whether they want tests to run on demand, with every patch submitted, or nightly. They also determine what environments those tests will run on; there are 6 combinations of PHP and database engines available for maintainers to choose from.

The majority of these test runs are Drupal 8 tests at this point. (19,599 core tests and 47,713 contrib project tests were run during those 5 months.) Each test costs about 12 cents to run on Amazon Web Services. At the time of writing this post, we averaged around $2,000 per month in testing costs for our community. (Thank you supporters!)

An overly simple history of automated testing for Drupal

Automated testing first became a thing for Drupal contributed projects during Drupal version 4.5 with the introduction of the SimpleTest module. It was not until Drupal 6 that we started manually building out testbots and running these tests on Drupal.org hardware.

In Drupal 7, SimpleTest was brought into Drupal Core. (More information about what that took can be reviewed in the SimpleTest Roadmap for Drupal 7.)

In Drupal 8, PHPUnit testing was added to Drupal Core. PHPUnit tests are much faster than a full functional test in SimpleTest—though runtest.sh still triggers a combination of these test types in Drupal 8.

The actual implementation of automated testing was much more complicated than this history suggests. The original testbot infrastructure that ran for 7 years on Drupal.org hardware was manually managed by some fiercely dedicated volunteers. The manual nature of that maintenance led to the architecture of DrupalCI, which was meant to make it easier to test locally at first and later focused on autoscaling on powerful hardware that could plow through tests more quickly.

DrupalCI's basic structure

In The Drupal.org Complexity, we could see the intricate ways that Drupal's code base interacts with other parts of the system.

We could further break out how systems like DrupalCI are interrelated.

DrupalCI is a combination of data stored on Drupal.org, cron jobs, drush commands, and most importantly a couple of Jenkins installations to manage all the automation.

Jenkins is the open source automation server project that makes most of the system possible. We use it for automating our build process and deploying code to our dev, staging and production environments. It automates just about anything and is used by companies small and large to run continuous integration or continuous deployment for their applications. It's considered a "best practice" solution alongside options like Travis, CircleCI, and Bamboo. They all have slightly different features, but automation is at the core of most of these DevOps tools.

To provide continuously integrated tests, you need to trigger those tests at a moment when the tests will have the greatest value.

The three triggers for running a test job are when a patch is added to an issue comment, when code is committed to a repository or daily on a cron. Maintainers can specify which triggers are associated with which branches of their projects and which environments should run those tests.

For core these settings look something like this:

This detail allows for specific tests to run at specific times per the Drupal.org Testing Policy for DrupalCI.

To make this automation happen, we have an installation of Jenkins (Infrastructure Jenkins below) that is polled by Drupal.org once per minute with testing jobs to be queued.

These jobs live in a database record alongside Drupal.org.

Infrastructure Jenkins speaks to the CI Dispatcher (also Jenkins) where the testing queue regularly passes those jobs to available testbots. CI Dispatcher uses an Amazon Web Services EC2 plugin to spin up new testbots when no existing testbot is available. Each testbot can spin up Docker containers with the specific test images defined by the maintainer. Theses containers pull from DockerHub repositories with official combinations of PHP and database engines that Drupal supports.

After a testbot is running, the CI Dispatcher is in constant communication with the bots. You can even click through to the console on CI Dispatcher and watch the tests run. (It's not very exciting—perhaps we should add sound effects to the failures—but it is very handy.)

Once per minute, Drupal.org polls the CI Dispatcher for test status. It responds with pending, running, failed or passed. Failed and passed tests are then pulled back into Drupal.org for display using the Jenkins JSON API.

Tests can also be run on demand at the patch, commit or branch level using the handy "add test" and "retest" links.

Why did we build this ourselves? Why not use [insert testing platform here]

Lot's of people have asked why we don't use TravisCI, CircleCI or some other hosted testing solution. The short answer is that most publicly available testing systems require Github authentication and integration.

Additionally, our testing infrastructure is powerful because of its integration with our issue queues. Read the aforementioned The Drupal.org Complexity for more information.

Another reason to run our own testing is scale. To get through all of the core tests for Drupal 8 in an acceptable amount of time (about 44 mins on average), we run very large testbots. These bots have 2 processors with 8 hardware cores. With hyperthreading, that means we have 32 hardware execution threads—about 88 EC2 compute units. They are not exactly super computers, but they are very performant.

We average nearly 18,000 test runs per month. During our peak usage we spin up as many as 25 testbot machines—though usually we cap at 15 bots to keep costs under control. This helps us plow through our testing needs during sprints at DrupalCons and large camps.

We have explored using an enterprise licensed version of either Github or CircleCI with our own hardware to tackle testing. That same consideration has been given to SauceLabs for front-end testing. Right now, there is not a cost savings to tackle this migration, but that does not rule it out in the future. Testing services continues to evolve.

Accelerating Drupal 8

In my first months as CTO, I was told repeatedly that the most important thing for us to work on was testing for Drupal 8. In those early days as I built out the team, we were mostly focused on catching up from the Drupal 7 upgrade and tackling technical debt issues that cropped up. In DrupalCon Austin, I had members of my team learn how to maintain the testbot infrastructure so that we could take over the process of spinning up bots and dealing with spikes in demand.

By early 2015, we had optimized the old testbots as much as they were going to be optimized. We moved them to AWS so we could spin up faster machines and more bots, but there were features that were waiting on the new DrupalCI infrastructure that were blocking key development on Drupal 8.

In March of 2015, we invited all the community developers that had helped with DrupalCI to the Drupal Association offices in Portland and sprinted with them to figure out the remaining implementation needs. The next couple of months involved tweaking DrupalCI's architecture and cutting out any nice to have features to get something launched as soon as possible.
It is no coincidence that from the time of DrupalCI's launch until the release of Drupal 8, progress was rapidly accelerated.

I am immensely proud of the work of all the community members and staff that worked directly with core maintainers to unblock Drupal 8 development and make it faster. This work was critical.

Thank you to jthorson, ricardoamaro, nick_schuch, dasrecht, basic, isntall, drumm, mikey_p, mixologic, hestenet, chx, mile23, alexpott, dawehner, Shyamala, and webchick. You all made DrupalCI. (And huge apologies to all those I'm undoubtedly leaving out.) Also thank you to anyone who chimed in on IRC or in the issue queues to help us track down bugs and improve the service.

What's next for testing Drupal

Most of the future state of testing is outlined in the Drupal.org Testing Policy for DrupalCI.

Key issues that we still need to solve are related to concurrent testing improvements and new test types to support. While we have PhantomJS integrated with the test runner, there are optimizations that need to happen.

Testing is not an endpoint. Like much of our work, it is an ongoing effort to continuously improve Drupal by providing a tool that improves how we test, what we test, and when we test.

Matthew Lechleider (Slurpee) has been active in the Drupal community for over a decade, and his hard work has directly led to an incredible amount of community growth. The founder of a Chicago Drupal User Group and our community’s chief advocate for the Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In programs, Matthew has been a key part of growing the Drupal project and our global community. Here's his Drupal story.

“In 2005, I was a full-time university student working at an internet service provider so I could put myself through school,” Matthew said. “I was working as a network/systems person, and since I was at an ISP we had a lot of people calling us and asking the same questions over and over. At the time, I knew bit about web development and programming, and I thought, ‘I bet I could make a website that would answer these people’s questions.’ And that’s how I found Drupal. I proposed it to my boss, and the next thing I knew I was working on a full-time project getting paid to work with Drupal 4. I built the website and it was really popular— and we noticed that the phone calls went down. We were tracking our support calls at the 24-hour call center, and when people called for help, we would refer them to the website as a resource. So it really was a big help."

