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This is a guest post from Dido Grigorov, a deep learning engineer and Python programmer with 17 years of experience in the field.

Chatbots have evolved far beyond simple question-and-answer tools. With the power of large language models (LLMs), they can understand the context of conversations and generate human-like responses, making them invaluable for customer support applications and other types of virtual assistance. 

LangChain, an open-source framework, streamlines the process of building these conversational chatbots by providing tools for seamless model integration, context management, and prompt engineering.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how LangChain works and how chatbots interact with LLMs. We’ll also guide you step by step through building a context-aware chatbot that delivers accurate, relevant responses using LangChain and GPT-3.

What are the chatbots in the realm of LLMs?

Chatbots in the field of LLMs are cutting-edge software that simulate human-like conversations with users through text or voice interfaces. These chatbots exploit the advanced capabilities of LLMs, which are neural networks trained on huge amounts of text data which allows them to produce human-like responses to a wide range of input prompts.

One among all other matters is that LLM-based chatbots can take a conversation’s context into account when generating a response. This means they can keep coherence across several exchanges and can process complex queries to produce outputs that are in line with the users’ intentions. Additionally, these chatbots assess the emotional tone of a user’s input and adjust their responses to match the user’s sentiments.

Chatbots are highly adaptable and personalized. They learn from how users interact with them thus improving on their responses by adjusting them according to individual preferences and needs. 

What is LangChain?

LangChain is a framework that’s open-source developed for creating apps that use large language models (LLMs). It comes with tools and abstractions to better personalize the information produced from these models while maintaining accuracy and relevance. 

One common term you can see when you read about LLMs is “prompt chains”. A prompt chain refers to a sequence of prompts or instructions used in the context of artificial intelligence and machine learning, with the purpose to guide the AI model through a multi-step process to generate more accurate, detailed, or refined outputs. This method can be employed for various tasks, such as writing, problem-solving, or generating code. 

Developers can create new prompt chains using LangChain, which is one of the strongest sides of the framework. They can even modify existing prompt templates without needing to train the model again when using new datasets.

How does LangChain work?

LangChain is a framework designed to simplify the development of applications that utilize language models. It offers a suite of tools that help developers efficiently build and manage applications that involve natural language processing (NLP) and Large Language Models. By defining the steps needed to achieve the desired outcome (this might be a chatbot, task automation, virtual assistant, customer support, and even more), developers can adapt language models flexibly to specific business contexts using LangChain. 

Here’s a high-level overview of how LangChain works.

Model integration

LangChain supports various Language models including those from OpenAI, Hugging Face, Cohere, Anyscale, Azure Models, Databricks, Ollama, Llama, GPT4All, Spacy, Pinecone, AWS Bedrock, MistralAI, among others. Developers can easily switch between different models or use multiple models in one application. They can build custom-developed model integration solutions, which allow developers to take advantage of specific capabilities tailored to their specific applications.

Chains

The core concept of LangChain is chains, which bring together different AI components for context-aware responses. A chain represents a set of automated actions between a user prompt and the final model output. There are two types of chains provided by LangChain:

• Sequential chains: These chains enable the output of a model or function to be used as an input for another one. This is particularly helpful in making multi-step processes that depend on each other.
• Parallel chains: It allows for simultaneous running of multiple tasks, with their outputs merged at the end. This makes it perfect for doing tasks that can be divided into subtasks that are completely independent.

Memory

LangChain facilitates the storage and retrieval of information across various interactions. This is essential where there is need for persistence of context such as with chat-bots or interactive agents. There are also two types of memory provided:

• Short-term memory – Helps keep track of recent sessions.
• Long-term memory – Allows retention of information from previous sessions enhancing system recall capability on past chats and user preferences.

Tools and utilities

LangChain provides many tools, but the most used ones are Prompt Engineering, Data Loaders and Evaluators.  When it comes to Prompt Engineering, LangChain contains utilities to develop good prompts, which are very important in getting the best responses from language models.

If you want to load up files like csv, pdf or other format, Data Loaders are here to help you to load and pre-process different types of data hence making them usable in model interactions.

Evaluation is an essential part of working with machine learning models and large language models. That’s why LangChain provides Evaluators – tools used for testing language models and chains so that generated results meet the required criteria, which might include:

Datasets criteria:

• Manually curated examples: Start with high-quality, diverse inputs.
• Historical logs: Use real user data and feedback.
• Synthetic data: Generate examples based on initial data.

Types of evaluations:

• Human: Manual scoring and feedback.
• Heuristic: Rule-based functions, both reference-free and reference-based.
• LLM-as-judge: LLMs score outputs based on encoded criteria.
• Pairwise: Compare two outputs to pick the better one.

Application evaluations:

• Unit tests: Quick, heuristic-based checks.
• Regression testing: Measure performance changes over time.
• Back-testing: Re-run production data on new versions.
• Online evaluation: Evaluate in real-time, often for guardrails and classifications.

Agents
LangChain agents are essentially autonomous entities that leverage LLMs to interact with users, perform tasks, and make decisions based on natural language inputs.

Action-driven agents use language models to decide on optimal actions for predefined tasks. On the other side interactive agents or interactive applications such as chatbots make use of these agents, which also take into account user input and stored memory when responding to queries.

How do chatbots work with LLMs?

LLMs underlying chatbots use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG), which are made possible through pre-training of models on vast textual data.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

• Context awareness: LLMs can understand the subtlety and allusions in a conversation, and they can keep track of the conversation from one turn to the next. This makes it possible for the chatbots to generate logical and contextually appropriate responses to the clients.
• Intent recognition: These models should be capable of understanding the user’s intent from their queries, whether the language is very specific or quite general. They can discern what the user wants to achieve and determine the best way to help them reach that goal.
• Sentiment analysis: Chatbots can determine the emotion of the user through the tone of language used and adapt to the user’s emotional state, which increases the engagement of the user.

Natural Language Generation (NLG)

• Response generation: When LLMs are asked questions, the responses they provide are correct both in terms of grammar and the context. This is because the responses that are produced by these models mimic human communication, due to the training of the models on vast amounts of natural language textual data.
• Creativity and flexibility: Apart from simple answers, LLM-based chatbots can tell a story, create a poem, or provide a detailed description of a specific technical issue and, therefore, can be considered to be very flexible in terms of the provided material.

Personalization and adaptability

• Learning from interactions: Chatbots make the interaction personalized because they have the ability to learn from the users’ behavior, as well as from their choices. It can be said that it is constantly learning, thereby making the chatbot more effective and precise in answering questions.
• Adaptation to different domains: The LLMs can be tuned to particular areas or specialties that allow the chatbots to perform as subject matter experts in customer relations, technical support, or the healthcare domain.

LLMs are capable of understanding and generating text in multiple languages, making them suitable for applications in diverse linguistic contexts.

Building your own chatbot with LangChain in five steps

This project aims to build a chatbot that leverages GPT-3 to search for answers within documents. First, we scrape content from online articles, split them into small chunks, compute their embeddings, and store them in Deep Lake. Then, we use a user query to retrieve the most relevant chunks from Deep Lake, which are incorporated into a prompt for generating the final answer with the LLM.

It’s important to note that using LLMs carries a risk of generating hallucinations or false information. While this may be unacceptable for many customer support scenarios, the chatbot can still be valuable for assisting operators in drafting answers that they can verify before sending to users.

Next, we’ll explore how to manage conversations with GPT-3 and provide examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of this workflow

Step 1: Project creation, prerequisites, and required library installation

First create your PyCharm project for the chatbot. Open up Pycharm and click on “new project”. Then give a name of your project.

Once ready with the project set up, generate your `OPENAI_API_KEY` on the OpenAI API Platform Website, once you are logged in (or sign up on the OpenAI website for that purpose). To do that go to the “API Keys” section on the left navigation menu and then click on the button “+Create new secret key”. Don’t forget to copy your key.

After that get your `ACTIVELOOP_TOKEN` by signing up on the Activeloop website. Once logged in, just click on the button “Create API Token” and you’ll be navigated to the token creation page. Copy this token as well.

Once you have both the token and the key, open your configuration settings in PyCharm, by clicking on the 3 dots button next to the run and debug buttons, and choose “Edit”. You should see the following window:

Now locate the field “Environment variables” and find the icon on the right side of the field. Then click there – you’ll see the following window:

And now by clicking the + button start adding your environmental variables and be careful with their names. They should be the same as mentioned above: `OPENAI_API_KEY` and `ACTIVELOOP_TOKEN`. When ready just click OK on the first window and then “Apply” and “OK” on the second one.

That’s a very big advantage of PyCharm and I very much love it, because it handles the environment variables for us automatically without the requirement for additional calls to them, allowing us to think more about the creative part of the code.

