

Talking Drupal
Talking Drupal Hosts
Talking Drupal is a weekly chat about web design and development by a group a guys with one thing in common, we love Drupal. With hosts Stephen Cross, John Picozzi and Nic Laflin.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Mar 18, 2024 • 1h 9min
Talking Drupal #442 - Mercury Editor
Today we are talking about Mercury Editor, What it does, and how it could change your editorial life with guest Justin Toupin. We’ll also cover Webform Protected Downloads as our module of the week. For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/442 Topics What is Mercury Editor What is powering Mercury Editor Do you see any risk building on top of Paragraphs Does Mercury Editor cost anything Can companies hire Aten to add features What are some key features What makes Mercury Editor unique How stable is the content What happens if Paragraphs stops being supported How can the community help Resources Mercury Editor Layout Paragraphs Episode Layout Paragraphs Paragraphs Library Sub-module of Paragraphs Style options Layout Paragraphs restrictions Guests Justin Toupin - atendesigngroup.com justin2pin Hosts Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Anna Mykhailova - kalamuna.com amykhailova MOTW Correspondent Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu Brief description: Have you ever wanted to have downloadable content on your website, only available to visitors who have filled out a webform? There’s a module for that. Module name/project name: Webform Protected Downloads Brief history How old: created in Sep 2010 by berliner, but the most recent releases are by james.williams of Computer Minds Versions available: 7.x-1.1 and 8.x-1.0-alpha2 versions available, the latter of which works with Drupal 9 and 10 Maintainership Actively maintained, the latest release was a week ago Security coverage Introductory blog linked on the project page Number of open issues: 18 open issues, none of which are bugs against the current branch Usage stats: 804 sites Module features and usage Having thought leadership content like white papers or reports gated behind a lead capture form is a common pattern for websites, and this module is designed to make that easy to set up You use the module by adding a handler to your webform, similar to triggering an email send In the configuration for your webform protected download handler you have options for how much verification you want for the download link, whether or not the link should expire after a period of time, and so on, in addition to uploading one or more files that can be downloaded by people who submit the webform The module provides tokens for the download URLs, so you can easily include them in a submission confirmation message or email

Mar 13, 2024 • 36min
Skills Upgrade #2
Welcome back to “Skills Upgrade” a Talking Drupal mini-series following the journey of a D7 developer learning D10. This is episode 2. Topics Review Chad's goals for the previous week DDEV Installation Docker for Mac vs other options IDE Setup Review Chad's questions Tasks for the upcoming week DDEV improve performance Install Drupal 10 Install drupal/core dependencies Configure and test phpcs Test phpstan Set up settings.local.php Install devel module Resources DDEV Performance DDEV Quickstart Drupal Core Dependencies How to Implement Drupal Code Standards Running PHPStan On Drupal Custom Modules Why you should care about using settings.local.php Rancher Desktop Chad's Drupal 10 Learning Curriclum & Journal Chad's Drupal 10 Learning Notes Hosts AmyJune Hineline - @volkswagenchick Guests Chad Hester - chadkhester.com @chadkhest Mike Anello - DrupalEasy.com @ultimike