After that, the next steps were logical for Matthew. He put together a Drupal meet-up at his Chicago-based company. The group grew quickly each month, and in no time at all, people were asking about training and “Introduction to Drupal” classes. "I started teaching those classes,” Matthew said, "and then next thing you know, people were asking for private trainings and businesses were asking me to come to their offices and train new Drupal developers. When the people I was training came back with advanced questions, I realized how much money they were making, so in 2008 I went from being a network engineer to focusing on Drupal full-time. Since then, I’ve started a Drupal business and worked on some very big projects."

"I never thought I would be a web developer, but I fell into Drupal, saw how great and easy it was, and decided it was a good thing to be a part of,” Matthew added.

Over his time in Drupal, Matthew has converted a lot of Chicagoan web developers into Drupal users. “It's pretty cool to be part of something bigger than yourself,” Matthew said. “It's like a big tidal wave — I feel like I’ve been riding this Drupal wave for a long time. I didn’t think I’d still be work with Drupal this many years later."

Why Slurpee?

Many people in the community know Matthew only by his user username, Slurpee. But how did he come by that handle?

"I was probably eight or nine years old, learning about computers, and I had some nicknames I was playing around with. But it’s like that movie ‘Hackers’: you have to have your handle, you have to have your identity. It was the middle of a hot July in the summer, and as I was figuring out what I should call myself, I realized I had bout 20 empty slurpee cups surrounding my computer. I really do like slurpees. So that’s where that came from."

Drupal 8

As a long-time Drupal user and evangelist, Matthew is incredibly excited for Drupal 8.

" I have a traditional programming background in computer science, and Drupal wasn’t always the most professional CMS,” Matthew said. “Now, I’m very excited about Drupal 8— it’s like Drupal grew up and went to college and got a graduate degree. Drupal 8 is the way Drupal should have been a long time ago. I’ve built some of the biggest Drupal projects in the world, and when you’re talking to those kinds of massive clients, it’s hard to sell systems like Drupal four, five, and six. They’re out paying the big money for the huge enterprise solutions, and Drupal 8 is big. It’s ready to go, and I really think it's on par with everything else these days."

When asked about his favorite Drupal 8 feature, Matthew said, “As I work with big sites, it’s been a big struggle to deal with continuous integration, which is resolved in Drupal 8. As a person with a sysadmin background, I think integration is probably the thing that will save the most headaches. It’s going to be a very cool tool to work with."

Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In

Matthew is also heavily involved in several of Google’s student coding programs, and runs point on keeping Drupal in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Google Code-In (GCI) programs.

“I’m a bit younger than other people in the community, and I started with Drupal when I was 19 years old or so. I was going to college when I got into Drupal, and I remember talking to people about it at school... and nobody had any clue about it, not even my teachers,” Matthew said. “Fast forward several years: I was working in the community, specifically on the VoIP Drupal module suite. At the time, we had a student come to us about GSoC —this was in 2012— and he said, ‘hey, I want to work on this project for you guys as part of the GSoC. Can you be a mentor?’ I said sure, and that’s all I was that first year. The next year, nobody wanted to organize GSoC for Drupal, so I stepped up and said that I liked the program and would get the ball rolling. I spent a lot of time revamping the things that Drupal does with Google, got us accepted back into the program, and we’ve been participating every year since, both in the Google Summer of Code, which is for university students, and the Google Code-In, which is for students ages 13 through 17.

“Getting back to what I said earlier about being a student, when nobody knew what Drupal was, it was a bit harder to get involved. Knowing that there’s a program like this in schools around the world, pushing these projects to students, I think it’s critical for us to participate. If we want this project to continue to be successful, we have to focus on younger people. They’re the ones who are adapting and changing the tech as we know it, and if they don’t know about Drupal, they won’t use it. But if we embrace these kids and show them how awesome Drupal can be — we have impressive students doing impressive stuff— it’s great for everyone. That’s why I think it’s super important that we spend so much time on the GSoC and GCI programs."

For those who are interested in getting involved, there are both GSoC and GCI Drupal Groups, a documentation guide for GCI, and a guide for the GSoC students who are just getting started. There is also a #drupal-google IRC channel on free node.

“It’s fairly easy to get involved,” Matthew said. “If you’re interested in helping, join the groups — we send out lots of updates — or you can can contact me directly. You can find us on IRC, or if you know of a student who wants to get involved, all they need to do is read the documentation. It covers everything. We spent a lot of time on that documentation,” Matthew said.

Being part of something bigger

When asked what drives him to participate and organize the community, Matthew’s answer was simple.

"Honestly, it’s all about being part of something bigger than myself,” he said. "I’ve been participating in computer hacker nerd groups since I was a kid, and back then (in the 90s) it was fairly difficult to find out about these kinds of groups. I attended something called 2600 — does anyone else remember that? — I thought it was so cool to be a part of something like that. I’ve been in IRC every day for over 20 years participating in communities, and it’s so exciting to be part of a huge thing bigger than myself. Now I’m getting recognized for it in Drupal, which is cool,” he added.

"Drupal is by far the largest community I’ve participated in from that point of view, and it’s been an exciting ride. Honestly, I thought it would have been over by now — I’ve been part of the community for over 10 years and that’s a long time — but I’m excited to see where it goes. For me, Drupal is more of a lifestyle than a career. Technically I’m a web developer, but I spend so much of my time volunteering and going to events. I can go to a DrupalCon in another country and see my friends from all over the world. Seeing how mature our community has become over the past decade continues to excite me, and and I plan to be part of this for as long as possible."

“The money’s not bad either,” he added. “I live a comfortable life working from home. I like to travel a lot, go to music festivals, or go on Phish tour for weeks at a time, but I can still work. I have a mobile hotspot, and just bring my laptop with me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been set up at a camping spot in the middle of nowhere, working on my laptop, or how many times I’ve been in a random country looking for internet so I can get some work done.”

“Working remotely, or working from home, gives me a lot of freedom. It lets me go to the skate park when all the kids are at school— I skateboard, and bring my board with me when I travel — and there’s time for me to go running every day. It’s actually one of my favorite activities, my running break — halfway through the day, I get up and I go running. It helps me keep my sanity."

"I also like to snowboard,” Matthew continued. “I’ve been skateboarding since I was 5 — since I could walk and talk I’ve been skateboarding — and I started snowboarding a couple years after that. Going to DrupalCon Denver was exciting, and there was a DrupalCon snowboard trip. Lots of people went to Breckenridge together, and that’s the other cool thing about the community: these people are fun, they like to go out and do things together."

Helping camps and communities around the world

After a decade in the Drupal community, Matthew has a lot of great memories of traveling, teaching, and sharing.

“I was invited to organize the first DrupalCamp in Sri Lanka and hold training classes there,” Matthew said. “It’s an island just off the coast of India, and when I went in 2012, they had just finished having a civil war. I was one of the only foreigners there, and there was military presence walking around. I wasn’t allowed to leave my hotel unless the Drupal people came and picked me up, and they were absolutely wonderful. They were so nice and appreciative, and so many people were incredibly smart and really talented. After I did a training or presentation, they all had a million questions and we ended up talking for hours. And that was when I had an ‘aha!’ moment and really felt like I was part of something bigger. It drove home that it’s my responsibility to spread the word of Drupal as much as possible."

“That was actually one of the trainings that I did when I was traveling a lot” Matthew added. “I literally traveled for years living out of hostels, and couch surfing. I was being contracted at the time to go teach Drupal in Europe, Asia, and Australia."

And for Matthew, one of his proudest accomplishments is Drupal’s participation in the GSoC and GCI programs.

