October 23, 2023
Today we are talking about The Future of Drupal article, What Challenges Drupal may have, and How we can overcome them together! with guest Ricardo Marcelino.
Listen:
Watch:
Topics:
- Can you describe the article this topic is based on
- Module percentages
- Drupal’s challenges
- Drupal’s unique selling proposition
- How can Drupal expand relevance
- Why is relevance important
- How does Drupal move forward
- What’s next for Drupal
- Do you think this is a natural change for a project like Drupal
- How do we ensure the future of Drupal
Resources:
Module of the Week:
Next.js
- Brief description:
- Have you ever wanted to build a website with a React-based front end, but with lots of the robust and mature CMS capabilities that Drupal provides? There’s a module for that.
- Brief history
- How old: created in Jan 2021 by shadcn, who continues to support it, including in the #nextjs channel in Drupal slack
- Versions available:
- 1.6.3 for Drupal 9 & 10
- Maintainership
- Actively maintained, though it uses a Github repo as its place for collaboration, including issues
- Number of open issues:
- 135 open, 12 of them bugs
- Test coverage? Y
- Usage stats:
- 1,249 sites
- Maintainer(s):
- shadcdn, who continues to support it, including in the #nextjs channel in Drupal slack
- Module features and usage:
- For anyone not familiar with Next.js, it’s a React framework for building front-end applications that gives developers a number a number of useful capabilities, such as dynamic routing, performance optimizations, integrations, and more
- The Next.js module for Drupal optimizes your Drupal backend for use as the content repository for a Next.js front end
- It add functionality like headless preview of unpublished content, even across multiple front end apps
- It also supports Incremental Site Regeneration, a best practice to ensure your front end site can serve static pages for the fastest possible delivery, but without the risk of serving stale content
- Works with the JSON:API Menu Items and JSON:API Views Drupal modules to allow even more of your front end site to be managed within your Drupal backend
- There’s even a Next.js Webform module that allows your Drupal site builder to create webforms, and have the React forms automatically created
- There is also a specialized version of Next.js, a “next-drupal-basic-starter”, also maintained by shadcn, that helps to get your Next.js front end working with Drupal more quickly
