Talking Drupal #475 - Workspaces

November 11, 2024

Today we are talking about Workspaces, What They are, and How They Work with guest Scott Weston. We’ll also cover Workspaces Extra as our module of the week.

Listen:

direct Link

Topics

  • What are Workspaces in Drupal
  • What's a common use cases for Workspaces
  • Are Workspaces stable
  • Do Workspaces help with content versioning
  • What does the module ecosystem look like for Workspaces
  • Inspiration
  • Workspaces best practices
  • Any interesting ways it is being used
  • Is there a way to access workspace content in twig
  • Navigation integration
  • Workspaces and workflows
  • What aspects of a Workspace are limited to live
  • If someone wants to get involved or get started

Resources

Module of the Week

Workspaces Extra
  • Brief description:
    • Do you want to extend the capabilities of the Workspaces system in Drupal core? There’s a module for that.
  • Module name/project name:
  • Brief history
    • How old: created in Apr 2021 by Andrei Mateescu (amateescu) of tag1, who has also contributed to Workspaces in core, among other many things
    • Versions available: 2.0.0-alpha3 which works with Drupal 10.3 or 11
  • Maintainership
    • Actively maintained, latest release is less than a week old
    • Security coverage: technically yes, but not really until it has a stable release
    • Test coverage
    • Number of open issues: 20 open issues, 3 of which are bugs against the current branch, though one has already been fixed
  • Usage stats:
    • 89 sites
  • Module features and usage
    • One of the big features in Drupal 10.3 was that Workspaces is now officially stable. That said, not everything works the way some site builders will want it to. That’s where a contrib solution like Workspace Extra can help to fill in the gaps
    • It provides new options like letting you roll back changes from a published workspace, move content between workspaces, discard changes in a workspace, squashing content revisions when a workspace is published, and more
    • Workspaces Extra, or WSE also includes a number of submodules to add even more capabilities. For example, they can allow your workspace to stage an allowlist of configuration changes, deploy workspace content using an import/export system, stage menu changes, and more. For workflow, there’s an option to generate a shareable workspace preview link for external users, and a scheduler to publish your workspace at a specific day and time
    • I will add that the first time I played with workspaces I ran into an issue where I couldn’t create media entities within a workspace. I don’t know for sure that this hasn’t been fixed in core, but the core issue about it is still listed as “Needs work”. That said, the last comment on that issue (link in the show notes) lists WSE as something that helps, so if you encounter the same issue with Workspaces, WSE is worth a try