"I think it’s cool that I maintain Drupal’s relationship with Google,” he said. "It’s Google. They’re the biggest tech company ever, and I have this relationship with multiple people at their offices. They’re all super nice and it’s great that they’re pushing this open source stuff. They want our community's feedback, and I think it’s really cool that I can represent Drupal with Google. They’re trying to give us money and get us to do more with the students. It’s something I think is really great."

The importance of networking

When asked if he had any advice for new Drupal users, Matthew had several thoughts to share.

“Find your local communities and participate,” he advised. “Go to as many events as you can. If you have to drive a couple of hours to go to a Drupal camp, do it. If there isn’t a local community in your area, start one. If you go to meetup.com and post a similar topic, even if just one other person shows up, that’s cool and the community will grow. Drupal is a software, but it helps to get some face time in with other people. Network. Go out. Have some coffee (or beer). Hang out. Bring your laptop and start sharing ideas— you’ll be surprised at how welcoming the Drupal community is. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at the bar until the bar kicked us out just helping people fix websites and giving free training.

“If you’re struggling, it’s important to network with other groups — non-Drupal groups — like a web-dev group or an open source group or a Linux group or something. That’s what helped me when I did the first Drupal camp for Chicago 2008. We were thinking 100 people might show up, but we did a lot of networking. I contacted every tech user group in Milwaukee, Detroit, southern Illinois, and Minnesota. I found every group that was related to web or open source or Drupal, and I contacted every one of their organizers. Within a couple weeks we had over 200 registrations, and people were emailing us about hotels and hotel accommodations. It was a big wow moment for us."

As for those who are involved in the community and want to do more, Matthew has a few tips.

“If you want to teach training, my advice is not to focus on the curriculum. Everywhere I go, everyone wants me to submit my curriculum. I’ve taught a lot of classes, and I’ve learned that every group of students is going to be different. I can’t tell you how many times I had a curriculum and thought I was going to go through the whole thing, and instead I wind up talking about something else. Make sure you understand your students, and teach them what they want to learn about.

“And it’s not even all that difficult,” he added. “Here’s what I do for Global Training Days. You know what happens when you make an event that’s free anything? You get all sorts of people registering. So I keep the classes as small as possible — so whenever anybody registers for the event, I don’t give them the address unless they give me their phone number. When someone registers, I call them and ask them, 'what do you want to get from this training,' 'what is your experience,' — and I can’t tell you how many people have thanked me for that. Requiring a phone call with the registration helped keep the classes smaller, and limit it to people who were actually new to Drupal and would be in proper context of attending a GTD. So, that’s my advice — know your audience. Don’t assume everyone knows about Drupal. Don’t worry about a set curriculum — go with what you students are actually looking to gain from the experience."

For those who are looking for more tips, tricks, and knowledge from Matthew, his wisdom will soon be available at your fingertips in paperback form.

“I’m working with Packt publishing on a collection of ‘Drupal 8 Administration Cookbook Recipes.’ They’re step-by-step tutorials that teach admins to do everything from getting started with Drupal to doing advanced site building stuff, and it's coming out in later this summer. I’m pretty excited about it! I’ve always read a lot of the Drupal books and I’m excited to make a contribution. I started on my own but have had a Drupal business for several years, and have had several people who have worked for me. The book is literally just a collection of all the same questions every client always asks. It’s almost like a tell-all: here’s step-by-step documentation for how to do everything. Now stop asking us,” he added with a laugh.

Front page news: Planet Drupal

Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

The team is back from New Orleans and thankful for the time we had to spend with the community, attending sessions, presenting sessions of our own, and sprinting with you throughout the Con. As individuals, we’re all members of the community, and as an organization we're proud to hold the home of the community in trust.

Because of DrupalCon North America, May is always a busy month for the Association engineering team. We're preparing our sessions, ensuring that the testbots will be running smoothly for DrupalCon sprints, and polishing new features and ideas to share with the community. Here's what's new:

Drupal.org updates Composer repositories moving towards stable

At the end of April, we launched the Alpha of our Composer façade, providing Composer repository endpoints on Drupal.org for Drupal 8 and Drupal 7. At DrupalCon New Orleans, we gave a presentation on the architecture of the Composer façade, and our plans for next steps. We also received some great feedback from users who helped us test the alpha release, and in May we've focused on moving Composer from an alpha release to a more stable environment suitable for use on production Drupal sites. We'll be following up soon with a more detailed blog post about Composer, when that more stable release is available.

If you want to help test the Composer service, you can learn more about Drupal.org's Composer repositories.

New documentation content types

As previewed in our session at DrupalCon New Orleans, we're modernizing Drupal documentation with two new content types: Guides, and Documentation Pages. Documentation Pages will be organized in Guides, which will be curated by maintainers. We're also bringing a new visual design to documentation, re-organizing documentation by major version of Drupal, and developing a call-outs feature to help highlight key information like best practices or important changes in minor versions.

In May, we made an initial deployment of these content types to Drupal.org, though access is presently restricted to administrators while we work with the Documentation Working Group to sort out our initial migration plan. In June, we hope to deploy a migration tool, allowing users to convert existing documentation Book Pages and their children into the new Guides and Documentation Pages.

CKEditor

We've also deployed CKEditor to Drupal.org. The WYSIWYG editor is now available on the Section, Page, and Post content types, as well as the incoming Documentation Guide and Documentation Page types. CKEditor brings a more robust editorial experience to Drupal.org, and as it gets wider use we’ll expand it to additional content types. We also want to allow time for the Dreditor maintainers to update to support the change. As a long-term goal, we hope that some of the features of Dreditor may be reimplemented as CKEditor plugins and directly available to every Drupal.org user without the use of a 3rd party browser extension.

Sustaining support and maintenance DrupalCon Dublin full site launched

At DrupalCon New Orleans, we launched the full site for DrupalCon Dublin. The call for papers is open now, as is registration, so submit your sessions and purchase your tickets soon. DrupalCon New Orleans had the most sessions submissions ever for a DrupalCon, and the standard of quality was incredibly high. We're hoping that DrupalCon Dublin will see just as many wonderful submissions.

DrupalCon Baltimore announced!

As is tradition, we also revealed the location of the next DrupalCon North America. In 2017, DrupalCon will be in Baltimore! At the closing session, the engineering team launched the splash page for the upcoming event, with travel information, hotels, and important dates.

And if your organization would like to sponsor DrupalCon Baltimore, you can find more information and our prospectus on the site as well.

Infrastructure

We made several tweaks to Drupal.org infrastructure in May as well. We updated the Git Twisted daemon, which serves as the backend for the Drupal.org Git repositories and packaging process. We rebuilt our staging infrastructure at OSU/OSL. And finally, with the generous support of new Technology Supporting Partner OpsGenie, we updated our internal pager rotation for infrastructure alerts.

———

As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who made it possible for us to work on these projects.

We also want to say a special thanks to the departing leadership team at the Drupal Association: our former executive director, Holly Ross, who is moving on after building an incredible team and a great culture throughout the entire organization; Matt Tsugawa, our CFO; and Josh Mitchell, who has lead and mentored the engineering team.

Megan Sanicki, our former COO, is taking on the mantle of Executive Director and we're looking forward to where her leadership will take us

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra

The Aaron Winborn Award was created in 2015 after the loss of one of one of the Drupal community’s most prominent members, Aaron Winborn, to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (also referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease in the US and Motor Neuron Disease in the UK). Aaron’s commitment to the Drupal project and community made him the epitome of our unofficial motto: "Come for the code, stay for the community". The Community Working Group with the support of the Drupal Association came together to honor Aaron's memory by establishing the Aaron Winborn Award, which annually recognizes an individual who demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community.

