Preston So

Throughout Drupal's existence, no other changes have made as much an impression on users as refreshes of the administrative interface in Drupal. Content editors and site builders have a long list of expectations when it comes to the editorial experience they wish to use, and surveys and tests had shown that Seven was showing its age. Now, thanks to Claro, the new administration theme for Drupal 8, user interfaces for all editors in Drupal are...

Preston So

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

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

In the first part of our two-part blog series on Drush 10, we covered the fascinating history of Drush and how it came to become one of the most successful projects in the Drupal ecosystem. After all, many of us know many of the most common Drush commands by heart, and it’s difficult to imagine a world without Drush when it comes to Drupal’s developer experience. Coming on the heels of Drupal 8.8, Drush 10...

Preston So

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

If you’ve touched a Drupal site at any point in the last ten years, it’s very likely you came into contact with Drush (a portmanteau of “Drupal shell”), the command-line interface (CLI) used by countless developers to work with Drupal without touching the administrative interface. Drush has a long and storied trajectory in the Drupal community. Though many other Drupal-associated projects have since been forgotten and relegated to the annals of Drupal history, Drush remains...

Preston So

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...