Note: ActiveLoop is a technology company that focuses on developing data infrastructure and tools for machine learning and artificial intelligence. The company aims to streamline the process of managing, storing, and processing large-scale datasets, particularly for deep learning and other AI applications.

DeepLake is an ActiveLoop’s flagship product. It provides efficient data storage, management, and access capabilities, optimized for large-scale datasets often used in AI.

Install the required libraries

We’ll use the `SeleniumURLLoader` class from LangChain, which relies on the `unstructured` and `selenium` Python libraries. Install these using pip.  It is recommended to install the latest version, although the code has been specifically tested with version 0.7.7. 

To do that use the following command in your PyCharm terminal:

pip install unstructured selenium

Now we need to install langchain, deeplake and openai. To do that just use this command in your terminal (same window you used for Selenium) and wait a bit until everything is successfully installed:

pip install langchain==0.0.208 deeplake openai==0.27.8 psutil tiktoken

To make sure all libraries are properly installed, just add the following lines needed for our chatbot app and click on the Run button:

from langchain.embeddings.openai import OpenAIEmbeddings from langchain.vectorstores import DeepLake from langchain.text_splitter import CharacterTextSplitter from langchain import OpenAI from langchain.document_loaders import SeleniumURLLoader from langchain import PromptTemplate

Another way to install your libraries is through the settings of PyCharm. Open them and go to the section Project -> Project Interpreter. Then locate the + button, search for your package and hit the button “Install Package”. Once ready, close it, and on the next window click “Apply” and then “OK”.

Step 2: Splitting content into chunks and computing their embeddings

As previously mentioned, our chatbot will “communicate” with content coming out of online articles, that’s why I picked Digitaltrends.com as my source of data and selected 8 articles to start. All of them are organized into a Python list and assigned to a variable called “articles”.

articles = ['https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/claude-sonnet-vs-gpt-4o-comparison/', 'https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-intelligence-proves-that-macbooks-need-something-more/', 'https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-use-openai-chatgpt-text-generation-chatbot/', 'https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/character-ai-how-to-use/', 'https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-upload-pdf-to-chatgpt/']

We load the documents from the provided URLs and split them into chunks using the `CharacterTextSplitter` with a chunk size of 1000 and no overlap:

# Use the selenium to load the documents loader = SeleniumURLLoader(urls=articles) docs_not_splitted = loader.load() # Split the documents into smaller chunks text_splitter = CharacterTextSplitter(chunk_size=1000, chunk_overlap=0) docs = text_splitter.split_documents(docs_not_splitted)

If you run the code till now you should receive the following output, if everything works well:

[Document(page_content="techcrunch\n\ntechcrunch\n\nWe, TechCrunch, are part of the Yahoo family of brandsThe sites and apps that we own and operate, including Yahoo and AOL, and our digital advertising service, Yahoo Advertising.Yahoo family of brands.\n\n    When you use our sites and apps, we use \n\nCookiesCookies (including similar technologies such as web storage) allow the operators of websites and apps to store and read information from your device. Learn more in our cookie policy.cookies to:\n\nprovide our sites and apps to you\n\nauthenticate users, apply security measures, and prevent spam and abuse, and\n\nmeasure your use of our sites and apps\n\n    If you click '", metadata={'source': ……………]

Next, we generate the embeddings using OpenAIEmbeddings and save them in a DeepLake vector store hosted in the cloud. Ideally, in a production environment, we could upload an entire website or course lesson to a DeepLake dataset, enabling searches across thousands or even millions of documents. 

By leveraging a serverless Deep Lake dataset in the cloud, applications from various locations can seamlessly access a centralized dataset without the necessity of setting up a vector store on a dedicated machine.

Why do we need embeddings and documents in chunks?

When building chatbots with Langchain, embeddings and chunking documents are essential for several reasons that relate to the efficiency, accuracy, and performance of the chatbot.

Embeddings are vector representations of text (words, sentences, paragraphs, or documents) that capture semantic meaning. They encapsulate the context and meaning of words in a numerical form. This allows the chatbot to understand and generate responses that are contextually appropriate by capturing nuances, synonyms, and relationships between words.

Thanks to the embeddings, the chatbot can also quickly identify and retrieve the most relevant responses or information from a knowledge base, because they allow matching user queries with the most semantically relevant chunks of information, even if the wording differs.

Chunking, on the other side, involves dividing large documents into smaller, manageable pieces or chunks. Smaller chunks are faster to process and analyze compared to large, monolithic documents. This results in quicker response times from the chatbot.

Document chunking helps also with the relevancy of the output, because when a user asks a question, it is often only in a specific part of a document. Chunking allows the system to pinpoint and retrieve just the relevant sections and the chatbot can provide more precise and accurate answers.

Now let’s get back to our application and let’s update the following code by including your Activeloop organization ID. Keep in mind that, by default, your organization ID is the same as your username.

# TODO: use your organization id here. (by default, org id is your username) my_activeloop_org_id = "didogrigorov" my_activeloop_dataset_name = "jetbrains_article_dataset" dataset_path = f"hub://{my_activeloop_org_id}/{my_activeloop_dataset_name}" db = DeepLake(dataset_path=dataset_path, embedding_function=embeddings) # add documents to our Deep Lake dataset db.add_documents(docs)

Another great feature of PyCharm I love is the option TODO notes to be added directly in Python comments. Once you type TODO with capital letters, all notes go to a section of PyCharm where you can see them all:

# TODO: use your organization id here. (by default, org id is your username)

You can click on them and PyCharm directly shows you where they are in your code. I find it very convenient for developers and use it all the time:

If you execute the code till now you should see the following output, if everything works normal:

To find the most similar chunks to a given query, we can utilize the similarity_search method provided by the Deep Lake vector store:

# Check the top relevant documents to a specific query query = "how to check disk usage in linux?" docs = db.similarity_search(query) print(docs[0].page_content) Step 3: Let’s build the prompt for GPT-3

We will design a prompt template that integrates role-prompting, pertinent Knowledge Base data, and the user’s inquiry. This template establishes the chatbot’s persona as an outstanding customer support agent. It accepts two input variables: chunks_formatted, containing the pre-formatted excerpts from articles, and query, representing the customer’s question. The goal is to produce a precise response solely based on the given chunks, avoiding any fabricated or incorrect information.

Step 4: Building the chatbot functionality

To generate a response, we begin by retrieving the top-k (e.g., top-3) chunks that are most similar to the user’s query. These chunks are then formatted into a prompt, which is sent to the GPT-3 model with a temperature setting of 0.

# user question query = "How to check disk usage in linux?" # retrieve relevant chunks docs = db.similarity_search(query) retrieved_chunks = [doc.page_content for doc in docs] # format the prompt chunks_formatted = "\n\n".join(retrieved_chunks) prompt_formatted = prompt.format(chunks_formatted=chunks_formatted, query=query) # generate answer llm = OpenAI(model="gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct", temperature=0) answer = llm(prompt_formatted) print(answer)

If everything works fine, your output should be:

To upload a PDF to ChatGPT, first log into the website and click the paperclip icon next to the text input field. Then, select the PDF from your local hard drive, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive. Once attached, type your query or question into the prompt field and click the upload button. Give the system time to analyze the PDF and provide you with a response.

Step 5: Build conversational history # Create conversational memory memory = ConversationBufferMemory(memory_key="chat_history", input_key="input") # Define a prompt template that includes memory template = """You are an exceptional customer support chatbot that gently answers questions. {chat_history} You know the following context information. {chunks_formatted} Answer the following question from a customer. Use only information from the previous context information. Do not invent stuff. Question: {input} Answer:""" prompt = PromptTemplate( input_variables=["chat_history", "chunks_formatted", "input"], template=template, ) # Initialize the OpenAI model llm = OpenAI(openai_api_key="YOUR API KEY", model="gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct", temperature=0) # Create the LLMChain with memory chain = LLMChain( llm=llm, prompt=prompt, memory=memory ) # User query query = "What was the 5th point about on the question how to remove spotify account?" # Retrieve relevant chunks docs = db.similarity_search(query) retrieved_chunks = [doc.page_content for doc in docs] # Format the chunks for the prompt chunks_formatted = "\n\n".join(retrieved_chunks) # Prepare the input for the chain input_data = { "input": query, "chunks_formatted": chunks_formatted, "chat_history": memory.buffer } # Simulate a conversation response = chain.predict(**input_data) print(response)

Let’s walk through the code in a more conversational manner.

To start with, we set up a conversational memory using `ConversationBufferMemory`. This allows our chatbot to remember the ongoing chat history, using `input_key=”input”` to manage the incoming user inputs.

Next, we design a prompt template. This template is like a script for the chatbot, including sections for chat history, the chunks of information we’ve gathered, and the current user question (input). This structure helps the chatbot know exactly what context it has and what question it needs to answer.

