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. You can also review the Drupal project roadmap.

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Drupal's 20th Birthday Year

As we close out the first quarter of 2021, we continue the celebration of 20 years of Drupal with #DrupalFest and #DrupalCon!

#DrupalFest is a month-long celebration of all things Drupal, taking place online all around the world. DrupalFest lasts throughout the month of April. Most events are free, and we encourage everyone to attend, and even submit your own!

DrupalCon is right around the corner from April 12-16, happening online. This year's DrupalCon reflects a renewed focus on the strategic initiatives that drive innovation in Drupal. Each day has a half day of live programming for and then a half day of contribution, and all personas are welcome! Join us!

Increased focus on Strategic Initiatives

Speaking of strategic initiatives, the current primary initiatives being highlighted at DrupalCon and beyond are: 

  • Decoupled Menus - This initiative focuses on creating standardized tools and libraries for decoupled Drupal, starting with the menu system. This is the first step in making JavaScript front-ends a central part of the Drupal project. 
  • Easy out of the Box - This mega-initiative combines the efforts of Layout Builder, Media, and Claro to help empower content editors in Drupal to take advantage of the best that Drupal can offer.
  • Automatic Updates - This initiative is focused on the #1 most requested feature in Drupal: automatic updates. The initiative is building a robust and secure system for automatically updating Drupal, starting with security and patch releases.
  • Drupal 10 Readiness - The Drupal innovation train keeps rolling! The Drupal 10 Readiness initiative is rallying the community around what we need to reach our Drupal 10 release date, and helping site owners ensure they're ready for the upgrade when the time comes.

In addition to the content at DrupalCon, you can find ways to get involved in any of these initiatives by checking out the Drupal Strategic Initiative section on Drupal.org.

Decoupled Menu Initiative Support

General projects are a new content type on Drupal.org for code that does not fall into the neat categories of module, theme, or distribution. Instead, these can cover things like JavaScript Components, Drush Extensions, Install Profiles, Libraries, etc.

This is the first step in making Drupal a project greater than just PHP. This capability leans into Drupal's future in Decoupled applications, and in digital experiences beyond the web browser. 

Since the launch of general projects as a new content type on Drupal.org the Decoupled Menu Initiative has made great progress on creating standardized endpoints/libraries for decoupled Drupal solutions.

At DrupalCon North America the Decoupled Menus initiative leads invite you to a hackathon to begin to create applications for this work.

The rapid movement on this initiative shows how quickly the Drupal community can pivot into more robust and standardized Decoupled implementations, and furthers Drupal's lead in the marketplace.

Easy Out of the Box Support

For the Easy Out of the Box team, the Drupal Association has been focused on connecting the initiative leads to the Drupal Contribution Mentoring team, so that at DrupalCon there will be a variety of onramps to help new contributors support this work.

Easy Out of the Box is effectively three initiatives in one, focused on Layouts, Media, and the Claro administrative theme, so people with interest in any of those areas are more than welcome.

AutoUpdates Initiative Cross-Project Collaboration

The Drupal Association Engineering team continues its close collaboration with the AutoUpdates initiative team. Because AutoUpdates requires a server side component that will live on Drupal.org infrastructure, the engineering team needs to be closely involved.

This initiative has also had a heavy focus on cross-project collaboration - with three CMS partners in the PHP ecosystem collaborating together on the basic principles of supporting securely signed update packages.

Drupal    Typo3   Joomla

We're also collaborating with other partners, such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundations 'TUF'(The Update Framework) team, and the team behind Composer. 

Composer     Cloud Native Computing Foundation    The Update Framework

At DrupalCon North America the TUF team will be presenting about securing software package delivery - a topic that is sure to be interesting for all.

Drupal 10 Readiness Support

Drupal 10 is slated for release in June of 2022, which is only a little bit more than a year away. Fortunately, Drupal 10 follows the continuous innovation model of Drupal development that was so successful in the transition from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. In essence, so long as site owners are up to date with the latest version of Drupal 9 they should be able to make the jump very easily. The only area of concern is deprecated code.

