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Today we are talking about DrupalCon Singapore, What you can expect, and What’s next for Drupal in Asia with guest Mike Richardson & Surabhi Gokte. We’ll also cover Filefield Paths as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/462

Topics

• When is Drupalcon Asia
• The last one was in 2016, what did it take to reprise
• How do you handle language barriers
• What are your roles in the organizing committee
• Steering committee and Drupal South
• What can attendees expect
• Any special programming
• What kind of diversity is expected from attendees
• Driving from Mumbai to Singapore is 110 hours
• Will Dries be there
• Can we expect future Drupalcon Asia's
• Planning and logistics regarding coffee
• Starshot

Resources

• DrupalCon Singapore
• Droptimes
• Drupal camp Pune
• Steering committee for Drupal South
• Linux Australia Council
• DrupalCon Singapore Sponsorship
  • Email events@drupalasia.org
• Park Royal Collection Marina Bay
• Singapore Wiki
• Singapore Visa

Guests

Mike Richardson - Singapore DrupalCon richo_au Surabhi Gokte - surabhi-gokte

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Josh Miller - joshmiller

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to use a variety of tokens to customize the directory and file names of your uploaded files? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • File (Field) Paths
• Brief history
  • How old: created in July 2008 by Stuart Clark (Deciphered), though recent releases are by Oleh Vehera (voleger) of Golems GABB
  • Versions available: 7.x-1.2 and 8.x-1.0-beta7, the latter of which supports Drupal 9.3 or newer, and Drupal 10
• Maintainership
  • Seeking co-maintainers
  • Security Coverage
    • Opted in, but no coverage in practice for Drupal 9 or 10
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: 131 open issues, 50 of which are bugs against the current branch
• Usage stats:
  • 34,609 sites almost 35,000 sites
• Module features and usage
  • This module allows you to customize file names and paths by leveraging a variety of entity-based tokens
  • It also integrates with the Pathauto module, giving you options to clean up the tokens for example by removing slashes, filtering out words or punctuation, and so on
  • It can also work with the Transliteration module to convert unicode characters into US-ASCII
  • Filefield Paths has options to rename and move existing files, and can retroactively rename files, effectively bulk updating and moving all your existing files
  • It can also work with the Redirect module to automatically create redirects from the old path and filename to the new location, when renaming
  • I’d also like to give a tip of the cap to Jim Birch of Kanopi for suggesting this module, when I was talking to a customer who was looking to achieve pretty much exactly what this module does

The Drupal Association’s individual membership program has always played a crucial role in supporting the Drupal community and ensuring the ongoing success of the Drupal project. The program was initially set up as a transactional vehicle: aside from the badge and voting rights, members received access to discounts from Drupal services providers.

The individual membership program stayed on autopilot during the turmoil of the Covid pandemic as we made the difficult decision to cancel DrupalCon North America 2020. During this time, our members and other Drupal community supporters donated unprecedented unrestricted funds using the hashtag #DrupalCares.

I joined the Drupal Association about two years ago as the Development & Membership Manager. My role split my time between Drupal Certified partners and the individual membership program, however it was clear from the beginning that the individual membership program would need a lot more attention.

The membership program underwent significant transformation from 2019 through May 2023, overcoming challenges and celebrating successes along the way. Initially, we faced a decline in numbers, but through consistent effort and unprecedented generosity, we've made remarkable strides. Today, we proudly recognize 1,747 members, with 70% of them providing recurring support.

Ripple Makers: Celebrating Changemakers in our Community 

The individual membership program rebranded as Ripple Makers in 2024. With this new name, the Drupal Association increases focus on communication, transparency, and engagement within the community. The ‘new’ program encourages sustaining donors to make monthly recurring gifts, which provide a reliable source of funding. This financial support allows the Drupal Association to plan for the future, support essential projects, and foster a dynamic and responsive community​.

Membership Programs, Sustainable Giving, and Nonprofits 

Why does a nonprofit organization such as the Drupal Association need a sustaining giving program? This program is vital for the sustainability and growth of the Drupal Association, and the benefit it brings to the community. It provides a stable foundation of support, ensuring that we can continue to innovate and grow. In addition, unrestricted giving in particular allows nonprofits to allocate resources where they are needed most, supporting the overall health of the Drupal project. Importantly. It also opens up direct lines of communication with the community.

Positive Impact on the Drupal Community

The Drupal community thrives because of several factors: open source collaboration, supportive environment, diverse participation, commitment to quality, and others. In my opinion, a supportive environment is the most important one.

By becoming a Ripple Maker, you directly support a vibrant and inclusive community of people who care for the Drupal project. Your contributions empower us to foster a sustainable ecosystem for Drupal by harnessing the collective generosity and commitment to the future of Drupal. Learn more about the program and join the wave on our sign up page.