Then, we move on to initializing our language model chain, or `LLMChain`. Think of this as assembling the components: we take our prompt template, the language model, and the memory we set up earlier, and combine them into a single workflow.

When it’s time to handle a user query, we prepare the input. This involves creating a dictionary that includes the user’s question (`input`) and the relevant information chunks (`chunks_formatted`). This setup ensures that the chatbot has all the details it needs to craft a well-informed response.

Finally, we generate a response. We call the `chain.predict` method, passing in our prepared input data. The method processes this input through the workflow we’ve built, and out comes the chatbot’s answer, which we then display.

This approach allows our chatbot to maintain a smooth, informed conversation, remembering past interactions and providing relevant answers based on the context.

Another favorite trick with PyCharm that helped me a lot to build this functionality was the opportunity to put my cursor over a method, to hit the key “CTRL” and click on it.

In conclusion

GPT-3 excels at creating conversational chatbots capable of answering specific questions based on contextual information provided in the prompt. However, ensuring the model generates answers solely based on this context can be challenging, as it often tends to hallucinate (i.e., generate new, potentially false information). The impact of such false information varies depending on the use case.

In summary, we developed a context-aware question-answering system using LangChain, following the provided code and strategies. The process included splitting documents into chunks, computing their embeddings, implementing a retriever to find similar chunks, crafting a prompt for GPT-3, and using the GPT-3 model for text generation. This approach showcases the potential of leveraging GPT-3 to create powerful and contextually accurate chatbots while also emphasizing the importance of being vigilant about the risk of generating false information.

About the author Dido Grigorov

Dido is a seasoned Deep Learning Engineer and Python programmer with an impressive 17 years of experience in the field. He is currently pursuing advanced studies at the prestigious Stanford University, where he is enrolled in a cutting-edge AI program, led by renowned experts such as Andrew Ng, Christopher Manning, Fei-Fei Li and Chelsea Finn, providing Dido with unparalleled insights and mentorship.

Dido’s passion for Artificial Intelligence is evident in his dedication to both work and experimentation. Over the years, he has developed a deep expertise in designing, implementing, and optimizing machine learning models. His proficiency in Python has enabled him to tackle complex problems and contribute to innovative AI solutions across various domains.

Discover why Drupal's latest product will be called 'Drupal CMS' and not just 'Drupal.' Explore the strategic decision-making, community feedback, and future implications behind this significant naming shift that redefines the way we think about Drupal's evolution.

We recently posted a survey seeking community feedback on what features and contrib modules to include in Drupal CMS out of the box, in order to deliver on the vision of getting from install to launch really fast. We were looking for features and modules that align with the Drupal Starshot strategy and consider the primary persona, which is ambitious marketers.

The survey got 60 submissions, with a wide variety of suggestions. Many of these were already on our radar, and closely align with our existing initiatives and work tracks. But it also raised a lot of new and interesting ideas for the leadership team and track leads to consider. We will also likely be posting new work tracks in the next few weeks based on the results, since there are some great suggestions that are not yet covered.

The following is a summary of the survey results, which we are not treating as a 'vote' for any one feature, but it's a great way to validate our plans and determine what other areas to focus on.

Features

There were 108 different feature suggestions, with many that overlapped. Of those that were suggested in more than one submission, all of these are already covered by an initiative or work track: 

• Better page building tools: more intuitive layout builder; drag & drop components; ability to easily add lists to pages; theming tools in the UI; live preview (20) [Experience builder]
• SEO: Meta tags (specifically including content schema and social media sharing); SEO analysis tools (14) [SEO track]
• Form builder (7) [Contact form track]
• Perform content management actions in bulk (3) [Content publishing workflows track]
• Image resizing and cropping tools (3) [Media management track]
• Responsive images (3) [Media management track]
• Login with email (3) [Base recipe track]
• Anti-spam measures (2) [Contact form track]
• Better for search (2) [Advanced search recipe track]
• Ability to add sitewide alerts (2) [Base recipe track]

The remaining feature suggestions were suggested once each, but point to specific areas we could focus on.

Content management & workflows

• Workspaces
• Content workflows
• Content scheduling
• Content cloning
• Simple content access control
• Deleted content recovery
• WYSIWYG editor
• Content import & export tools
• Inline entity creation
• Jobs content recipe
• Event calendar

Security

• Two-factor authentication
• Configurable password policy
• Security compliance tools

Multilingual

• Asymmetric translations
• Capability to display the source content next to the translated content in the node edit form

Media

• SVG support
• Bulk media upload
• Easy linking directly to media files
• AI alt tag generation

Marketing tools

• A/B testing for content
• QR code generation
• Easy to configure social media links
• Social sharing capability

General

• Accessibility checker
• AI enabled content writing 
• Admin menu search
• Infinite scrolling
• SMTP email support
• Entity relationship modeling tool
• Better cookie handling
• Login with social network accounts

Developer tools

• Integrated deployments
• Email rerouting for non-production environments
• New core theme with configurable CSS variables
• Advanced aggregation modernization
• Better exposure of metrics / telemetry

Drupal-specific suggestions

• Automatic Updates
• Project Browser
• Simplified Views UI
• Ability to define "site settings" without affecting configuration
• Safe revision pruning
• Better situational awareness of extensions
• Easy configuration management system
• Easier removal of modules and cleaning up of applied recipes
• Entity hierarchy module in core
• Referential integrity: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2723323
• Poster images for video media: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2954834
• Inline moderation notes for easier collaboration
• Improved file upload experience/widget
• Submission against including Twig Tweak module
• Manual curation tools such as entityqueue

Modules proposed

As with the feature suggestions, some modules were suggested more than once, and are mostly covered by existing streams.

Whether a module will be included will depend on many things, but mainly, it should be required for some functionality that we are planning to deliver. Track leads will propose functionality that will be supported by contrib modules, and then the modules will be assessed for inclusion. We plan to publish further information about module selection and ongoing governance and maintenance as the project progresses.

• Metatag (6) [SEO track]
• Webform (5) [Contact form track]
• Admin Toolbar (3) [Superseded by Navigation module]
• Coffee (3) [Base recipe track]
• Paragraphs (3) [Superseded by Experience builder]
• Simple XML sitemap (3) [SEO track]
• Scheduler / Scheduled Publish (3) [Base recipe track]
• Security Kit (2)
• Captcha (2) [Contact form track]
• Editor Advanced link (2)
• Focal Point (2) [Media management track]
• Linkit (2) [Base recipe track]
• Pathauto (2) [Base recipe track]
• Google Tag / GoogleTag Manager (2) [Analytics track]
• Smart Date (2) [Event track]
• Workspaces (2) [Content publishing workflows track]

Based on this, we might create new tracks for WYSIWYG and security, if we don't feel that we can sufficiently cover these as part of the base recipe.

The other modules suggested were:

• Address
• Back To Top
• Better Exposed Filter
• Block Class
• CKEditor 5 Font Plugin
• CrowdSec
• Disable language
• Disclosure Menu
• DropzoneJS
• ECA: Event - Condition - Action
• Editoria11y Accessibility Checker
• Entity
• Entity Extra Field
• Estimated Read Time
• EU Cookie Compliance (GDPR Compliance)
• Field Permissions
• Fullcalendar View
• Honeypot
• Image Effects
• Inline responsive images
• Keysave
• Layout Builder Asymmetric Translation
• Linkchecker
• Media Alias Display
• Media Directories
• Multiple Fields Remove Button
• Override Node Options
• Quick Node Block
• Responsive Table Filter
• RobotsTxt
• Role Delegation
• Rules
• Search API
• Security Review
• Select (or other)
• Select 2
• Stage File Proxy
• Svg Image
• Drupal Symfony Mailer
• System Tags
• Two-factor Authentication (TFA)
• Token
• Token Filter
• Tour
• Trash
• UI Patterns
• View Unpublished
• Views Bulk Edit
• Views Bulk Operations (VBO)
• Views data export
• Views Load More
• Real-time SEO for Drupal

Review: These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs

Series: Kindom Trilogy #1 Publisher: Orbit Copyright: October 2023 ISBN: 0-316-46342-6 Format: Kindle Pages: 430

These Burning Stars is a science fiction thriller with cyberpunk vibes. It is Bethany Jacobs's first novel and the first of an expected trilogy, and won the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award for the best SF paperback original published in the US.

Generation starships brought humanity to the three star systems of the Treble, where they've built a new and thriving culture of billions. The Treble is ruled by the Kindom, a tripartite government structure built around the worship of six gods and the aristocratic power of the First Families. The Clerisy handle religion, the Secretaries run the bureaucracy, and the Cloaksaan enforce the decisions of the other branches.

