Talking Drupal #493 - Drupal Developer Survey

March 17, 2025

Today we are talking about The Drupal Developer Survey, Last year's results, and How it helps Drupal with guest Mike Richardson. We’ll also cover HTMX as our module of the week.

Listen:

direct Link

Topics

  • What is the Drupal Developer Survey
  • How often does it come out
  • How did it come to be
  • What type of information does it collect
  • Do you look at other surveys
  • What were some of the most interesting stats last year
  • Core contributors
  • How do you expect last year to compare to this year
  • Do you think the outlook will be more positive with Drupal CMS
  • Drop off in Drupal 7
  • Home users
  • DDEV usage
  • AI questions
  • Security questions

Resources

Module of the Week

HTMX
  • Brief description:
    • Have you ever wanted to replace Drupal’s AJAX capabilities with a lightweight library that has no additional dependencies? There’s a module for that.
  • Module name/project name:
  • Brief history
    • How old: created in May 2023 by wouters_f though recent releases are by fathershawn of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
    • Versions available: 1.3.5 and 1.4.0, both of which support Drupal 10.3 and 11
  • Maintainership
    • Actively maintained, latest release less than a month ago
    • Security coverage
    • Test coverage
    • Documentation included in the repo as well as online
    • Number of open issues: 3 open issues, 1 of which is a bug
  • Usage stats:
    • 92 sites
  • Module features and usage
    • To use HTMX, you need to attach the library to the render array of one or more elements where you want to use it, and then add data attributes to your render array that indicate how you want HTMX to react to user behaviour
    • HTMX can help make your Drupal sites more interactive by dynamically loading or reloading parts of a page, giving it a more “application-like” user experience
    • There is a planning issue to discuss gradually replace Drupal’s current AJAX system with HTMX, and a related Proof Of Concept showing how that could work with an existing Drupal admin form
    • A number of elements in the current AJAX system also rely on jQuery, so adopting HTMX would also help to phase out jQuery in core. HTMX is also significantly more lightweight than JS frameworks like React
    • HTMX is really a developer-oriented project, which is why I thought it would be appropriate for this week’s episode