Thank you for your ongoing support and dedication. Let's make the next chapter of our sustainable giving program the best one yet!

Dear Readers, 

Imagine a bustling workshop filled with developers, designers, and enthusiasts collaborating to build something extraordinary. This is the scene as Drupal 11 emerges, packed with features designed to make web development more intuitive and efficient.

"In recent years, we've seen an uptick in innovation in Drupal. Drupal 11 continues this trend with many new and exciting features."

notes Dries Buytaert, Founder and Lead of Drupal.

He emphasises that Drupal 11 is designed to empower ambitious site builders to create exceptional websites and accelerate Drupal's innovation. With this release, Drupal has become more intuitive, powerful, and flexible, ensuring it remains a leader in web development and digital experience creation.

Key among these innovations are Recipes and Single-Directory Components (SDCs). Recipes act like pre-assembled kits, allowing developers to add features to their websites with ease. Meanwhile, SDCs gather all necessary code for each component into one tidy package, simplifying the workflow.

Drupal 11 boasts superior performance, running up to 50% faster on PHP 8.3 compared to its predecessors. This improvement ensures swift page loading and an overall enhanced user experience. Accessibility remains a key focus, with Drupal continuing to support over 100 languages, ensuring inclusivity and usability for a global audience. This new release is the product of a vibrant community effort, with 1,858 individuals from 590 organizations contributing their expertise and passion. It’s a shining example of what can be achieved when people come together with a common goal: to push the boundaries of what’s possible with Drupal.

But the excitement doesn’t end with Drupal 11. The community is already buzzing about the upcoming Drupal Starshot project. Starshot aims to make Drupal more accessible than ever, especially for newcomers. By integrating user-friendly tools like the Project Browser and automatic updates, Starshot promises a smooth journey from installation to launching a fully functional website. With 148 days left for the year, the community is eagerly anticipating the arrival of the initial version of Starshot.

These developments are more than just updates; they’re part of an ongoing story of innovation and collaboration. With Drupal 11 and the forthcoming Starshot project, the Drupal community is not just keeping pace with the future—they're shaping it.

Moving on to stand-out stories of the past week.

The most important and currently happening update from the Drupal Community is the announcement of candidates for Drupal Association Board Elections. This year's election will fill one at-large board seat, with candidates Albert Hughes, Will Huggins, Alejandro Moreno, Janna Malikova, Kevin Quillen, Matthew Saunders, and Dominique De Cooman vying for the position. Voting will open on 15 August, requiring active Drupal Association memberships by 14 August to participate. The election results will be ratified between 6-13 September, with the new board member announced at DrupalCon Barcelona.

Last week, Daniel Cothran, in a conversation with Kazima Abbas, sub-editor of The DropTimes, shared his journey into web development and the creation of Views CSV Source. He explained how this module not only simplifies the data presentation process but also improves the efficiency and performance of Drupal sites, making it especially valuable for projects requiring reliable and streamlined data handling. Read the full article here.

In an email conversation, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jürgen Haas, Co-Founder of LakeDrops, and the creative mind behind the ECA module. During our discussion, Jürgen delved into the development of the ECA (Event, Condition, Action) module, which he designed to modernize workflow automation within Drupal. He shared the story behind the ECA module's inception, its development path, and its potential integration with future Drupal core updates, emphasizing its value in enhancing the user experience through intuitive tools.

The second part of the Thoughts on Starshot feature revealed widespread excitement within the Drupal community, highlighting the potential of the Starshot initiative to transform the Drupal platform. With contributions from seasoned community members like Kristen Pol, Murray Woodman, Nicolas Loye, Martin Anderson-Clutz, and Tim Hestenes Lehnen, the consensus is clear: Drupal Starshot promises to streamline the user experience, foster greater collaboration, and lower the barriers to entry, making Drupal more accessible to a wider audience.

DrupalCamp Ottawa 2024, held on August 2, brought together web development enthusiasts of all skill levels for a day of learning and networking centered around the Drupal platform. Highlighting key speakers like Martin Anderson-Clutz, the event emphasized community, inclusivity, and the latest advancements in Drupal, ensuring a successful and collaborative experience for all attendees. Read here.

The Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit is set to return for its 10th event, taking place from October 11 to 13, 2024, in Seattle, Washington. Since 2009, this summit has been a key regional event for Drupal professionals in the Pacific Northwest.

The Acquia 2024 Digital Freedom Tour will make its next stop in New York City on October 24, 2024. The event aims to advance a safer, more inclusive, and accessible digital world. It will bring together prominent digital leaders who will share their expertise in creating impactful digital experiences.

Anoop Singh, Tech Lead at Valuebound, announced on LinkedIn the upcoming release of the FlexiStyle Bootstrap SCSS theme on Drupal.org. This follows the success of the original FlexiStyle Bootstrap theme and promises even greater customization and flexibility for Drupal projects.