The Nightfoots are one of the First Families. They control sevite, the propellant required to move between the systems of the Treble now that the moon Jeve and the sole source of natural jevite has been destroyed. Esek Nightfoot is a cleric, theoretically following the rules of the Clerisy, but she has made a career of training cloaksaan. She is is mercurial, powerful, ruthless, ambitious, politically well-connected, and greatly feared. She is also obsessed with a person named Six: an orphan she first encountered at a training school who was too young to have a gender or a name but who was already one of the best fighters in the school. In the sort of manipulative challenge typical of Esek, she dangled the offer of a place as a student and challenged the child to learn enough to do something impressive. The subsequent twenty years of elusive taunts and mysterious gifts from the impossible-to-locate Six have driven Esek wild.

Cleric Chono was beside Esek for much of that time. One of Six's classmates and another of Esek's rescues, Chono is the rare student who became a cleric rather than a cloaksaan. She is pious, cautious, and careful, the opposite of Esek's mercurial rage, but it's impossible to spend that much time around the woman and not be affected and manipulated by her. As this story opens, Chono is summoned by the First Cleric to join Esek on an assignment: recover a data coin that was stolen from a pirate raid on the Nightfoot compound. He refuses to tell them what data is on it, only saying that he believes it could be used to undermine public trust in the Nightfoot family.

Jun is a hacker with considerably fewer connections to power or government and no desire to meet any of these people. She and her partner Liis make a dubiously legal living from smaller, quieter jobs. Buying a collection of stolen data coins for an archivist consortium is riskier than she prefers, but she's been tracking down rumors of this coin for months. The deal is worth a lot of money, enough to make a huge difference for her family.

This is the second book I've read recently with strong cyberpunk vibes, although These Burning Stars mixes them with political thriller. This is a messy world with complicated political and religious systems, a lot of contentious history, and vast inequality. The story is told in two interleaved time sequences: the present-day fight over the data coin and the information that it contains, and a sequence of flashbacks telling the history of Esek's relationship with Six and Chono. Jun's story is the most cyberpunk and the one I found the most enjoyable to read, but Chono is a good viewpoint character for Esek's vicious energy and abusive charisma.

Six is not a viewpoint character. For most of the book, they're present mostly in shadows, glimpses, and consequences, but they're the strongest character of the book. Both Esek and Six are larger than life, creatures of legend stuffed into mundane politics but too full of strong emotions, both good and bad, to play by any of the rules. Esek has the power base and access to the levers of government, but Six's quiet competence and mercilessly targeted morality may make them the more dangerous of the pair.

I found the twisty political thriller part of this book engrossing and very difficult to put down, but it was also a bit too much drama for me in places. Jacobs has some surprises in store, one of which I did not expect at all, and they're set up beautifully and well-done within the story, but Esek and Six become an emotional star that the other characters orbit around and are in danger of getting pulled into. Chono is an accomplished and powerful character in her own right, but she's also an abuse victim, and while those parts are realistic, I didn't entirely enjoy reading them. There is quiet competence here alongside the drama, but I think I wanted the balance of emotion to tip a bit more towards the competence.

There is one thing that Jacobs does with the end of the book that greatly impressed me. Unfortunately I can't even hint at it for fear of spoilers, but the ending is unsettling in a way that I found surprising and thought-provoking. I think what I can say is that this book respects the intelligence and skill of secondary characters in a way that I think is rare in a story with such overwhelming protagonists. I'm still thinking about that, and it's going to pull me right into the sequel.

This is not going to be to everyone's taste. Esek is a viewpoint character and she can be very nasty. There's a lot of violence and abuse, including one rather graphic fight scene that I thought dragged on much longer than it needed to. But it's a satisfying, complex story with a true variety of characters and some real surprises. I'm glad I read it.

Followed by On Vicious Worlds, not yet published as I write this.

Content warnings: emotional and physical abuse, graphic violence, off-screen rape and sexual abuse of minors.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Happy to announce a new package: RcppMagicEnum. It arrived on CRAN yesterday following the resumption of normal service following the CRAN summer break. RcppMagicEnum brings the magicenum library by Daniil Goncharov to R.

Modern C++ is powerful, but still lacks reflection. This may change with C++26 but until then this library can help. A simple example, also shown on the README is as follows (and can be called from R via Rcpp::sourceCpp() if the RcppMagicEnum package is installed):

// [[Rcpp::depends(RcppMagicEnum)]] #include <RcppMagicEnum> // define a simple enum class, it uses optional typing as well as optional assigned values enum class Color : int { RED = -10, BLUE = 0, GREEN = 10 }; // [[Rcpp::export]] void example() { // instantiate an enum value in variable 'val' auto val = Color::RED; // show the current value on stdout Rcpp::Rcout << "Name of enum: " << magic_enum::enum_name(val) << std::endl; Rcpp::Rcout << "Integer value of enum: " << magic_enum::enum_integer(val) << std::endl; } /*** R example() */

It produces the following output (where the ‘meta-comment’ at the end ensure the included and created-by-sourcing function example() is also called):

> Rcpp::sourceCpp("miniex.cpp") > example() Name of enum: RED Integer value of enum: -10 >

The plan to experiment some more with this and then see if we could possible make factor variables map to such enums and vice versa. Help and discussion input is always welcome, and could be submitted either on the rcpp-devel list or as an issue at the repo.

The short NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2024-07-31)

• Initial version and CRAN upload

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

It has been a few months since I wrote about Rye here last. You might remember that in February I passed over stewardship of my Rye packaging too to Astral. The folks over there have been super busy in building a lot of amazing tooling for Python packaging in the last few months. If you have been using Rye in the last few months you will have noticed that the underlying resolver and installer uv got a lot better and faster.

As of the most recent release, uv also gained a lot of functionality that previously required Rye such as manipulating pyproject.toml files, workspace support, local package references and script installation. It now also can manage Python installations for you so it's getting much closer.

If you are using Rye today, consider this blog post as a reminder that you should probably starting having a closer look at uv and give feedback to the Astral folks.

I gave a talk just recently in Prague at EuroPython about my current view of the Python packaging, the lessons I learned when creating Rye and one of the things I mentioned there is that the goal of a packaging tool has to be that it will dominate the space. The tool that absolutely everybody uses has to be the best tool: it's the thing any new person to Python gets to see when they start their programming journey. After that talk a lot of people walked up to me and had a lot of questions about that in particular.

Python in the last two years has become an incredibly hot and popular platform for many new developers. That has in part been fueled by all the investments and interest that went into AI and ML. I really want everybody who gets to learn and experience Python not to remember it as an old language with bad tooling, but as an amazing language with a stellar developer experience. Unfortunately that's not the case today because there is so much choice, so many tools that are not quite compatible, and by the inconsistency everywhere. I have seen people walk down one tool, just to re-emerge moving their entire stack to conda and back because they hit some wall.

Domination is a goal because it means that most investment will go into one stack. I can only re-iterate my wish and desire that Rye (and with it a lot of other tools in the space) should cease to exist once the dominating tool has been established. For me uv is poised to be that tool. It's not quite there today yet for all cases, but it will be in no time, and now is the moment to step up as a community and start to start to rally around it. That doesn't mean that this tool will be the tool forever. Things come and go and maybe there is a future for some other tool.

But today I'm looking forward to the moment when there will be a final release of Rye that is no remaining functionality other than to just largely alias to uv, that retires Rye specific functionality and migrates you over to uv.

However I only have the power to retire one tool, and that won't be enough. Today we are using so many other package managing solutions for Python and we should be advertising fewer. I understand how much time and effort went into many of those, and everybody's contributions are absolutely appreciated. Software like Rye and uv were built on the advancements of the ecosystem underneath it. They leverage years and years of work that went into migrating the Python ecosystems from setup.py files to eggs and finally wheels. From not having a metadata standard to having one. From coupled to decoupled build systems. Much of what makes Rye so enjoyable were individuals that worked towards making redistributable and downloadable Python binaries a possibility. There was a lot of work that was put into building out an amazing ecosystem of Rust crates and Python libraries needed to make these tools work. All of that brought us to that point where we are today.

But it is my believe that we need to take the next step and be willing to say as a community that some tools are no longer recommended. Maybe not today, but that moment will come quicker than we think. I remember a time when many of us who maintained Python libraries pointed new developers to using ez_setup.py and easy_install in our onboarding guides. Years later we removed the mentions of ez_setup.py from our guides to replace them with pip. Some of us have pointed developers at pip-tools, at poetry or PDM. Many projects today even show 5 different installation guides because of that wild variety of tools available because they no longer feel like they can recommend one.

If you maintain an important Python project I would ask you to give uv a try and ask yourself if you would consider pointing people towards it. I think that this is our best shot in the community at finding ourselves in a much better position than we have ever been.