Mar 11, 2024 • 1h 14min
Talking Drupal #441 - CI for Drupal modules
Today we are talking about CI for Drupal modules, How it helps us build Drupal, and the ongoing work and improvements being made with guest Fran Garcia-Linares. We’ll also cover Require on Publish as our module of the week. For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/441 Topics What does CI mean How do Drupal modules use CI When we talk about Drupal CI are we talking about the website itself or the CI that supports contributors What tools does Drupal use for CI How do maintainers interact with CI What changes have happened in the last year Speed improvements Drupal CI vs Gitlab CI Process to convert When is Drupal CI being shut down What improvements are coming If someone has an issue where do they get help Resources Gitlab templates module Gitlab CI Drupal Support ElasticSearch 8 [#3279558] | Drupal.org Slack channel for ci questions #gitlab DrupalCI and all patch testing will be turned off on July 1, 2024 | Drupal.org Testing a Drupal module | Basic module building tutorial: Lorem ipsum generator Gitlab CI getting started GitLab CI | Using GitLab to Contribute to Drupal WIP: Create a space to document how to customize each of the GitLab CI jobs [#3423238] | Drupal.org will generate https://project.pages.drupalcode.org/gitlab_templates/ We are pushing for a basic version to be fully live this week [Meta] Switching to Gitlab CI [#3424725] | Drupal.org Guests Fran Garcia-Linares - fjgarlin Hosts Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan Stephen Cross - stephencross.com stephencross Anna Mykhailova - kalamuna.com amykhailova MOTW Correspondent Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu Brief description: Have you ever wanted to have content fields that could be optional until a piece of content is published, or ready to be published? There’s a module for that. Module name/project name: Require on Publish Brief history How old: created in Apr 2018 by Mike Priscella (mpriscella), though recent releases are by Mark Dorison (markdorison) of Chromatic Versions available: 8.x-1.10 Maintainership Actively maintained, latest release just over a month ago Security coverage Test coverage Number of open issues: 18, 8 of which are bugs Usage stats: 3,001 sites Module features and usage With this module enabled, form to configure fields for you content types will have a new checkbox labeled “Required on Publish” Check this new box instead of the normal “Required field” checkbox to have the field only required if the content is being published or already published Useful for publishing workflows where you want content creators to be able to quickly get started on content, but ensure that fields will be filled in before publishing Useful for fields that will optimize the content for SEO, social sharing, search, and so on

Mar 6, 2024 • 30min
Skills Upgrade #1
This is the first episode of Skills Upgrade, a Talking Drupal mini-series following the journey of a Drupal 7 developer learning Drupal 10. Topics Chad and Mike's first meeting Chad's Background Chad's goals Tasks for the week Resources Chad's Drupal 10 Learning Curriclum & Journal Chad's Drupal 10 Learning Notes Hosts AmyJune Hineline - @volkswagenchick Guests Chad Hester - chadkhester.com @chadkhest Mike Anello - DrupalEasy.com @ultimike

Mar 4, 2024 • 1h 21min
Talking Drupal #440 - The Cost Of Drupal
Today we are talking about the cost around Drupal, common misconceptions, and how you get what you pay for with guest Jeff Robbins. We’ll also cover Module Instructions as our module of the week. For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/440 Topics What is new! How did you get started with Drupal Selling Drupal and the cost How much is the technology vs the complexity of projects that lend themselves to Drupal Value of Drupal What can the Drupal community do to make it more widely attractive Versionless Drupal marketing Resources Drupal.org README.md Documentation Drupal versioning discussion Talking Drupal #390 - Employee Owned Companies Talking Drupal #429 - The Drupal Association Board Talking Drupal #439 - Drupal 7 Long-Term Support Visibox Jeff Robbins MySQL PHP Guests Jeff Robbins - jjeff.com jjeff Hosts Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Ivan Stegic - ten7.com ivanstegic MOTW Correspondent Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu Brief description: Have you ever wanted to have easy access to the README, CHANGELOG, and INSTALL files for the contrib modules on your Drupal site? There’s a module for that. Module name/project name: Module Instructions Brief history How old: created in Apr 2012 by Ales Rebec of Slovenia Versions available: 7.x-1.0 and 2.0.3 versions available, the latter of which works with Drupal 9 and 10 Maintainership Actively maintained? Security coverage Test coverage Number of open issues: 4 open issues, none of which are bugs against the 2.0.x branch Usage stats: 1,238 sites Maintainer(s): Current maintainer of the 2.0.x branch is Viktor Holovachek a.k.a Aston Victor of the Ukraine Drupal Community Module features and usage The usage of the module is pretty straightforward. Once the module is installed, anyone who has access to the Modules page on a Drupal site will see links on that page to any README, CHANGELOG, or INSTALL files that are available for the contrib modules in the codebase It also provides a cron job and drush command to generate the links, stored in the site state, so the application isn’t doing all the work of parsing through all your contrib modules looking for the files every time someone wants to load the Modules page It does override the template for the module page to add those links, so be aware that if you’re doing something very custom and have overridden that template in something like a custom admin theme, you may need to manually add some extra markup to see the links The module does also define new permissions, to manage the settings for these links, or to view them The settings really consist of specifying which of the links you want to appear, if the relevant files are available. By default it will show all three, but you could, for example, only have it show README links