Additionally, amazee.io has released Lagoon V2.20, a significant update to its open-source application delivery platform. This release includes enhancements in user management, security, and onboarding efficiency designed to better support business needs.

Backdrop CMS 1.28.0 has been released, bringing significant enhancements to the platform, including new options for configuration storage. Laryn Kragt Bakker, Senior Developer at Aten Design Group, detailed the update, which allows users to choose between storing their configuration data in the file system or the database.

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also, join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you,
Sincerely
Alka Elizabeth
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

In this digital world, it is absolutely necessary to stay up-to-date with the latest upgrades and trends. Drupal 11 is here, bringing you better security, performance, and user experience. As a pioneer in 360 Drupal services, LN Webworks is excited to help you upgrade 

In this blog, we will navigate more about the intricacies of Drupal 11’s core attributes, the benefits of embracing the latest update, and how LN Webworks stands as your steadfast Drupal Certification Migration Partner for a successful migration.

<p>How we fixed a buggy custom Drupal module for setting up a <a href="https://www.adcisolutions.com/work/product-catalog-import?utm_source=planetdrupal%26utm_medium=rss_feed%26utm_campaign=catalog_import">product catalog</a> and got faulty catalog filters working with Ajax modules.</p><img data-entity-uuid="89483bc1-60e8-4538-8747-32b5bb9d1100" data-entity-type="file" src="https://www.adcisolutions.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/catalog-data-import.png" width="1986" height="1263" alt="catalog import">

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) aims to enhance the accessibility of products and services for people with disabilities and the elderly throughout the EU. With less than a year remaining to meet compliance requirements, both the public and private sectors must act now.

We talk with Jamie Abrahams from FreelyGive about the new AI module and what it means for the future of AI modules in the Drupal ecosystem.

URLs mentioned

• The new AI module 
• Introductory video on the new AI module
• Press release announcing AI module
• Detailed introduction of AI module 
• #AI channel in Drupal Slack workspace 
• Issue queue discussion about generic "ai()" method
• LangChain  
• LlamaIndex 
• LM Studio 
• Ollama 

DrupalEasy News

• Professional module development - 15 weeks, 90 hours, live, online course.  
• Drupal Career Online - 12 weeks, 77 hours, live online, beginner-focused course.

Audio transcript

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Credits

Podcast edited by Amelia Anello.
 

The Freedesktop.org Specifications directory contains a list of common specifications that have accumulated over the decades and define how common desktop environment functionality works. The specifications are designed to increase interoperability between desktops. Common specifications make the life of both desktop-environment developers and especially application developers (who will almost always want to maximize the amount of Linux DEs their app can run on and behave as expected, to increase their apps target audience) a lot easier.

Unfortunately, building the HTML specifications and maintaining the directory of available specs has become a bit of a difficult chore, as the pipeline for building the site has become fairly old and unmaintained (parts of it still depended on Python 2). In order to make my life of maintaining this part of Freedesktop easier, I aimed to carefully modernize the website. I do have bigger plans to maybe eventually restructure the site to make it easier to navigate and not just a plain alphabetical list of specifications, and to integrate it with the Wiki, but in the interest of backwards compatibility and to get anything done in time (rather than taking on a mega-project that can’t be finished), I decided to just do the minimum modernization first to get a viable website, and do the rest later.

So, long story short: Most Freedesktop specs are written in DocBook XML. Some were plain HTML documents, some were DocBook SGML, a few were plaintext files. To make things easier to maintain, almost every specification is written in DocBook now. This also simplifies the review process and we may be able to switch to something else like AsciiDoc later if we want to. Of course, one could have switched to something else than DocBook, but that would have been a much bigger chore with a lot more broken links, and I did not want this to become an even bigger project than it already was and keep its scope somewhat narrow.

DocBook is a markup language for documentation which has been around for a very long time, and therefore has older tooling around it. But fortunately our friends at openSUSE created DAPS (DocBook Authoring and Publishing Suite) as a modern way to render DocBook documents to HTML and other file formats. DAPS is now used to generate all Freedesktop specifications on our website. The website index and the specification revisions are also now defined in structured TOML files, to make them easier to read and to extend. A bunch of specifications that had been missing from the original website are also added to the index and rendered on the website now.

Originally, I wanted to put the website live in a temporary location and solicit feedback, especially since some links have changed and not everything may have redirects. However, due to how GitLab Pages worked (and due to me not knowing GitLab CI well enough…) the changes went live before their MR was actually merged. Rather than reverting the change, I decided to keep it (as the old website did not build properly anymore) and to see if anything breaks. So far, no dead links or bad side effects have been observed, but:

If you notice any broken link to specifications.fd.o or anything else weird, please file a bug so that we can fix it!

Thank you, and I hope you enjoy reading the specifications in better rendering and more coherent look!