Have a look at the blog post that Charlie from Astral wrote about what uv can do today. It's a true accomplishment worth celebrating and enjoying.

Postscriptum: there is an elephant in the room which is that Astral is a VC funded company. What does that mean for the future of these tools? Here is my take on this: for the community having someone pour money into it can create some challenges. For the PSF and the core Python project this is something that should be considered. However having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed.

Ever wished you could take an Intro to Python training with me, but you don’t work for a company with a generous training budget? I’m running a Python-learning program just for this situation.

Python High Five is a 10-week Python jumpstart program that starts this September.

Set aside the time to learn ⌚

One of the biggest problems for folks starting to learn Python is setting aside the time. And even if you do manage to set aside the time, you’ll often hit a roadblock where you feel confused.

Python High Five is a way to keep a daily learning habit and to get help when find yourself stuck.

This program is based around daily practice. Monday through Friday you’ll pick 30 minutes from your schedule, at any time that works you. During those 30 minutes, you’ll watch a 5 minute video, work on the day’s exercise, and reflect on your progress.

The most effective learning is hands-on 🖐️

Python High Five is all about learning through writing Python code. Each week we’ll dive deeper into Python, building upon what we’ve learned so far.

When you find yourself stuck you can get help through an asynchronous group chat and weekly office hour sessions. In addition to our weekly office hours together, I’ll check the chat each day, respond to questions, and provide guidance.

Proven learning techniques behind the scenes 📝

The daily check-ins allow for daily accountability. The group chat also provides both a community of peers to rely on, and guidance from an experienced Python trainer (me).

We’ll also be using proven learning techniques behind the scenes:

• Retrieval practice: you don’t learn by putting information into your head, but by trying to take it out; for Python learning, that means writing code.
• Spaced repetition: cramming is less effective than learning spaced out over time, which is why we’ll spend 30 minutes each weekday instead of spending a few hours every week.
• Interleaving: each day’s exercise isn’t predictably themed because a bit of unpredictability can be really improve learning outcomes.
• Elaboration: your daily check-in isn’t just about reflection: it’s also a helpful learning tool!

Plus, we’ll be working through curriculum I’ve been developing and iterating on for many years. I have taught these topics in many different settings to folks from many different backgrounds.

Form a daily learning habit 🔁

Any 10-week program will be just the start of a Python learning habit. You’ll need to keep up your Python after Python High Five ends, either by promptly applying your skills to a new project or diving deeper into Python with continued daily practice.

That’s why I’m offering an 80% discount for High Five attendees on one year of Python Morsels, which is my skill-building service designed to help deepen your Python skills every week. You can see more details on that here.

Ready to start your Python journey? ⛰️

Are you ready to start your Python journey with a solid foundation?

Read more about Python High Five and decide whether this is for you.

Keep in mind that while the program begins on September 9, enrollment closes on August 31. So check the FAQs and if you have additional questions, be sure to email me soon!

Python programmers typically check for empty lists by relying on truthiness.

Table of contents

1. Checking the length of a list
2. Evaluating the truthiness of a list
3. Comparing for equality with an empty list
4. Truthiness checks are non-emptiness checks on lists

Checking the length of a list

One way to check whether a list is empty is to check the length of that list. If the length is 0, the list must be empty:

>>> numbers = [] >>> if len(numbers) == 0: ... print("The list is empty.") ... The list is empty.

Or if we wanted to check for non-empty lists, we could make sure that the length is greater than 0:

>>> if len(numbers) > 0: ... print("The list is NOT empty.") ...

But this is actually not the most typical way to check for an empty list in Python.

Evaluating the truthiness of a list

Many Python users prefer to …

Read the full article: https://www.pythonmorsels.com/checking-for-an-empty-list-in-python/

#643 – AUGUST 20, 2024
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Interacting With REST APIs and Python

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Django: Create Management Sub-Commands

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Automating Boolean-Based SQL Injection With Python

SQL injection is the process of tricking a database into doing unintended things by modifying the input values to a query. Boolean-based blind injection is a subset that reveals structural information about the database. These can be hard to craft by hand, this article shows you how to automate the process to help do penetration testing.
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An HTML email utilizes HTML code for presentation. Its design is heavy and looks like a modern web page, rich with visual elements like images, videos, etc., to emphasize different parts of an email's content.

Building email templates tailored to your brand is useful for various email marketing purposes such as welcoming new customers, order confirmation, and so on. Email template customization allows you to save time by not having to create emails from scratch each time. You can also include an email link in HTML to automatically compose emails in your email client.

In this step-by-step guide, you'll learn how to build an HTML email template, add a CSS email design to it, and send it to your target audience.

Setting Up Your Template Directory and Jinja2

Follow the steps below to set up your HTML email template directory and Jinja2 for Python email automation:

• Create a Template Directory: To hold your HTML email templates, you will need to set up a template directory inside your project module. Let's name this directory - html_emailtemp.

• Install Jinja2: Jinja is a popular templating engine for Python that developers use to create configuration files, HTML documents, etc. Jinja2 is its latest version. It lets you create dynamic content via loops, blocks, variables, etc. It's used in various Python projects, like building websites and microservices, automating emails with Python, and more.

  Use this command to install Jinja2 on your computer:

  pip install jinja2

Creating an HTML Email Template

To create an HTML email template, let's understand how to code your email step by step. If you want to modify your templates, you can do it easily by following the steps below:

Step 1: Structure HTML

A basic email will have a proper structure - a header, a body, and a footer.

• Header: Used for branding purposes (in emails, at least)
• Body: It will house the main text or content of the email
• Footer: It's at the end of the email if you want to add more links, information, or call-to-actions (CTA)

Begin by creating your HTML structure, keeping it simple since email clients are less compatible than web browsers. For example, using tables is preferable for custom email layouts.

Here's how you can create a basic HTML mail with a defined structure:

<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <title>HTML Email Template</title> <style type="text/css"> /* Add your CSS here */ </style> </head> <body> <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td align="center"> <table width="600" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <!-- Header --> <tr> <td style="background-color: #1c3f60; color: #ffffff; text-align: center; padding: 20px;"> <h1>Your order is confirmed</h1> </td> </tr> <!-- Body --> <tr> <td style="padding: 20px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.6; color:#ffffff;"> <p>The estimated delivery date is 22nd August 2024.</p> </td> </tr> <!-- Footer --> <tr> <td style="background-color: #ff6100; color: #000000; text-align: center; padding: 20px;"> <p>For additional help, contact us at support@domain.com</p> </td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>

Explanation:

• <!DOCTYPE html>: This declares HTML as your document type.
• <html>: This is an HTML page's root element.
• <head>: This stores the document's metadata, like CSS styles.
• <style>: CSS styles are defined here.
• <body>: This stores your email's main content.
• <table>: This tag defines the email layout, giving it a tabular structure with cells and rows, which makes rendering easier for email clients.
• <tr>: This tag defines the table's row, allowing vertical content stacking.
• <td>: This tag is used to define a cell inside a row. It contains content like images, text, buttons, etc.

Step 2: Structure Your Email

Now, let's create the structure of your HTML email. To ensure it's compatible with different email clients, use tables to generate a custom email layout, instead of CSS.

<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td align="center"> <table width="600" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border: 1px solid #1c3f60; padding: 20px;"> <tr> <td align="center"> <h1 style="color: #7ed957;">Hi, Jon!</h1> <p style="font-size: 16px; color: #ffde59;">Thank you for being our valuable customer!</p> </td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> Styling the Email with CSS

Once you've defined your email structure, let's start designing emails with HTML and CSS:

Inline CSS

Use inline CSS to ensure different email clients render CSS accurately and preserve the intended aesthetics of your email style.

<p style="font-size: 16px; color: blue;">Styled paragraph.</p> Adjusting Style

Users might use different devices and screen sizes to view your email. Therefore, it's necessary to adapt the style to suit various screen sizes. In this case, we'll use media queries to achieve this goal and facilitate responsive email design.

<style type="text/css"> @media screen and (max-width: 600px) { .container { width: 100% !important; padding: 10px !important; } } </style> <table class="container" width="600"> <!-- Content --> </table>

Explanation:

• @media screen and (max-width: 600px) {....}: This is a media query that targets device screens of up to 600 pixels, ensuring the style applies only to these devices, such as tablets and smartphones.
• width: 100% !important;: This style changes the width of the table - .container. The code instructs that the table width be set to full screen, not 600px.
• !important: This rule overrides other styles that may conflict with it.
• padding: 10px !important;: Inside the .container table, a padding of 10px is added to the table.

Adding CTA Button and Links

Here, we are adding a call to action (CTA) link at the button - "Get a 30-day free trial" that points to this page - https://www.mydomain.com.

