Talking Drupal #481 - Drupal Marketing & Drupal CMS

December 23, 2024

Today we are talking about Drupal Marketing, how it applies to Drupal CMS, and what a Drupal and Drupal CMS Marketing Future look like with guest Suzanne Dergacheva. We’ll also cover Drupal 11.1 as our module of the week.

Listen:

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Topics

  • Drupal marketing moves
  • New brand
  • Marketing people at the DA
  • Goal of marketing
  • How does this impact Drupal CMS
  • Drupal CMS marketing
  • How will you educate people about the differences between core and CMS
  • Any challenges
  • How do you like the new homepage
  • Next steps to move the brand forward
  • Case studies
  • Why did you volunteer
  • If someone wants to get involved how can they

Resources

Module of the Week

Drupal 11.1
  • Brief description:
    • Have you been wanting a version of Drupal with improvements to the recipes system, the ability to write hooks as classes, and an icon management API? The new Drupal 11.1 release has all of that and more.
  • Module name/project name:
  • Brief history
    • How old: created on Dec 16 by catch of Tag1 and Third & Grove
  • Module features and usage
    • We’ve talked a number times on this show about the recipes system, particularly because it’s at the heart of Drupal CMS. In Drupal 11.1 recipes can define whether or not to use strict comparison for provided configuration, and there are a ton of new config actions. These allow your recipe to place blocks, take user input, enable layout builder for content types, clone configuration entities and more. It’s a huge leap forward, and I think you’ll quickly see a number of recipes that require Drupal 11.1 or newer.
    • Hooks have long been a powerful Drupalism that allow for deep customization of how your website functions. These hooks can now be written as classes, thanks to the new Hook attribute on methods. This will bring many of the object-oriented benefits of modern Drupal to the hooks system, and should also make it easier for developers new to Drupal to understand the code to create these customizations.
    • A new Icon Management API allows themes and modules to define icon packs, with unique identifiers for each included icon.
    • Drupal 11.1 also includes PHP 8.4 support. I haven’t been able to find any data on speed improvements compared to PHP 8.3, but there are interesting new features like property hooks, asymmetric visibility, new functions for finding array items, and more
    • There are plans to use Workspaces for content moderation, so the UI for Workspaces is now in a separate module. For new site builds if you want your editors to be able to use Workspaces, you’ll need to remember to enable this new UI module as well
    • New installs of Drupal 11.1 will also see improvements to the initial experience. These include defaulting to admin-created user accounts only, not adding the body field by default when creating new content types, and more.
    • Drupal 11.1 also includes a new views entity reference filter, opt-in render caching for forms, and improved browser and CDN caching for Javascript and CSS, among a host of other improvements.
    • A number of these improvements will also find their way into the upcoming 10.4 release, ensuring, for example, that recipes built to use the new config actions can be used with Long-Term Support (LTS) versions of Drupal, that will be supported until the stable release of Drupal 12 in mid- to late-2026