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OPTASY Favorites: 5 Best Drupal Blog Posts in May and Why We Enjoyed Them

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May has been most generous with us, no doubt about it: it has "spoiled" us with a heavy load of both useful and usable Drupal content. The community has been altruistic enough to share their “enlightening” experiences of working with Drupal, their discoveries and latest contributions. As for us, we "feasted" on their articles and tutorials, even managed to sync all our personal tops and to come up a unique "best Drupal blog posts list for this month.
 

Ranging from valuable tutorials to overviews of the latest Drupal releases, to glimpses of these Drupal contributors' hard work, our selection is as varied as it is valuable.
 

Now, in the name of open source we're ready to share our selection with you, OPTASY team's 5 most appreciated Drupal blog posts in May:
 

Drupal 8.7 had just been "taken out of the oven", it was still steamy fresh when the Srijan team published their inventory on its new features and newsworthy updates.

From:
 

  • JSON:API now in Drupal 8 core
  • to the Media Libray module, that grew from experimental to stable 
  • to the "rockstar" Drupal 8 module, the Layout Builder, that turned stable
  • to the newly improved configuration management system
     

... and other upgrades, updates, and newly added features, they managed to include in their post all the "highlights" of this Drupal minor release.

And, most of all, to do it promptly enough to be among the first (if not the first) to share their overview on the release with the world/the Drupal community...
 

Another piece of content that made it to our “best Drupal blog posts” list this month has been Matt Oliveira's tutorial on how to use Laravel's Homestead for Drupal local development.

He first adds some sort of context to justify his choice (since he used to go with Vagrant for his Drupal projects), then he explains, step by step:
 

  • what software you need to install, first things first ( VMWare, a VM provider, Hyper-V, Vagrant, etc.)
  • how to install and setup Homestead using Composer, but only after you've first cloned your Composer Drupal project
  • the command to enter for... launching it, after you've run all the due configurations
     

And his clearly formulated and practical tutorial goes all the way to the cool features that Homestead will provide you with and some useful warnings to keep in mind.

Have you used Homestead for your local development when working on your Drupal projects before?
 

Did the “secure Drupal” frenzy get you, too, last year? Particularly after the Drupalgeddon attacks?

Then you must have rushed to:
 

  • implement all the security best practices out there
  • put up a thick security shield around your Drupal modules and your Drupal theme
     

But did you know how insecure Drupal code even looked like?

And it's precisely this rhetorical question that generated the ThinkShout team's blog post.

They point out that:
 

  • way too many Drupal developers risk to “host” insecure code under their websites' hoods without even knowing it
  • most of us genuinely assume that all Drupal APIs are safe
     

Next, once they point out the issue(s), they enlist several exploitable holes that you could identify in your code, grouped in 3 main categories:
 

  • XSS vulnerabilities when rendering HTML
  • SQL injection risks
  • PHP code issues
     

A priceless resource to keep at hand and to tap into whenever we run our own code review sessions here, at OPTASY. One that we're most grateful for. 
 

It's useful, it's enjoyable, it's packed with helpful tips on both:
 

  • what optimizing images for the web really means; take it as a helpful checklist
  • what Drupal tools to use to... automate the whole process
     

And I'm talking here about the “Configure image styles” feature that enables you to define some sort of “pattern” to apply on all the future images on your website. One already incorporating all the due properties, the right width and height.

About the “Image toolkit” feature, that enables you to easily improve your image's quality. And the list goes on (with the Responsive Images module and so on...)

A way too valuable piece of content not to include it in our “best Drupal blog posts” list.
 

The real challenge highlighted by the Duo team in their post? Drupal site search in case of large organizations.

And their real struggle to look for a solution that:
 

  • would allow users to query across an entire ecosystem of websites and platforms
  • wouldn't put too much pressure on Drupal
     

In this respect, they bring to our attention a solution architected and developed by the Palantir team: the federated search.

Next, they back up their choice with strong arguments:
 

  • it's a robust enough search solution to meet large organizations' needs
  • being a decoupled solution, it leverages Drupal's powerful back-end without putting a strain on its front-end, as well
     

In short: for us, the OPTASY team, this post opened a world of possibilities. What if search in Drupal could be way more flexible, yet powerful enough to meet enterprise-level requirements?

And I'm thinking here of all our clients “juggling” with multiples websites...

 
The END!

These are the best Drupal blog posts on our monthly list. And we have to admit: picking just 5 pieces of content on Drupal was one hell of a challenge.

Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash

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