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="margin: auto;"> <tr> <td align="center" style="background-color: #8c52ff; padding: 10px 20px; border-radius: 5px;"> <a href="https://www.mydomain.com" target="_blank" style="color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">Get a 30-day free trial</a> </td> </tr> </table>

Let's Now Look at the Complete HTML Email Template:

<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <title>HTML Email Template</title> <style type="text/css"> /* Adding the CSS */ body { margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } table { border-collapse: collapse; } .mailcontainer { width: 100%; max-width: 600px; margin: auto; background-color: #ffffff; } .header { background-color: #1c3f60; color: #ffffff; text-align: center; padding: 20px; } .body { padding: 20px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.6; background-color: #1c3f60; color: #7ed957; } .footer { background-color: #ff6100; color: #000000; text-align: center; padding: 20px; } .cta { background-color: #8c52ff; padding: 10px 20px; border-radius: 5px; color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; } @media screen and (max-width: 600px) { .container { width: 100% !important; padding: 10px !important; } } </style> </head> <body> <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td align="center"> <table class="container" width="600" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <!-- Header --> <tr> <td class="header"> <h1>Your order is confirmed</h1> </td> </tr> <!-- Body --> <tr> <td class="body"> <p>The estimated delivery date is 22nd August 2024.</p> <p style="font-size: 16px; color: blue;">Styled paragraph.</p> <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border: 1px solid #1c3f60; padding: 20px;"> <tr> <td align="center"> <h1 style="color: #7ed957;">Hi, Jon!</h1> <p style="font-size: 16px; color: #ffde59;">Thank you for being our valuable customer!</p> </td> </tr> </table> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="margin: auto;"> <tr> <td align="center" style="background-color: #8c52ff; padding: 10px 20px; border-radius: 5px;"> <a href="https://www.mydomain.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">Get a 30-day free trial</a> </td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> <!-- Footer --> <tr> <td style="background-color: #ff6100; color: #000000; text-align: center; padding: 20px;"> <p>For additional help, contact us at support@domain.com</p> </td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>

Explanation:

• .mailcontainer: This is a class that you can use to style your email content's main section. It's given a set width, margin, border, and color.
• .header, .footer, .body: These are classes used to style your email's header, footer, and body, respectively.
• .cta: This class allows you to style your buttons, such as CTA buttons, with a specified color, border design, padding, etc.

Bringing Everything Together With Jinja2

Having created our HTML template, it's now time to bring everything together using the Jinja2 templating engine.

Import Project Modules

You've already set up your template directory - html_emailtemp. Now you can find and render templates using code. But before you do that, import the relevant project modules using the code below:

from jinja2 import Environment, PackageLoader, select_autoescape env = Environment(loader=PackageLoader('email_project', 'html_emailtemp'), autoescape=select_autoescape(['html', 'xml']))

Explanation:

• Environment: Jinja2 utilizes a central object, the template Environment. Its instances store global objects and configurations, and load your email templates from a file.

• PackageLoader: This configures Jinja2 to load email templates.

• autoescape: To mitigate security threats such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and protect your code, you can escape values (that are passed to the email template) while rendering HTML using the command autoescape. Or, you can validate user inputs to reject malicious code.

  For security, autoescape is set to True to enable escaping values. If you turn it to False, Jinja2 won't be able to escape values, and XSS attacks may occur. To enable autoescape, set autoescape to True:

  env = Environment(loader=PackageLoader("myapp"), autoescape=True)

Load Your Template

Once done, a template environment will be created with a template loader to find email templates created inside your project module's template folder.

Next, load your HTML email template using the method - get_template(). This function will return your loaded template. It also offers several benefits such as enabling email template inheritance, so you can reuse the template in multiple scenarios.

template1 = env.get_template("myemailtemplate.html")

Render the Template

To render your email template, use the method - render()

html1 = template1.render()

As these HTML email templates are dynamic, you can pass keyworded arguments (kwargs) with Jinja2 to the render function. The kwargs will then be passed to your email template. Here's how you can render your templates using the destined user's name - "Jon Doe" - in your email.

html1 = template1.render(name="Jon Doe")

Let's look at the complete code for this section:

from jinja2 import Environment, PackageLoader, select_autoescape env = Environment(loader=PackageLoader("email_project", "html_emailtemp"), autoescape=select_autoescape(["html", "xml"])) template1 = env.get_template("myemailtemplate.html") html1 = template1.render() Sending the Email

To send an email, you can use the application-level, straightforward protocol - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). This protocol streamlines the email sending process and determines how to format, send, and encrypt your emails between the source and destination mail servers.

In this instance, we'll send emails in Python via SMTP since Python offers a built-in module for email sending. To send emails, Python provides a library, 'smtplib', to facilitate effortless interaction with the SMTP protocol.

To get started:

Install 'smtplib': Ensure you have installed Python on your system. Now, import 'smtplib' to set up connectivity with the mail server.

import smtplib

Define your HTML parameter: Define your HTML parameter for the mail object where you'll keep your HTML template. It will instruct email clients to render the template.

Here's the full code for this section:

import smtplib from email.mime.text import MIMEText # MIMEText is a class from the email package from jinja2 import Template # Let's use Template class for our HTML template sender = "<a href='mailto:sender1@gmail.com' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer'>sender1@gmail.com</a>" recipient = "<a href='mailto:recipient1@gmail.com' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer'>recipient1@gmail.com</a>" subject = "Your order is confirmed!" with open('myemailtemplate.html', 'r') as f: template1 = Template(f.read()) # Enter the HTML template html_emailtemp = """ <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang='en'> <head> <meta charset='UTF-8'> <meta name='viewport' content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1'> <title>HTML Email Template</title> <style type='text/css'> # Adding the CSS body { margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #f4f4f4; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } table { border-collapse: collapse; } .mailcontainer { width: 100%; max-width: 600px; margin: auto; background-color: #ffffff; } .header { background-color: #1c3f60; color: #ffffff; text-align: center; padding: 20px; } .body { padding: 20px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.6; background-color: #1c3f60; color: #7ed957; } .footer { background-color: #ff6100; color: #000000; text-align: center; padding: 20px; } .cta { background-color: #8c52ff; padding: 10px 20px; border-radius: 5px; color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; } @media screen and (max-width: 600px) { .container { width: 100% !important; padding: 10px !important; } } </style> </head> <body> <table width='100%' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0'> <tr> <td align='center'> <table class='container' width='600' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0'> <!-- Header --> <tr> <td class='header'> <h1>Your order is confirmed</h1> </td> </tr> <!-- Body --> <tr> <td class='body'> <p>The estimated delivery date is 22nd August 2024.</p> <p style='font-size: 16px; color: blue;'>Styled paragraph.</p> <table width='100%' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' style='border: 1px solid #1c3f60; padding: 20px;'> <tr> <td align='center'> <h1 style='color: #7ed957;'>Hi, Jane!</h1> <p style='font-size: 16px; color: #ffde59;'> Thank you for being our valuable customer! </p> </td> </tr> </table> <table cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' style='margin: auto;'> <tr> <td align='center' style='background-color: #8c52ff; padding: 10px 20px; border-radius: 5px;'> <a href='https://www.mydomain.com' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' style='color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;'>Get a 30-day free trial</a> </td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> <!-- Footer --> <tr> <td style='background-color: #ff6100; color: #000000; text-align: center; padding: 20px;'> <p>For additional help, contact us at support@domain.com</p> </td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html> """ template1 = Template(html_emailtemp) html1 = template1.render(name="Jon Doe") # Attach your MIMEText objects for HTML message = MIMEText(html1, 'html') message['Subject'] = subject message['From'] = sender message['To'] = recipient # Send the HTML email with smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.gmail.com', 465) as server: server.login(username, password) server.sendmail(sender, recipient, message.as_string())

Explanation:

• sender: The sender's email address
• recipient: The recipient's email address
• from email.mime.text import MIMEText: This is used to import the class MIMEText, enabling you to attach your HTML template in the email.
• smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.gmail.com', 465) as server:: This establishes a connection with your email provider's (Gmail's) SMTP server using port 465. If you are using another SMTP provider, use their domain name, such as smtp.domain.com, with an appropriate port number. The connection is secured with SSL.
• server.login(username, password): This function allows you to log in to the email server using your username and password.
• server.sendemail(sender, recipient, message.as_string()): This command sends the HTML email.

Testing

Before sending your HTML email, test it to understand how different email clients render CSS and HTML. Testing tools like Email on Acid, Litmus, etc. can assist you.

Conclusion

To build custom email templates with HTML and CSS in Python, follow the above instructions. First, begin structuring your HTML email template, style emails with CSS, and then send them to your recipients. Always check your email template's compatibility with different email clients and ensure to keep your HTML simple using tables. Adding an email link in HTML will also allow you to compose an email automatically in your email client and send it to a specific email address.