To that end, the Drupal Association engineering team collaborated with Gábor Hotjsy to set up automate code deprecation checking using the DrupalCI infrastructure. This allows the team to understand the most used instances of deprecated code, so that contributed module maintainers can be made aware of the need to update, and so that the Drupal Rector team(supported by Palantir.net) can begin creating automatic deprecation patches.

GitLab Merge Request Updates

Last year, Drupal.org migrated our community contribution tools to GitLab, by integrating the existing Drupal.org issue queues with GitLab's merge request functionality.

Thanks to these improvements, the complete contribution lifecycle can be completed entirely in the browser. As a contributor to Drupal you no longer need to use command line git, install a local development environment, or use a local IDE in order to make your contributions.

Since the initial launch, we've received feedback from many people in the community about improvements to usability with the Drupal.org issue queue integration. Looking at the child issues of this issue, we can see rapid usability improvements that have sped the pace of contribution.

More recently, we worked with our partners at Tugboat.qa to release live deployment previews of your code changes - first for Drupal Core, but now available for contributed projects on Drupal.org as well. This means that even reviewing visual changes or seeing your code deployed to a site can all be done without leaving your browser. This is a huge boon to all contributors, but especially to usability and accessibility experts who can much more easily view the impact of changes across issues.

Major improvements to Community events

In collaboration with the Events Organizers Working Group, the Drupal Association has updated the Drupal.org Community Events section. This new section represents a central repository for all of the events taking place across the Drupal Community, and will ultimately be the replacement for Groups.Drupal.org.

This section allows anyone in the community to submit their events, whether online or in-person, and provides a variety of views to help people find events they'd like to attend. Events can be filtered by type(con, camp, meetup, training, etc); proposed events can be submitted to help avoid scheduling conflicts; and calls for content/speakers can be promoted.

A feed of these events is made available for 3rd party tools built by the community, which is already being used to feed Drupical.com.

Local events are the heart of our community, so we hope that you'll help us by submitting your local events to this new tool!

Documentation updates

Led by community volunteer u/jhodgdon, Drupal.org's documentation tools have seen a variety of updates. In particular, the Drupal contributor guide is now much more complete, helping folks who are new to contribution in Drupal find a place to fit in and get started.

We've also deployed improvements that make it easier to understand whether the documentation you're reading is up-to-date, and how to report problems if you find them.

If you're looking for somewhere to contribute - helping to update documentation is a wonderful place to start!

Coming soon: Discover Drupal Portal

Coming up at DrupalCon is the announcement of a new program: Discover Drupal. This program is part of the Drupal Association's talent and education initiatives, and represents the Drupal Association's commitment to growing the Drupal talent pool and increasing diversity in our community.

With the official announcement just around the corner we won't spoil the details here, but very soon you'll be able to check out the new web portal for the Discover Drupal program and find out what it's all about.

Infrastructure Updates

Over the course of the last quarter the Drupal Association engineering team has provided a variety of feature updates for the Drupal project in terms of testing infrastructure: 

  • PHP8 Testing support - The Drupal Association provided PHP8 testing environments in DrupalCI, and so Drupal versions 9.1 and beyond are all fully PHP 8 compatible.Staying on the leading edge of compatibility gives Drupal the advantage of improved performance and security, and sets us up for success when it's time for Drupal 10.

  • Code Standards test for Drupal Core - Drupal Core tests now provide code standards testing results, saving a laborious manual step when reviewing core contributions.
  • GitLabCI/Pipelines - The Drupal Association has also enabled GitLabCI/Pipelines for these new general projects. This is a precursor to moving to GitLabCI for all Drupal CI uses. With direct maintainer control of the CI configuration for these projects, we can see automated workflows to support a wider variety of projects - allowing for more innovation. However, we need to be cognizant of cost controls as we open up this capability.

The year is off to a fast-paced, productive start and as always it is humbling and gratifying to see the great work that the community accomplishes with the tools the Drupal Association provides.

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

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

https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/whats-new-on-drupalorg-q1-2021