Nominations were opened in March, giving community members the opportunity to nominate people they believe deserve the award, which were then voted on by the members of the Community Working Group, along with previous winners of the award.

We are pleased to announce that the 2016 recipient of the Aaron Winborn Award is Gábor Hojtsy. During the closing session of DrupalCon New Orleans, Community Working Group members presented the award to Gábor. The award was accompanied by a free ticket to DrupalCon, which he donated to Bojhan Somers.

Gábor was described in his nomination as an "amazing community connector" who is passionate about empowering others, stepping aside and allowing others the space and support to lead, and celebrating even the small wins that people who work with him achieve. The stellar work and leadership he displayed on the D8 Multilingual Initiative, managing sprints, Drupal events and setting up localize.drupal.org are just a few of the ways that this tireless Drupal contributor has been making an enormous impact in our community for more than a decade.

We hope you will join us in congratulating Gábor, who has demonstrated personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community in abundance.

Front page news: Planet Drupal

Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

We'll see you at DrupalCon!

DrupalCon New Orleans is about to get underway next week, and the Drupal Association will be there to talk about some of our recent work, to collaborate with the community, and to present some exciting things that are coming soon. We'll be giving a variety of presentations as part of the Drupal.org track, so if you'll be attending DrupalCon in New Orleans, please join us!

Laissez les bon temps roulez!

Drupal 8.1.0 released

On April 20th, the Drupal core maintainers released Drupal 8.1.0. This is the first release of the new Drupal release cycle in which new features of Drupal will be released much more rapidly than during the Drupal 7 cycle. The Drupal 8.1 release includes: an experimental UI for the Migration module for migrating from Drupal 6 or 7, BigPipe for improving the perceived rendering time of Drupal 8 sites, support for JavaScript automated testing, improved support for Composer, and much more.

The Drupal Association supported the release in several ways. We updated Drupal.org to use Composer to package Drupal Core's dependencies. We updated api.drupal.org to reflect the new point release, and the development branch for 8.2.x. We also bulk updated issues opened against Drupal Core 8.1.x to be open against 8.2.x moving forward. Finally, we updated DrupalCI to support JavaScript testing with PhantomJS. As this new, faster Drupal release cycle continues, we'll continue to refine the process and tools that the core developers use to make this process more efficient.

Drupal.org updates Composer repository alpha

We're very happy to announce the alpha release of Drupal.org's Composer repositories. One of our Community Initiatives for 2016, adding Composer repositories to Drupal.org, has been a concerted effort here at the Association for the past several months. Composer is the tool for dependency management in PHP, and by using Drupal.org's Composer endpoints you can use Composer to manage Drupal modules and themes.

The Drupal.org Composer façade also handles the translation of Drupal.org versioning into the semver format that Composer needs, which should also allow the community to move forward choosing a semver format for contrib. For example, we could now fairly easily support a Platform.Major.Minor.Patch versioning scheme until the semver standard itself supports the same.

As the current release is an alpha, we don’t recommend relying on the Drupal.org Composer repositories in a production environment quite yet. If you would like to help us test the system, you can start with our documentation for the Drupal.org Composer repositories, and then leave us feedback in the Project Composer issue queue.

Our work on Composer specifically, like many of the initiatives we undertake, was made possible through the support of our generous sponsors. If you would like to sponsor our work on Drupal.org, please consider our Supporting Partner Program.

PhantomJS testing in DrupalCI

A key milestone for core developers in Drupal 8.1 was adding the ability to test the front end, by using PhantomJS for JavaScript testing. After some concerted work by dawehner, pfrenssen, alexpott, and several others on the Drupal core side, isntall here at the Drupal Association was able to get PhantomJS properly running on the DrupalCI testbots.

More work will continue to improve our ability to test the front-end, and Drupal 8 continues to be among the most thoroughly tested open source projects in the ecosystem today.

Visual design system for Drupal.org

In April, our lead designer, DyanneNova, outlined the new design system and principles we’re using in all of our work to improve Drupal.org. Our most significant undertaking is the long term restructuring of Drupal.org, which will be implemented in an iterative way as we work through the many different content areas of Drupal.org. The next area of Drupal.org to receive updates, as previewed in the post above, will be Documentation.

Documentation

In our March update, we teased some of the upcoming Documentation features, and talked about the usability testing we performed at DrupalCamp London, and in the Drupal Association office here in Portland. In April, we took our observations from the usability testing, and began implementing these new features. We'll be previewing these upcoming changes in more detail at DrupalCon New Orleans next week, so stay tuned!

Sustaining support and maintenance Infrastructure

In April, we began the build-out of a new staging infrastructure for Drupal.org, part of the continual process of upgrading and refining the tools we use to develop Drupal.org. At the same time, we've updated several of our management and automation tools to keep our stack running smoothly. Work refining our pre-production environments will continue into May.

Maintenance and Bug Fixes

No month is complete without a bit of time spent on maintenance and bug fixes. In April, we spent some time cleaning up spam on archived sites of past DrupalCons, removed unneeded comment render cache code, fixed some bugs with featured job credits on Drupal Jobs, and worked on our payment processor implementation for our European DrupalCons.

———

As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who made it possible for us to work on these projects.

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra

Republished from buytaert.net

The one big question I get asked over and over these days is: "How is Drupal 8 doing?". It's understandable. Drupal 8 is the first new version of Drupal in five years and represents a significant rethinking of Drupal.

So how is Drupal 8 doing? With less than half a year since Drupal 8 was released, I'm happy to answer: outstanding!

As of late March, Drupal.org counted over 60,000 Drupal 8 sites. Looking back at the first four months of Drupal 7, about 30,000 sites had been counted. In other words, Drupal 8 is being adopted twice as fast as Drupal 7 had been in its first four months following the release.

As we near the six-month mark since releasing Drupal 8, the question "How is Drupal 8 doing?" takes on more urgency for the Drupal community with a stake in its success. For the answer, I can turn to years of experience and say while the number of new Drupal projects typically slows down in the year leading up to the release of a new version; adoption of the newest version takes up to a full year before we see the number of new projects really take off.

Drupal 8 is the middle of an interesting point in its adoption cycle. This is the phase where customers are looking for budgets to pay for migrations. This is the time when people focus on learning Drupal 8 and its new features. This is when the modules that extend and enhance Drupal need to be ported to Drupal 8; and this is the time when Drupal shops and builders are deep in the three to six month sales cycle it takes to sell Drupal 8 projects. This is often a phase of uncertainty but all of this is happening now, and every day there is less and less uncertainty. Based on my past experience, I am confident that Drupal 8 will be adopted at "full-force" by the end of 2016.

A few weeks ago I launched the Drupal 2016 product survey to take pulse of the Drupal community. I plan to talk about the survey results in my DrupalCon keynote in New Orleans on May 10th but in light of this blog post I felt the results to one of the questions is worth sharing and commenting on sooner:

Over 1,800 people have answered that question so far. People were allowed to pick up to 3 answers for the single question from a list of answers. As you can see in the graph, the top two reasons people say they haven't upgraded to Drupal 8 yet are (1) the fact that they are waiting for contributed modules to become available and (2) they are still learning Drupal 8. The results from the survey confirm what we see every release of Drupal; it takes time for the ecosystem, both the technology and the people, to come along.

Fortunately, many of the most important modules, such as Rules, Pathauto, Metatag, Field Collection, Token, Panels, Services, and Workbench Moderation, have already been ported and tested for Drupal 8. Combined with the fact that many important modules, like Views and CKEditor, moved to core, I believe we are getting really close to being able to build most websites with Drupal 8.