Drupal CMS is the official name for Drupal Starshot. We officially have the Drupal CMS project on Drupal.org, where the previous prototype has been converted into the official codebase. This monolithic repository will contain the Composer project and packages (recipes) that makeup Drupal CMS. 

A while ago a colleague of mine asked about our crash infrastructure in Plasma and whether I could give some overview on it. This seems very useful to others as well, I thought. Here I am, telling you all about it!

Our crash infrastructure is comprised of a number of different components.

• KCrash: a KDE Framework performing crash interception and prepartion for handover to…
• coredumpd: a systemd component performing process core collection and handover to…
• DrKonqi: a GUI for crashes sending data to…
• Sentry: a web service and UI for tracing and presenting crashes for developers

We will look at them in turn. This post introduces KCrash.

KCrash

KCrash, as the name suggests, is our KDE framework for crash handling. While it is a mid-tier framework and could be used by outside projects, it mostly doesn’t make sense to, because some behavior is very KDE-specific.

It installs POSIX signal handlers to intercept crash signals and then prepares the crashed process for handover to coredumpd and DrKonqi. More on these two in another post. Once prepared it sends the crash signal into the next higher level crash handler until the signal eventually reaches the default handler and cause the kernel to invoke the core pattern.

Before that can happen, a bunch of work needs doing inside KCrash. Most of it quite boring, but also somewhat challenging.

You see, when handling a signal you need to only use signal-safe functions. The manpage explains very well why. This proves quite challenging at the level we usually are at (i.e. Qt) because it is entirely unclear what is and isn’t ultimately signal-safe under the hood. Additionally, since we are dealing with crash scenarios, we must not trigger new memory allocation, because the heap management may have had an accident.

To that end, KCrash has to use fairy low-level API. To make that easier to work with, there are actually two parts to KCrash:

• The Initialization Stage
• The Crash Stage

The Initialization Stage

Initialization is generally triggered by calling KCrash::initialize. You may already wonder what kind of initialization KCrash could possibly need. Well, the obvious one is setting up the signal handling. But beyond that the init stage is also used to prepare us for the crash stage. I’ve already mentioned the serious constraints we will encounter once the signal hits, so we had best be prepared for that. In particular we’ll do as much of the work as possible during initialization. This most important includes copying QString content into pre-allocated char * instances such that we later only need to read existing memory. The second most important aspect is the metadata file preparation for use in…

The Crash Stage

Once initialization has happened, we are ready for crashes. Ideally the application doesn’t crash, of course. 😉

But if it does the biggest task is rescuing our data!

Metadata

Inside KCrash we have the concept of Metadata: everything we know about the crashed application: the signal, process ID, executable, used graphics device… and so on and so forth. All this data is collected into a metadata file on-disk in ~/.cache/kcrash-metadata at the time of crash.

Here’s an example file:

[KCrash] exe=/usr/bin/kwin_wayland glrenderer= platform=wayland appname=kwin_wayland apppath=/usr/bin signal=11 pid=1353 appversion=6.1.80 programname=KWin bugaddress=submit@bugs.kde.org

The actual fields vary depending on what is available for any given application, but it’s generally more or less what is shown in the example.

This metadata file will later be consumed by DrKonqi in an effort to obtain information that only existed at runtime inside the application - such as the version that was running, or whether it was running in legacy X11 mode.

Handoff

Once the metadata is safely saved to disk, KCrash simply calls raise(). This re-raises the signal into the default handler, and through that causes a core dump.

What happens next is up to the system configuration as per the core manpage.

The recommended setup for distributions is that a crash handler be configured as core_pattern and that this handler consumes the crash. We recommend an implementation of the coredumpd and journald interfaces as that will then allow our crash handler to come in and log the crash with KDE.

So that was KCrash, the first in our four-step crash-handling pipeline. In the next blog post I’ll tell you all about the next one: coredumpd.

This course uses three problems often covered in introductory astro-physics courses to play in Python. Along the way you’ll learn some astronomy, and how to use a variety of datascience libraries like NumPy, Matplotlib, pandas, and pint.

In this video course you’ll learn about:

• Introductory astrophysics topics
• Working with dataframes in pandas
• Writing code that uses scientific units
• Visualizing information with Matplotlib

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

As a Drupal 7 user, you might feel the pressure of the impending end-of-life (EOL) announcement. While Drupal 7 has served us well over the years, preparing for the future is essential. However, The Drupal Association has partners who offer D7 Extended Security Support.  you can confidently extend the life of your Drupal 7 site while strategically planning your migration to newer versions of Drupal. Find a partner here.

The Importance of Planning Your Migration

Migrating from Drupal 7 is crucial for staying current with new features, security updates, and performance improvements. There are significant advantages to moving to newer versions of Drupal:

• Enhanced Security: Newer versions of Drupal come with advanced security measures that protect your site from emerging threats.

• Modern Features: Newer Drupal versions introduce features that streamline content management, enhance user experience, and improve site performance.

• Better Performance: Newer versions are optimized for speed and efficiency, providing a better experience for your users.

• Community Support: With most of the Drupal community moving forward, staying on an outdated version might limit your access to community resources and modules.

To find a Drupal 7 Migration Partner to lead your migration, reach out to our Certified Migrations Partners that offer services in these categories.

• Enterprise Grade D7 Migrations

• Mid-Scale D7 Migrations

• Freelancers and small shops for smaller D7 Migrations

• D7 Extended Security Support

by por Andrew Gonçalves

Debian Day in Santa Maria - RS 2024 was held after a 5-year hiatus from the previous version of the event. It took place on the morning of August 16, in the Blue Hall of the Franciscan University (UFN) with support from the Debian community and the Computing Practices Laboratory of UFN.

The event was attended by students from all semesters of the Computer Science, Digital Games and Informational Systems, where we had the opportunity to talk to the participants.

Around 60 students attended a lecture introducing them to Free and Open Source Software, Linux and were introduced to the Debian project, both about the philosophy of the project and how it works in practice and the opportunities that have opened up for participants by being part of Debian.

After the talk, a packaging demonstration was given by local DD Francisco Vilmar, who demonstrated in practice how software packaging works in Debian.

I would like to thank all the people who helped us:

• Debian Project
• Professor Ana Paula Canal (UFN)
• Professor Sylvio André Garcia (UFN)
• Laboratory of Computing Practices
• Francisco Vilmar (local DD)

And thanks to all the participants who attended this event asking intriguing questions and taking an interest in the world of Free Software.

Photos:

por Andrew Gonçalves

O Debian Day em Santa Maria - RS 2024 foi realizado após 5 anos de hiato, foi feito durante a manhã do dia 16/08/2024 no Salão Azul da Universidade Franciscana (UFN) com apoio da comunidade Debian e do Laboratório de Práticas da Computação da UFN.

O evento contou com alunos de todos os semestres dos cursos de Ciência da Computação, Jogos Digitais e Sistemas de Informação, fizemos um coffee break onde tivemos a oportunidade de conversar com os participantes.

Cerca de 60 alunos prestigiaram uma palestra de introdução ao Software Livre e de Código Aberto, Linux e foram introduzidos ao projeto Debian, tanto sobre a filosofia do projeto, até como ele acontece na prática e oportunidades que se abriram para participantes do projeto por fazerem parte do Debian.

Após a palestra foi feita uma demonstração de empacotamento pelo DD local Francisco Vilmar, que demonstrou na prática como funciona o empacotamento de software no Debian.

Gostaria de agradecer a todas as pessoas que nos ajudaram:

• Projeto Debian
• Professora Ana Paula Canal (UFN)
• Professor Sylvio André Garcia
• Laboratório de Práticas da Computação
• Francisco Vilmar (DD local)

E um muito obrigado a todos os participantes que nos prestigiaram neste evento fazendo perguntas intrigantes e se interessando pelo mundo do Software Livre.

