Preston So

Claro at center stage:

Across Drupal's storied history, perhaps the most noticeable — and visible — changes in the CMS's evolution have come from the redesigns of the administrative interface that underpin every user's interaction with the Drupal editorial experience. Now, with the release of the Claro administration theme, which replaces the Seven theme and focuses on content author and site builder use cases, Drupal has reached another important inflection point in the history of its user experience. Claro...

Preston So

As another decade comes to a close in Drupal’s long and storied history, one important trend has the potential to present amazing — or unsettling, depending on how you look at it — opportunities and shifts in the Drupal ecosystem. That trend is decoupled Drupal.

Preston So

Introducing the new administration theme for Drupal 8

Drupal has been around for a long time, and its content editing interface has undergone several refreshes over the years, most notably during the Drupal 7 development cycle with the Seven theme. Another administration theme is rapidly changing the game for Drupal site builders and content editors, and it's part of a Drupal core strategic initiative—one of the Drupal community's utmost priorities and innovation streams—to modernize the front end of Drupal for a variety of...

Preston So

Over the last five years, decoupled Drupal has grown from a fringe topic among front-end enthusiasts in the Drupal community to something of a phenomenon when it comes to coverage in blog posts, tutorials, conference sessions, and marketing collateral. There is now even a well-received book by this author and a yearly conference dedicated to the topic. For many Drupal developers working today, not a day goes by without some mention of decoupled architectures that...

Preston So

Content collaboration has long been table stakes for content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, but what about real-time peer-to-peer collaboration between editors who need direct interaction to work on their content? The WordPress Gutenberg team has been working with Tag1 Consulting and the community of Yjs, an open-source real-time collaboration framework, to enable collaborative editing on the Gutenberg editor. Currently an experimental feature that is available in a Gutenberg pull request, shared editing in...

Preston So

Introducing the new & improved

One of the challenges of securing any Drupal site is the often wide range of modules to track, security advisories to follow, and updates to implement. When it comes to Drupal security, particularly older versions of Drupal such as Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, even a slight delay in patching security vulnerabilities can jeopardize mission-critical sites. Now that Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 are fast approaching their end of life (EOL) in November 2021 (Drupal...

Preston So

An effective administrative interface is table stakes for any content management system that wishes to make a mark with users. Claro is a new administration theme now available in Drupal 8 core thanks to the Admin UI Modernization initiative. Intended to serve as a logical next step for Drupal's administration interface and the Seven theme, Claro was developed with a keen eye for modern design patterns, accessibility best practices, and careful analysis of usability studies...

Preston So

Tag1 TeamTalk #009
What happens when you have a connection that isn't working, but you have a mission-critical document that you need to collaborate on with others around the world? The problem of peer-to-peer collaboration in an offline environment is becoming an increasingly pressing issue for editorial organizations and enterprises. As we continue to work on documents together on flights, trains, and buses, offline-first shared editing is now a base-level requirement rather than a pipe dream. Yjs, an...

Preston So

How to maintain quality user experiences with visual regression and performance testing

Quality assurance (QA) is no longer the phrase that drove developers to recoil in horror and customers to run away to examine their balance sheets. Testing is quickly transforming the way developers work as the number of solutions and approaches increases substantially, especially in recent years. Given the continued promulgation of compelling solutions when it comes to continuous integration (CI) and new software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors, testing is now a prerequisite rather than an afterthought. Nevertheless...

Preston So

Decoupled Drupal has been a trending topic for years in the Drupal community as well as the larger CMS landscape. What do some of the pioneers of the decoupled Drupal phenomenon have to say about what's possible today for decoupled Drupal and what's in store for practitioners? From GraphQL v4, to live preview with Gatsby, to Web Components browser support, innovation in the Drupal community is now quickly challenging some of our initial assumptions and...