The second reason people cited for not jumping onto Drupal 8 yet was that they are still learning Drupal 8. One of the great strengths of Drupal has long been the willingness of the community to share its knowledge and teach others how to work with Drupal. We need to stay committed to educating builders and developers who are new to Drupal 8, and DrupalCon New Orleans is an excellent opportunity to share expertise and learn about Drupal 8.

What is most exciting to me is that less than 3% answered that they plan to move off Drupal altogether, and therefore won't upgrade at all. Non-response bias aside, that is an incredible number as it means the vast majority of Drupal users plan to eventually upgrade.

Yes, Drupal 8 is a significant rethinking of Drupal from the version we all knew and loved for so long. It will take time for the Drupal community to understand Drupal's new design and capabilities and how to harness that power but I am confident Drupal 8 is the right technology at the right time, and the adoption numbers so far back that up. Expect Drupal 8 adoption to start accelerating.

Comment on buytaert.net

Front page news: Drupal News

Republished from buytaert.net

Today is another big day for Drupal as we just released Drupal 8.1.0. Drupal 8.1.0 is an important milestone as it is a departure from the Drupal 7 release schedule where we couldn't add significant new features until Drupal 8. Drupal 8.1.0 balances maintenance with innovation.

On my blog and in presentations, I often talk about the future of Drupal and where we need to innovate. I highlight important developments in the Drupal community, and push my own ideas to disrupt the status quo. People, myself included, like to talk about the shiny innovations, but it is crucial to understand that innovation is only a piece of how we grow Drupal's success. What can't be forgotten is the maintenance, the bug fixing, the work on Drupal.org and our test infrastructure, the documentation writing, the ongoing coordination and the processes that allow us to crank out stable releases.

We often recognize those who help Drupal innovate or introduce novel things, but today, I'd like us to praise those who maintain and improve what already exists and that was innovated years ago. So much of what makes Drupal successful is the "daily upkeep". The seemingly mundane and unglamorous effort that goes into maintaining Drupal has a tremendous impact on the daily life of hundreds of thousands of Drupal developers, millions of Drupal content managers, and billions of people that visit Drupal sites. Without that maintenance, there would be no stability, and without stability, no room for innovation.

Comment on buytaert.net

Front page news: Drupal News

Drupal 8.1.0, the first minor release of Drupal 8, is now available. With Drupal 8, we made significant changes in our release process, adopting semantic versioning and scheduled feature releases. This allows us to make extensive improvements to Drupal 8 in a timely fashion while still providing backwards compatibility. Drupal 8.1.0 is the first such update.

What's new in Drupal 8.1.x?

Drupal 8.1.0 comes with numerous improvements, including CKEditor WYSIWYG enhancements, added APIs, an improved help page, and two new experimental modules. (Experimental modules are provided with Drupal core for testing purposes, but are not yet fully supported.)

Download Drupal-8.1.0 Experimental UI for migrations from Drupal 6 and 7

Drupal 8.1.0 now includes the Migrate Drupal UI module, which provides a user interface for Drupal core migrations. Use it to migrate Drupal 6 or 7 sites to Drupal 8. The user guide on migrating from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8 has full documentation. Note that the Drupal 8 Migrate module suite is still experimental and has known issues. Read below for specific information on migrating Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 sites with 8.1.0. (Always back up your data before performing a migration and review the results carefully.)

BigPipe for perceived performance

The Drupal 8 BigPipe module provides an advanced implementation of Facebook's BigPipe page rendering strategy, leading to greatly improved perceived performance for pages with dynamic, personalized, or uncacheable content. See the BigPipe documentation.

CKEditor WYSIWYG spellchecking and language button

Drupal 8.0.0 included the CKEditor module (a WYSIWYG editor), but it was not previously possible to use your browser's built-in spell checker with it to check the text. With Drupal 8.1.0, spellchecking is now enabled within CKEditor as well.

Another great improvement is the addition of the optional language markup button in CKEditor. When configured to appear in your editing toolbar, it allows you to assign language information to parts of the text, which is useful for accessibility and machine processing.

Improved help page with tours

Drupal 8.0.0 included a new system for help tutorials called tours with the core Tour module. In Drupal 8.1.0, we made these tours easier to discover by listing them in the administrative help overview at /admin/help.

The help overview page is also more flexible now, so contributed modules can add sections to it and themes can override its appearance more easily. You can read more about the new system in the change record for the updated help page, or refer to the Tour API documentation for how to add tours for your modules.

Rendered entities in Views fields

Drupal 8.1.0 now includes a rendered entity field handler for Views, which allows placing a fully rendered entity within a view field. For example, this feature could be used to display a rendered user profile for each node author in a table listing node content. (This feature was provided by the Entity contributed module in Drupal 7, but had not yet been available in Drupal 8.)

Support for JavaScript automated testing

Drupal 8.1.0 adds support for automated testing of JavaScript, which will mean fewer bugs with Drupal's JavaScript functionality in the future as we write new tests for it. (Read more about how to run the JavaScript tests.) There are also other improvements to the testing system, including improved reporting of PHPUnit and other test results.

Improved Composer support

Starting with Drupal 8.1.x, Drupal core and its dependencies are packaged by Composer on Drupal.org. This means that sites and modules can now also use Composer to manage all of their third-party dependencies (rather than having to work around the vendor directory that previously shipped with core).

Developer API improvements

Minor releases like Drupal 8.1.0 include backwards-compatible API additions for developers as well as new features. Read the 8.1.0 release notes for more details on the many improvements for developers in this release.

What does this mean to me?
Drupal 8 site owners

Update to 8.1.0 to continue receiving bug and security fixes. The next bugfix release, 8.1.1, is scheduled for May 4, 2016.

Updating your site from 8.0.6 to 8.1.0 with update.php is exactly the same as updating from 8.0.5 to 8.0.6. Modules, themes, and translations may need small changes for this minor release, so test the update carefully before updating your production site.

Drupal 6 site owners

Drupal 6 is not supported anymore. Create a Drupal 8 site and try migrating your data into it as soon as possible. Your Drupal 6 site can still remain up and running while you test migrating your Drupal 6 data into your new Drupal 8 site. Note that there are known issues with the experimental Migrate module suite. If you find a new bug not covered by one of these issues, your detailed bug report with steps to reproduce is a big help!

Drupal 7 site owners

Drupal 7 is still fully supported and will continue to receive bug and security fixes throughout all minor releases of Drupal 8.

The new Migrate Drupal UI for Migrate also allows migrating a Drupal 7 site into a Drupal 8 site, but the migration path from Drupal 7 to 8 is not complete, so you may encounter errors or missing migrations when you try to migrate. That said, since your Drupal 7 site can remain up and running while you test migrating into a new Drupal 8 site, you can help us stabilize the Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration path! Testing and bug reports from your real-world Drupal 7 sites will help us stabilize this functionality sooner for everyone. (Search the known issues.)

Translation, module, and theme contributors

Minor releases like Drupal 8.1.0 are backwards-compatible, so modules, themes, and translations that support Drupal 8.0.x will be compatible with 8.1.x as well. However, the new version does include some string changes, minor UI changes, and internal API changes (as well as more significant changes to experimental modules like the Migrate suite). This means that some small updates may be required for your translations, modules, and themes. See the announcement of the 8.1.0 release candidate for more background information.

Reposted from buytaert.net

I've been writing a lot about what I believe is important for the future of Drupal, but now it is your turn. After every major release of Drupal I do a "product management survey" to get your ideas and data on what to focus on for future releases of Drupal (8.x/9).

The last time we had such a survey was after the release of Drupal 7, six months into the development of Drupal 8. I presented the results at DrupalCon London in 2011. The results informed the Drupal community at large, but were also the basis for defining initiatives for Drupal 8. This time around, I'm hoping for similar impact, but also some higher-level strategic thinking about how Drupal should respond to various market trends.