Feb 26, 2024 • 1h 24min
Talking Drupal #439 - Drupal 7 Long-Term Support
Today we are talking about Drupal 7 Long Term Support, common security tips, and support services you can use with guests Greg Knaddison, Aaron Frost, and Dave Welch . We’ll also cover Storybook as our module of the week. For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/439 Topics Drupal 7 EoL Drupal will not stop working Security team perspective Security concerns Extened Community Support Long Term support HeroDevs Never ending support (NES) PHP Hosting Security Contrib Product advisor Colorado Digital Service Resources herodevs.com Colorado Digital Service Guests Greg Knaddison - morrisanimalfoundation.org greggles Aaron Frost - herodevs.com aaronfrost Dave Welch - herodevs.com dwelch2344 Hosts Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Ivan Stegic - ten7.com ivanstegic MOTW Correspondent Mark Casias - markie Module name/project name: Storybook Brief description: The storybook module makes it easier to create a connection between Drupal and Storybook. It adds some Twig functionality so you can write Stories in Twig as opposed to YML or JSON or React Brief history How old: Less than a year Versions available: Alpha4 came out earlier this month Maintainership Actively maintained: Yes Number of open issues: 6 Test coverage: no Usage stats: N/A: for development only Maintainer(s): Mateu Aguiló Bosch (e0ipso) from Lullabot. Module features and usage Twig based stories Pulls in Sites theme and base css. So needs some updates to the development.services.yml Also means it is hard to publish a storybook. No need for SDC (but works well with it) Great instructions on the module page Way easier than previous integrations including cl_server. Not as opinionated as previous storybook integrations.

Feb 19, 2024 • 1h 15min
Talking Drupal #438 - CKEditor 4 End of Life
Today we are talking about CKEditor 4 End of Life, Moving to CKEditor 5, and what you can expect from CKEditor 5 now and in the future with guest Wim Leers. We’ll also cover CKEditor 5 Premium Features as our module of the week. For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/438 Topics CKEditor 4 end of life June 2023 Issues people might see if they are still on CKE4 Why a third party library and not roll our own Are there other alternatives Why did Drupal decide on CKEditor Drupal 10 moved to CKE5 How should people update Upgrade gotchas What's new in CKE5 What is on the roadmap regarding Drupal and CKE5 Is there going to be a CKE6 Native Web Components Does CKE in core affect Gutenberg Resources CKEditor 4 End Of Life Contrib Core, prioritized upstream blockers Core, all issues blocked on upstream (currently 29), if we look just at bugs there's 17 (1 of which is critical, 6 major) Drastically improve the linking experience in CKEditor 5 Drupal Image ability to opt in to SVG image uploads Native and UX https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3274635 Extended html filter Views / ckeditor custom elements Guests Wim Leers - wimleers.com Wim Leers Hosts Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Ivan Stegic - ten7.com ivanstegic MOTW Correspondent Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu Brief description: Have you ever wanted to offer your content creators advanced capabilities like real-time collaboration? There’s a module for that. Module name/project name: CKEditor 5 Premium Features Brief history How old: created in Sep 2022 by Wiktor Walc, although recent releases are by Wojciech (vOYchekh) Kukowski, both of CKSource, the company behind CKEditor (Wiktor was on episode 372 https://talkingdrupal.com/372) Current version available: 1.2.5 which works with Drupal 9 and 10 Maintainership Actively maintained, latest release in the past month User Guide available, link is in the README Number of open issues: 16, 8 of which are bugs Usage stats: 159 sites Module features and usage To me, the most compelling features enabled by this module are the ones that turn your Drupal WYSIWYG into a robust collaboration tool, similar to what users may be used to in tools like Google Docs or Office 365 Real-time inline comments and changes from multiple users Track changes to suggest ways the content could be improved A history of changes made in the WYSIWYG, independent of the saved Drupal revisions Tag users with @ mentions to have them notified There’s also a Productivity Pack to enhance your WYSIWYG, and again some of these will be familiar to users that also use popular online collaboration tools A document outline that uses heading within your content to make navigation for moving quickly within the document Can generate a linked Table of Contents, which will automatically update as headings are added or changed Slash commands to execute actions Enhanced Paste from Office, to preserve complex incoming content structures, but with clean HTML as the result And more! Another premium feature is the ability to export to Word or PDF, and it can also restore full screen editing, a feature that didn’t make the transition from CKEditor 4 to 5, as part of the open source offering Finally, it also includes an AI Assistant that provides yet another interesting way to empower your content authors to leverage AI tools for their writing, including the ability to change the style, length, or tone of selected content using pre-made prompts, or generate content with custom queries. It also works with a number of different models out of the box, so you’re not restricted to ChatGPT The module is open source but using these premium features does require a subscription. The pricing will depend on the number of active users and which features you need, so if you’d like more information you can use the contact form at ckeditor.com Also worth mentioning here that the team at Palantir has released a YouTube video of an open source collaborative editor that they’re calling Edit Together. It’s based on the ProseMirror rich-text editor framework, and the blog where they announced it mentioned a mid-2024 release, but that was back in Jul 2023 and I haven’t been able to find any updates since then

