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Top Drupal blog posts from November 2021

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Here’s our selection of some of the top Drupal-related articles written in November. We hope you enjoy revisiting them!

Drupal Association Announces Newly Appointed Board Members

We’re kicking off our selection for last month with the announcement of the newly appointed Drupal Association Board members, shared by Christina Lindner, newcomer to the Drupal community and the new Digital Marketing Manager on the Drupal Association team.

The new members are: Dropsolid’s CTO Nick Veenhof, Srijan’s founder and CEO Rahul Dewan, and Nikhil Despande, Chief Digital Officer for the state of Georgia who are all both long-time, frequent users of and contributors to Drupal. They are joining the DA Board alongside Mike Herchel who was elected for the Community At-Large position. Congratulations to all the newly appointed members!

Read more about the new Drupal Association Board members

Drupal 9: Removing The Summary From The Body Field

Next up, we have a post from Philip Norton on his #! code blog. He points to a key issue with the summary option in Drupal body fields (namely, that it’s not a markup field, so content entered into it is not treated as markup) and proposes to use a special Summary field instead.

To prevent users from entering the summary into the incorrect field, we can use two different approaches: either by turning off the summary input in the configuration, or by completely removing the body summary programmatically. The latter one is mostly just a proof of concept as it is much more complicated to deploy.

Read more about removing the summary from Drupal body fields

The Best CMS of 2022: Best Blog, E-com and Enterprise CMSs

The third post from November comes from Emily Gertenbach of Upwork and analyzes the top content management systems for 2022, in the categories of blogging, ecommerce and enterprise.

Emily’s comprehensive article weighs the pros and cons of a number of different CMSs, both proprietary and open source, paying special attention to their pricing. As she points out, Drupal is the dominant one in the enterprise space.

Some of Drupal’s key strengths are robust decoupling options, great multilingual support, omnichannel ecommerce support, commitment to security and accessibility, and an abundance of free modules.

Read more about the best CMS of 2022

How to Become a Drupal Developer

We continue with a great post for the Drupalize.me blog by Lullabot’s Marcos Cano, who writes about how to become a Drupal developer, highlighting the key steps of this journey.

Joining the community and finding support in existing members is definitely a priority. Next comes mapping your learning goals, which includes deciding what kind of path you’ll be choosing, the learner or the doer path.

Of course, you can’t become a true Drupal developer without actually working with Drupal - you’ll need to get familiar with site building, back-end module development and front-end theme development, and hopefully contribute back to Drupal at some point.

Read more about becoming a Drupal developer

Drupal 8 end of life: Drupal 8 is dead, long live Drupal 9

Early November marked the end of life of the much beloved and heavily used Drupal 8. This next article by Duncan Worrell of Cyber-Duck answers some of the most common questions regarding the end of life.

In short, the end of life of a particular software version means that version will no longer receive any official feature or security improvements. The main reason for Drupal 8 reaching EOL is the EOL of one of its most important dependencies, Symfony 3.

The final parts of Duncan’s article are dedicated to tips for upgrading to Drupal 9 and keeping your websites fresh and up to date.

Read more about the end of life of Drupal 8

Drupal's Bundle Classes Empower Better Code

Moving on, we have a post by Lullabot’s Mateu Aguiló Bosch which explores the use of bundle classes, a new feature available in Drupal core with version 9.3.0. The main gain of using bundle classes is better, more maintainable code - meaning code that is more declarative and more testable. 

Mateu takes a deep dive into using bundle classes, focusing specifically on some of their main shortcomings and contrasting how the Typed Entity module addresses them. These shortcomings are: bundles not being atomic; mixing of framework and business logic; and bundle classes’ lack of solution for using business logic for multiple entities.

Read more about Drupal bundle classes

Part 2: Good Drupal Leadership: What is a good plan for implementing a Drupal website/application for organizations?

In the next post from November, part 2 of his series on good Drupal leadership, Jacob Rockowitz discusses best practices for planning the implementation of a Drupal website/application.

The main planning challenges he highlights are: taking into account Drupal’s flexibility and planning accordingly; stability challenges (namely with contributed modules); and careful maintainability to avoid too much technical debt. 

He also identifies three main planning tasks to address these challenges: defining the requirements and potential challenges; being committed to good internal documentation and leveraging that to improve Drupal’s documentation; and open, clear communication which is key to effective collaboration.

Read more about planning a Drupal website/app

Decoupled websites are secure, fast and cost-effective – perfect for councils

Last up, we have an article by Mark Conroy of Annertech about decoupled architectures and why they’re such a great fit for websites of councils and small governments. It starts off with a short presentation of decoupling, and how decoupling Drupal enables the best use of both its data management capabilities and the presentation capabilities of the framework it’s paired with.

The five key advantages of decoupling that Mark points out are: security, performance, scalability options, costs and time, and ease of future migrations/redesigns. Another interesting observation is that the decoupled approach is actually more akin to the early development practices of the more static web.

Read more about the benefits of decoupled websites

Pumpkins on a wooden table

These were some of our favorite Drupal-related reads from November. If you enjoy these monthly recaps, make sure to follow our blog so you don’t miss any new posts.

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