Take the State of Drupal 2016 survey now

It shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes to fill out the survey. We'd like to hear from everyone who cares about Drupal: content managers, site owners, site builders, module developers, front-end developers, people selling and marketing Drupal, etc. Whether you are a Drupal expert or just getting started with Drupal, every voice counts! Best of all, with Drupal 8's new 6-month release cycle, we can act on the results of this survey much sooner than in the past.

I will be presenting the results during my DrupalCon New Orleans keynote (the video recording of the keynote, the presentation slides and the survey results will be downloadable on my blog after). Please tell us what you think about Drupal; your feedback will shape future versions of Drupal.

Front page news: Drupal News

As mentioned in our previous post, one of the initiatives we are working on this year is building a new visual system for Drupal.org.

It has been 7 years since Mark Boulton worked on a design plan for Drupal.org. Since then the web has come a long way. So has Drupal. Drupal.org needs a modern design, and the Product team at the Drupal Association has been working steadfastly on a plan to make that happen.

Building on insights from our user research and content strategy work, we have begun laying out a foundation for the future design system for the site.

Goal

Update Drupal.org to reflect the flexibility, modernity, and community of Drupal itself.

Design Principles

Before we started work on the design for Drupal.org we needed to iron out our process and the principles we wanted to keep in mind throughout our work.

To that end, tvn and I holed up for a weekend design retreat, which resulted in tons of post-it notes about what Drupal.org design looks like, what it should look like, and what we can learn from others -- to develop the design principles that will move Drupal.org forward.

Working on design principles for http://t.co/H0d2MHDCaS with @DyanneNova pic.twitter.com/XVZ0bgPlTe

— tvn (@tvnweb) July 25, 2015

After much deliberation, condensing, rewriting, and discussion with the wider Engineering and Communication teams, these are the principles we found to be our best guiding mantras:

Start with user needs.
We only design for real people. We verify their needs and let that information be our guide when designing anything.

Keep it simple. Focus.
We do less, but better. We focus on the areas we can have the most impact. Our designs are simple and clean, and our messages are clear. We strive for brevity and avoid clutter.

Be consistent. Re-use.
Our designs should be part of a consistent, cohesive system. We don’t introduce new patterns if we can re-use or improve any of the existing ones.

Be accessible.
Our designs should be usable by anyone, on any device or screen size, on a high speed connection or a slow network, by people with different native languages, and regardless of their accessibility needs.

Be relevant. Try new things.
Our designs are relevant and fresh. We keep up with the latest trends and are not afraid to try something new.

Iterate quickly.
We do small and quick iterations, continuously improving the experience. We experiment and test out different approaches.

Use Data.
We use data to support and drive our decisions. This includes analytics, data from testing and experiments, data gleaned through user research methods including interviews, surveys, and so on.

Work openly. Be honest.
Our designs are honest and authentic, and our intentions are transparent. We call things what they are. We respect our community values. We communicate openly and often.

Engage and empower.
We design experiences that unite our users and empower them to collaborate and do great things, because they can.

Be friendly.
We create friendly and welcoming environments. We want our users to feel welcome and supported.

Design Vision

Once we had our design principles in place we needed to move from those abstract guidelines to actual design plans for the website.

After DrupalCon Barcelona, we set aside time for another design retreat. This time tvn lost her voice on day 2, so miming and typing became a fun part of the workflow.

Our first step was to create a mood board of inspirational user interfaces to give us a beginning design language and a starting point for discussion.

Then we began our work with style tiles. I created four first drafts, informed by our mood board. One was softer, with varying shades of blue. At the other extreme was a largely monochrome design, with only tiny hints of the Drupal blue. After a few rounds of reviews and revisions we came up with the following visual system, which we feel matches our goals and gives a general idea of the mood, colors, and visuals we plan to move towards.

The general mood here was inspired by the idea of builders and makers working together to build something larger. We combine blueprint textures, single-width line icons, and an open typeface to make Drupal.org feel like the home to a continually improving framework.

We’ve kept the Drupal blue, and tweaked our green to bring it to a cooler shade. We’ve added darker tones for every color to give us more opportunity for high contrast.

The end goal is to make Drupal.org a useful space for contributors and users alike with a consistent quality of design throughout the site.

To that end, we’ve started work on a pattern library which will categorize all of the different design patterns used on Drupal.org. As we build out new patterns for new features they will be added to the library as well. The styles will be automatically inherited from the theme, which will make maintenance of the library as simple as adding relevant content to a page.

Iterative Approach

To support our current prioritization we knew we would need to use a very iterative process for launching design updates. Our strategy is to make design updates as we can when a new feature is prioritized. As each area of the site is functionally improved, it receives visual improvements as well. You’ve seen some of these updates already in the Drupal 8 launch and in the smaller updates to Drupal.org since last November.

With the Drupal 8 launch came a re-styled header for Drupal.org.

Release pages also received a small update to the download area, with clearer calls to action.

Shortly after that, we held a membership drive with a banner and a front page region highlighting community members. And just a few weeks ago we set up a new banner for promoting community elections to the Board, which can also be used for any important announcements going forward.

Next Steps

Our next big project is Documentation. We’ve been toiling away on these features for months now as part of our overall content restructure work. After the first pass of wireframes and design mockups, we collected input from documentation users via usability testing held remotely and in person at the Drupal Association office in Portland, Oregon, and at DrupalCamp London. Based on all the feedback, we've done a few revisions on our initial ideas and designs. We've spoken with a wide range of community members, from newcomers to masters, and their input was invaluable for arriving at a design that really works for the user.

You can see some of the new patterns we’ve begun work on in this mockup, such as the documentation section header and tags. We also have a pattern for related content which isn’t visible in the image. In our usability testing, we found that wayfinders were incredibly important to the experience of documentation, so we spent considerable time on improving the breadcrumbs and menu navigational patterns before arriving at what you see above.

How to get involved

There are a number of ways to get involved in improving Drupal.org. You can read more about general volunteering here.

If you’re interested in joining our usability testing sessions held both remotely and in person at major Drupal events, please fill out this form and we’ll reach out to you when the next session is being planned.

To post an issue about design on Drupal.org, use the project issue queue at Drupal.org Design. This issue queue will replace the Bluecheese theme queue going forward as a central place to report issues or inconsistencies with Drupal.org design. Meta discussions of design on Drupal.org are also welcome in the queue.

If you’d like to participate in quick design discussions about Drupal.org and be available to give feedback on upcoming design decisions, join us on Slack at channel #drupalorg-design.

As we incrementally roll out new features, you’ll see Drupal.org move ever closer to our updated visual system. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

Drupal.org updates Syntax Highlighting

A WYSIWYG editor(CKEditor) is coming to Drupal.org soon to improve the editorial experience- and to take advantage of the same functionality that made CKEditor the choice for Drupal 8 core. However, as a stepping stone to that goal, we need to ensure that the formatting of <code> blocks throughout Drupal.org is preserved.

This has lead us to using Prism.js for syntax highlighting on Drupal.org. You can see this change in any <code> or <?php> block throughout the site, such as this example of function hook_field_info_alter(); below:

function hook_field_info_alter(&$info) { // Change the default widget for fields of type 'foo'. if (isset($info['foo'])) { $info['foo']['default widget'] = 'mymodule_widget'; } }

This is the first step, but with a better syntax highlighting library in place, we are pushing hard to make CKEditor itself available on Drupal.org.