Feb 12, 2024 • 1h 16min
Talking Drupal #437 - Drupal Mail & Easy Email
Today we are talking about sending email with Drupal, The Easy Email Module, and Drupal Mail Best Practices with guest Wayne Eaker. We’ll also cover Content Access by Path as our module of the week. For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/437 Topics Current state of email What happened to swiftmailer Do you still need the mailsystem module Why Symfony Mailer New dependency in core Difference between Symfony Mailer module and the Symfony Mailer Lite module How does the Easy email module make it easier What are the features of Easy Email Why not use PHP mail JMAP Do you have a roadmap How do we communicate the different module options Are you looking for help Resources Easy Email Module Symfony Mailer Lite Module Symfony Mailer Module Mail System Module hook_mail replacement issue Swiftmailer / Symfony mailer issue JMAP FastMail Free Easy Email Webinar Guests Wayne Eaker - drupaltutor.com zengenuity Hosts Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Ivan Stegic - ten7.com ivanstegic MOTW Correspondent Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu Brief description: Have you ever wanted to grant users access to edit content based on the path alias of the content? There’s a module for that. Module name/project name: Content Access by Path Brief history How old: created in the past month by Mark Conroy of Annertech, who is also a core subsystem maintainer for the Umami profile Versions available: a stable 1.0.0, created in the past week, that works with Drupal 10 Maintainership Actively maintained Doesn’t have a user guide yet, but the module’s README does include some FAQs, and the project page includes a link to a YouTube video that demonstrates how to install and use the module Number of open issues: 2, one of which is a bug Usage stats: 2 sites Module features and usage When installed, the module adds a new taxonomy vocabulary to your site. You can add terms to this vocabulary to define sections by path Users on the site will have a new field, where you can reference one or more of the section terms, granting the user access to edit any content with a path that matches the section The module also includes a submodule called Content Access by Path Admin Content. When installed, users who go to the admin/content listing will only see content listed that they can edit, based on either the sections they’ve been assigned, or their ownership of the content. Granting edit permissions to a “section” of the website is a common ask for site owners, so I’m excited that this module makes it easy to set that up. There are solutions in the contrib ecosystem based on taxonomy for access control, and back in episode #414 we talked about Access Policy as a very flexible way to grant edit permissions, but in my mind those all require more set-up, and may require an extra step during content creation to make sure the right access is available. Content Access by Path, along with something like the near-ubiquitous Pathauto, can make it pretty painless to set up and use section-specific edit permissions

Feb 5, 2024 • 1h 12min
Talking Drupal #436 - Drupal & AI
AI specialist, Martin Anderson-Clutz, joins to discuss AI in Drupal. They cover topics like AI in relation to image fields, configuring API keys for the Augmenter module, prompt engineering, and exploring AI integration in Drupal. They also touch on the use of AI in solving arithmetic problems and automating blog post creation.

Jan 29, 2024 • 1h 14min
Talking Drupal #435 - UI Suite initiative
The podcast discusses the UI Suite initiative in Drupal, its benefits for themers and site builders, and its division of work between developers. They also explore a contrib module for drop down menus, improving accessibility, and the functionality and configuration options of Drupal menus. The hosts highlight the advantages of implementing design systems and discuss handling updates and deprecations. They provide information on reaching out to the podcast and contacting the hosts about the UI Suite.