Documentation Usability Testing

In March members of the Drupal Association engineering team also spent time doing usability testing with a prototype of our new Documentation content type. This testing, performed with a representative sample of users of different experience levels with Drupal, helped validate our design direction for new Documentation pages and Documentation Guides on Drupal.org, and gave us some valuable feedback for further refining our design as we move into implementation. While we're not yet ready to share all the details of the new Documentation experience, we're very excited to share this with the community soon.

Release File Hashes

A file hash can be used to verify the integrity of a file downloaded from a trusted source. Drupal.org provided an md5 hash on the list of a project's releases (here's the release listing for Drupal core, for example), but we have expanded the file hash options to include: md5, sha-1, and sha-256.

Because many users do not use file hashes, these hashes are not displayed by default. Any user who does want to access these file hashes can do so from a toggle on the sidebar of a release page. Your preference for what file hash to view will be saved in your browser's local storage and displayed on all other release pages. The new sha-1 hashes will also be used in upcoming Composer integration.

Communications channels

Taking advantage of the new Sections and Blogs on Drupal.org, we're gradually working on improving our communication channels. It starts with the Drupal blog, and the Drupal.org blog (which you're reading now!) - but will soon affect all the ways we communicate about Drupal the software and Drupal.org the site.

You can learn more about communication channels here.

2016 Elections Complete

Lastly, but certainly not least - the 2016 election for the Drupal Association At-Large board member ended in March. For the first time, we promoted the voting process to all eligible voters with a targeted banner on Drupal.org. This gave us the broadest reach we've ever had when electing a board member, and the most ballots submitted. You can learn more about the elections process and the final vote here.

Congratulations Shayamala Rajaram - and thank you for supporting the community by joining the board!

Sustaining support and maintenance Drupal.org Outages

Unfortunately our work in March was disrupted on several occasions by a particularly tricky series of outages. Seemingly at random one of the Drupal.org webnodes would experience cache corruption and begin serving 500 errors. The issues did not seem to be related to a recent change, a singular area of the site, or an increase in traffic. After some diligent sleuthing we began to see some patterns in the cache corruption.

In the end, we were able to determine that all the outages were linked to the same bug in Drupal core's handling of SchemaCache. Drupal.org has been patched and since then no cache corruption incidents have recurred. With a bit more community review (you can help!), hopefully the fix will be committed to core so other affected sites will not encounter the same issue that we did.

More Improvements and Bug Fixes

We made a few other infrastructural improvements and bug fixes in March as well. Not the least of these was deploying dedicated beanstalkd queue servers, to improve the reliability of Drupal.org job queues, especially when recovering from disruption.

We also fixed a regression on groups.drupal.org caused by the upgrade to PHP 5.4 the previous month. A bug in the date chooser caused the date of an event to be reset whenever the event was edited- an issue that we know was frustrating to many in the community who organize local events.

Lastly, we fixed an issue on jobs.drupal.org to make it easier for companies to renew their featured job listings (without having to reach out to us for manual support). We're seeing a marked increase in the Drupal Jobs interest since the launch of Drupal 8 and we'll continue to improve the Drupal Jobs platform to foster the Drupal ecosystem.

———

As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who made it possible for us to work on these projects.

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra

The first release candidate for the upcoming Drupal 8.1.0 release is now available for testing. With Drupal 8, we made major changes in our release process, adopting semantic versioning and scheduled releases. This allows us to make significant improvements to Drupal 8 in a timely fashion while still providing backwards compatibility. Drupal 8.1.0 will be the first such update, expected to be released April 20.

Download Drupal-8.1.0-rc1

8.1.x includes an experimental user interface for migrating from Drupal 6 and 7, the BigPipe module for increasing perceived site performance, and more. You can read a detailed list of improvements in the announcements of beta1 and beta2.

What does this mean to me?
For Drupal 8 site owners

The final bugfix release of 8.0.x has been released. 8.0.x will receive no further releases following 8.1.0, and sites should prepare to update from 8.0.x to 8.1.x in order to continue getting bug and security fixes. Use update.php to update your 8.0.x sites to the 8.1.x series, just as you would to update from (e.g.) 8.0.4 to 8.0.5. You can use this release candidate to test the update. (Always back up your data before updating sites, and do not test updates in production.)

For module and theme authors

Drupal 8.1.x is backwards-compatible with 8.0.x. However, it does include internal API changes and API changes to experimental modules, so some minor updates may be required. Review the change records for 8.1.x, and test modules and themes with the release candidate now.

For translators

Some text changes were made since Drupal 8.0.0. Localize.drupal.org automatically offers these new and modified strings for translation. Strings are frozen with the release candidate, so translators can now update translations.

For core developers

All outstanding issues filed against 8.0.x are automatically migrated to 8.1.x after the final 8.0.x patch release. Future bug reports should be targeted against the 8.1.x branch. 8.2.x will remain open for new development during the 8.1.x release candidate phase. For more information, see the release candidate phase announcement.

Your bug reports help make Drupal better!

Release candidates are a chance to identify bugs for the upcoming release, so help us by searching the issue queue for any bugs you find, and filing a new issue if your bug has not been reported yet.

Note that there are known issues with the experimental Migrate module suite, especially the incomplete Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration path. If the bug you find is not covered by one of these issues, your detailed bug report with steps to reproduce is a big help!

In this post I'd like to talk about one of our major projects for 2016, which comes as a follow up to the content strategy project of 2015.

Content restructure

Last year we presented our findings from the content strategy developed by Drupal Association staff in collaboration with Forum One. This year we're focusing on bringing as many of those ideas to life as we can. We call this implementation phase 'content restructure'. We'll look at one area of the site at a time, audit its content, change the way it is created and stored (content type) if needed, redesign the way it looks and reorganize it into a more usable and findable structure, improving content quality and giving content creators better tools to maintain it along the way.

The backbone of the new content structure are 'sections' or top level groupings of content. We created infrastructure to make those possible and have already launched the first few.

Together with sections we've been rolling out blogs to improve how we communicate about specific topics on Drupal.org. Recently, I talked in more detail how blogs and sections fit into our overall plan of making it easier to communicate important announcements and news to the Drupal community.

Our current focus is Documentation area of the site. We're working on a complete revamp that will change the way documentation looks and works, and will change the way users can navigate and improve documentation. We're working closely with the Documentation Working Group and performing rounds of usability testing to ensure the changes we are working on will improve the user experience across the board. More details on this can be found in the issue queue.

A big part of the content restructure plan is a content audit and migration. This is especially true for documentation revamp, where we have thousands of pages to migrate into the new system. We'll be turning to the community to help us with this effort. Not only because that's too many pages for a small team like ours to migrate on our own, but also because we need subject matter experts to look at a lot of the pages and evaluate how accurate they are, whether they should be migrated or archived, and so on.

More than just content

Along with the content restructure project, we'll be doing important work that complements and supports it, though each component is not a discrete project on its own.

Developing visual design system

The current Drupal.org design is based on branding and design work done in 2008 by Mark Boulton Design and Leisa Reichelt. They did a great job, but even the most beautiful site will age. Since more than seven years have elapsed since the last redesign, it's time to update the site for a more contemporary look.

Our quest towards updating Drupal.org visually started in 2014 with the user research project, which brought us user personas. The next big step was the content strategy project, which laid the groundwork for the content restructure work discussed above.

Building on what we learned about our users, and how to structure our content to best serve their needs, this year we'll be introducing the new visual design system for the site. There will not be a single, comprehensive launch, where you wake up and suddenly Drupal.org looks completely different. We'll do it iteratively, in parallel with the content restructure, by redesigning the specific area of the site we are focusing on at a given time. This approach lets us introduce visual changes sooner, and iteratively improve and refine them as we go. In fact, you've already seen some of the elements of the new visual system appear with the Drupal 8 launch.

Later this week, our designer DyanneNova will share a bit more details about the work we've already done towards the new system and our next steps.

Updating content style guide

Along with restructuring content we also want to improve the quality of the existing content during migrations, as well as the quality of the content that will be created in the future. To this end, we'll be taking a look at the content style guide, and plan to refresh and update it. We also anticipate expanding the guide to add information about specific content types and communication channels.

Capturing user engagement and contribution

Another aspect of our content restructure work will touch on user engagement and contribution. As we go area through area of the site, redesigning it and improving its content, we'll be looking at what type of user engagement and contributions happen in that area. We'll be looking for opportunities to better capture them, and subsequently better recognize and display those contributions. For example, right now 'documentation edits' count on user profiles show the number of edits user has done to 'book page' content type items, which may or may not be documentation. We'll make that calculation more precise to display the actual documentation edits. We'll also be able to display specific parts of documentation a user maintains, similar to projects they maintain.

Increasing sustainability

An ongoing challenge at the Drupal Association is ensuring we have sustainable revenue to support our work for the community. As we do this work, we will be looking into improving existing revenue opportunities and introducing new ones to make Drupal.org more sustainable. We will also work closely with partners who may be willing to sponsor specific improvements to Drupal.org on behalf of the community.

Other initiatives

The content restructure is not the only project we are working on right now. Some of the other initiatives will be described in future posts. Check our Roadmap to see all the things in progress.

And if you happen to be at DrupalCon New Orleans this May, come to our session to get further updates on some of the topics discussed in this blog.

Republished from Buytaert.net

At DrupalCon Mumbai I sat down for several hours with the Drupal team at Pfizer to understand the work they have been doing on improving Drupal content management features. They built a set of foundational modules that help advance Drupal's content workflow capabilities; from content staging, to multi-site content staging, to better auditability, offline support, and several key user experience improvements like full-site preview, and more. In this post, I want to point a spotlight on some of Pfizer's modules, and kick-off an initial discussion around the usefulness of including some of these features in core.

Use cases

Before jumping to the technical details, let's talk a bit more about the problems these modules are solving.

1. Cross-site content staging — In this case you want to synchronize content from one site to another. The first site may be a staging site where content editors make changes. The second site may be the live production site. Changes are previewed on the stage site and then pushed to the production site. More complex workflows could involve multiple staging environments like multiple sites publishing into a single master site.
2. Content branching — For a new product launch you might want to prepare a version of your site with a new section on the site featuring the new product. The new section would introduce several new pages, updates to existing pages, and new menu items. You want to be able to build out the updated version in a self-contained 'branch' and merge all the changes as a whole when the product is ready to launch. In an election case scenario, you might want to prepare multiple sections; one for each candidate that could win.
3. Preview your site — When you're building out a new section on your site for launch, you want to preview your entire site, as it will look on the day it goes live. This is effectively content staging on a single site.
4. Offline browse and publish — Here is a use-case that Pfizer is trying to solve. A sales rep goes to a hospital and needs access to information when there is no wi-fi or a slow connection. The site should be fully functional in offline mode and any changes or forms submitted, should automatically sync and resolve conflicts when the connection is restored.
5. Content recovery — Even with confirmation dialogs, people delete things they didn’t want to delete. This case is about giving users the ability to “undelete” or recover content that has been deleted from their database.
6. Audit logs — For compliance reasons, some organizations need all content revisions to be logged, with the ability to review content that has been deleted and connect each action to a specific user so that employees are accountable for their actions in the CMS.

Technical details

All these use cases share a few key traits:

1. Content needs to be synchronized from one place to another, e.g. from workspace to workspace, from site to site or from frontend to backend
2. Full revision history needs to be kept
3. Content revision conflicts needs to be tracked

Much of this started as a single module: Deploy. The Deploy module was first created by Greg Dunlap for Drupal 6 in 2008. In 2012, Greg handed over maintainership to Dick Olsson who created the first Drupal 7 version (7.x-2.x) with many big improvements. Later, Dave Hall created a second Drupal 7 version (7.x-3.x) which more significant improvements based on feedback from different users. Today, both Dick and Dave work at Pfizer and have continued to include lessons learned in the Drupal 8 version of the module. After years of experience working on Deploy module and various redesigns, the team has extracted the functionality in a set of modules:

• Deploy
• Multiversion
• Replication
• Workspace
• RELAXed Web Services
• Trash

Multiversion

This module does three things: (1) it adds revision support for all content entities in Drupal, not just nodes and block content as provided by core, and (2) it introduces the concept of parent revisions so you can create different branches of your content or site, and (3) it keeps track of conflicts in the revision tree (e.g. when two revisions share the same parent). Many of these features complement the ongoing improvements to Drupal's Entity API.

Replication

Built on top of Multiversion module, this lightweight module reads revision information stored by Multiversion, and uses that to determine what revisions are missing from a given location and lets you replicate content between a source and a target location. The next two modules, Workspace and RELAXed Web Services depend on replication module.

Workspace

This module enables single site content staging and full-site previews. The UI lets you create workspaces and switch between them. With Replication module different workspaces on the same site can behave like different editorial environments.

RELAXed Web Services

This module facilitates cross-site content staging. It provides a more extensive REST API for Drupal with support for UUIDs, translations, file attachments and parent revisions — all important to solve unique challenges with content staging (e.g. UUID and revision information is needed to resolve merge conflicts). The RELAXed Web Services module extends the Replication module and makes it possible to replicate content from local workspaces to workspaces on remote sites using this API.

In short, Multiversion provides the "storage plumbing", whereas Replication, Workspace, and RELAXed Web Services, provide the "transport plumbing".

Deploy

Historically Deploy module has taken care of everything from bottom to top related to content staging. But for Drupal 8 Deploy has been rewritten to just provide a UI on-top of the Workspace and Replication modules. This UI lets you manage content deployments between workspaces on a single site, or between workspaces across sites (if used together with RELAXed Web Services module). The maintainers of the Deploy module have put together a marketing site with more details on what it does: http://www.drupaldeploy.org.

Trash

To handle use case #5 (content recovery) the Trash module was implemented to restore entities marked as deleted. Much like a desktop trash or recycle bin, the module displays all entities from all supported content types where the default revision is flagged as deleted. Restoring creates a newer revision, which is not flagged as deleted.

Synchronizing sites with a battle-tested API

When a Drupal site installs and enables RELAXed Web Services it will look and behave like the REST API from CouchDB. This is a pretty clever trick because it enables us to leverage the CouchDB ecosystem of tools. For example, you can use PouchDB, a JavaScript implementation of CouchDB, to provide a fully-decoupled offline database in the web browser or on a mobile device. Using the same API design as CouchDB also gives you "streaming replication" with instant updates between the backend and frontend. This is how Pfizer implements off-line browse and publish.

This animated gif shows how a content creator can switch between multiple workspaces and get a full-site preview on a single site. In this example the Live workspace is empty, while there has been a lot of content addition on the Stage workspace in.

This animated gif shows how a workspace is deployed from 'Stage' to 'Live' on a single site. In this example the Live workspace is initially empty.

Conclusion

Drupal 8.0 core packed many great improvements, but we didn't focus much on advancing Drupal's content workflow capabilities. As we think about Drupal 8.x and beyond, it might be good to move some of our focus to features like content staging, better audit-ability, off-line support, full-site preview, and more. If you are a content manager, I'd love to hear what you think about better supporting some or all of these use cases. And if you are a developer, I encourage you to take a look at these modules, try them out and let us know what you think.

Thanks to Tim Millwood, Dick Olsson and Nathaniel Catchpole for their feedback on the blog post. Special thanks to Pfizer for contributing to Drupal.

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