Algumas fotos:

Faceted search offers users with a superior search experience by displaying filters against their search results. It is particularly useful for websites having large catalogues and listings. Once the user types in their search query, they will be presented with a list of relevant filter options to further narrow down their search. These filtering elements are facets.Previously Facet API in Drupal 9, the Facet module in Drupal 10 enables your website with faceted searching abilities. Let’s look at configuring and implementing Faceted search with Drupal’s own search server, Search API. What is Faceted Search? If your users are finding it hard to see what they are searching for even after keying in their search query, they are bound to get frustrated. Faceted search provides users with multiple filters at the same time for the various attributes of the content. The facets provided are based on the search query the user has executed. Facets will also display the number of matched results (usually within brackets) next to it. Let’s take a look at this below screenshot to understand Facets better. In one of our recent Drupal projects, a quick search for Homes in Columbia on this website presents to you with facets like Communities, Hot Deals, Quick Move-ins and more. You will also see the count of the results next to each facet. So, a query with “Columbia” keyword is sent to the search server to retrieve the already configured and indexed categories (Communities, Hot Deals, etc.) Installing the Facets Module for Drupal 10 As previously discussed, we will be implementing Faceted search using Drupal’s Search API module.  Step 1: Enabling the modules Install and enable these modules •    The Facet Module •    Search API module Step 2: Creating Content Types Create the content you would like to include in the faceted search by adding Content types as shown below. You can also use the default content types provided by Drupal. Step 3: Configuring the Search server Navigate to Configuration -> Search and metadata -> Search-API from the admin interface to configure your search server. Give a name to your search server (here - data server).  Step 4: Configuring the Search Index Next, configure the search index to improve the search performance. Navigate to Configuration -> Search and metadata -> Search-API -> Index -> data_index. Give a name to your index and then select Content as your Datasources since we will be indexing the Content entities here. You can then move on to the next section - Configuring the Datasource (here – Content). Here you can choose to select all the bundles or only select a few from the below list to index. Next, select your server that you had already created (here - data server). Select the “Index items immediately” option to begin the indexing process. Click on Save. Step 5: Adding Fields for Indexing Next, we need to add Fields to be indexed. Navigate to Configuration -> Search and metadata ->Search API -> data index and select the Fields tab. Click on the Add fields button to create fields according to your requirement. Step 6: Indexing the Content Under the same location, click on the View tab to start the process of indexing your content. In the Start Indexing Now section, click on the Index Now button. It will then show you a progress bar with the status of the number of items that have been indexed. Step 7: Creating a View Now we will be creating a view for the data that needs to be indexed and displayed to your users. Navigate to Structure -> Views -> Add View. Give a name for the View.Under View Settings dropdown list, select the index that you have created in Step 4.Create a page for your search results by clicking on the Create a page checkbox under the Page Settings tab. Give a name and a path for the same. Under Items to Display, select 0 if you want to display all the results in one page. Else, select a number of results to be displayed. Under Page Display settings, you can select the format in which you want to display your results – Table, Grid, HTML list or Unformatted list. We have selected Unformatted list here. Click on Save. Step 8: Adding Fields to the View Here we will be adding fields that we have indexed earlier to the View.Go to Views, click on Add button next to the Fields section. Select the Fields, click on Add and Configure. Under Render Settings, select the Link to Content checkbox so that the results displayed are clickable.Click Save. Step 9: Configuring the Facets Now let’s begin configuring and enabling the facets. Navigate to Configuration -> Search and meta data -> FacetsClick on the Add Facet button. Select the Facet Source – This will be your View that you created previously.Select the Field – This will display the fields you had added for indexing in Step 5.Give a name to the Facet.Click on Save. Next, you will then see more configuration options for displaying the facets (as shown in the below image). Widgets will list out a number of options like List of links, array, dropdown, etc. You can choose what suits your website the best.Select the “Transform entity ID to label” to avoid displaying the machine name of the content type.Click on Save. Step 10: Placing the Facet blocks in the chosen page regions  Next, place the Facets you created as blocks in a page region of your choice. Navigate to Structure -> Block Layout. Select the region of the page where you would like to place the block containing the Facets.Here, we are selecting Sidebar. Click on the Place Block button next to the Sidebar.In the next dialog box, search for the Facet name and click on Place Block. In the Configure Block section, mention the Search page path that you had previously created. Here -“site-search” is our page we had created. Give a display name for your Block and select the Display title checkbox if you want the block name to be displayed (here – Type).Click on Save Block. The Result And just like that, your faceted search page and functionality is ready! Notice the Facet called Type (display name) that has Basic page and Article listed as content types to filter against.(Note: Since there is no content available under ‘Basic Page’, it will not show up in the filter).   Select Type as ‘Person’   Select Type as ‘Article’ Final Thoughts Implementing faceted search provides users with an easy and fast search experience. In this tutorial, we have used Search API as the search engine. You could also use search servers like Apache Solr, Search API Solr search or Elasticsearch with Drupal 8, whatever suits your requirements. As a leading Drupal development company, Specbee’s Drupal experts can help you build exemplary search experiences. Contact us to know more.

As part of The DropTimes&#039; &quot;Meet the Candidate&quot; campaign for the ongoing Drupal Association Board Elections, Kevin Quillen, Practice Lead at Velir, shares his vision for making Drupal more accessible and appealing worldwide. With over 16 years of experience in the community, Kevin discusses his plans to modernize Drupal.org, attract new developers, and enhance the platform&#039;s global impact. Voting runs until 5 September.

<strong>Topics covered in this episode:</strong><br> <ul> <li><strong><a href="https://github.com/ZeroIntensity/pyawaitable?featured_on=pythonbytes">pyawaitable</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://nrennie.rbind.io/blog/plotnine-annotated-area-chart/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Annotated area charts with plotnine</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://github.com/uname-n/deltabase?featured_on=pythonbytes">DeltaDB</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://pycon.blogspot.com/2024/08/pycon-us-2024-recap-and-recording.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">PyCon US 2024 Recap + Videos are up</a></strong></li> <li><strong>Extras</strong></li> <li><strong>Joke</strong></li> </ul><a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67F3kv6jCEU' style='font-weight: bold;'data-umami-event="Livestream-Past" data-umami-event-episode="397">Watch on YouTube</a><br> <p><strong>About the show</strong></p> <p>Sponsored by us! Support our work through:</p> <ul> <li>Our <a href="https://training.talkpython.fm/?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>courses at Talk Python Training</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://courses.pythontest.com/p/the-complete-pytest-course?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>The Complete pytest Course</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://www.patreon.com/pythonbytes"><strong>Patreon Supporters</strong></a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Connect with the hosts</strong></p> <ul> <li>Michael: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@mkennedy"><strong>@mkennedy@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> <li>Brian: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@brianokken"><strong>@brianokken@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> <li>Show: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@pythonbytes"><strong>@pythonbytes@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> </ul> <p>Join us on YouTube at <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/stream/live"><strong>pythonbytes.fm/live</strong></a> to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesdays at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.</p> <p>Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/friends-of-the-show">our friends of the show list</a>, we'll never share it.</p> <p><strong>Michael #1:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/ZeroIntensity/pyawaitable?featured_on=pythonbytes">pyawaitable</a></p> <ul> <li>CPython API for asynchronous functions.</li> <li>by Peter Bierma</li> <li>It was originally designed to be directly part of CPython - you can read the <a href="https://gist.github.com/ZeroIntensity/8d32e94b243529c7e1c27349e972d926?featured_on=pythonbytes">scrapped PEP</a> about it. </li> <li>Since this library only uses the public ABI, it's better fit outside of CPython, as a library.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Brian #2:</strong> <a href="https://nrennie.rbind.io/blog/plotnine-annotated-area-chart/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Annotated area charts with plotnine</a></p> <ul> <li>Nicola Rennie</li> <li>This is a marvelous, very professional looking plot, and a tutorial for how to achieve it.</li> <li>Uses <a href="https://plotnine.org?featured_on=pythonbytes">plotline</a>, which is “.. an implementation of a <em>grammar of graphics</em> in Python based on ggplot2” <ul> <li>I actually didn’t know the gg in ggplot came from “grammar of graphics”. TIL</li> </ul></li> </ul> <p><strong>Michael #3:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/uname-n/deltabase?featured_on=pythonbytes">DeltaDB</a></p> <ul> <li>A lightweight, comprehensive solution for managing delta tables built on polars and deltalake.</li> <li><a href="https://github.com/delta-io/delta-rs?featured_on=pythonbytes">Deltalake</a>: Delta Lake is an open-source storage format that runs on top of existing data lakes. </li> <li><a href="https://github.com/pola-rs/polars?featured_on=pythonbytes">Polars</a>: Dataframes powered by a multithreaded, vectorized query engine, written in Rust (aka fluent, rust-based pandas)</li> <li>See <a href="https://uname-n.github.io/deltabase/?featured_on=pythonbytes">the docs</a>.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Brian #4:</strong> <a href="https://pycon.blogspot.com/2024/08/pycon-us-2024-recap-and-recording.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">PyCon US 2024 Recap + Videos are up</a></p> <ul> <li>95 countries attended</li> <li>total attendance of 2,991 <ul> <li>2,551 in person</li> <li>440 remote</li> </ul></li> <li>Videos available <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@PyConUS">PyConUS</a> <ul> <li>I recommend <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2Uw4_HvXqvYhjub9bw4uDAmNtprgAvlJ">Playlist → 2024 → view full playlist</a>, as it’s easier to see the talk titles.</li> <li>I’ve got Paul Gannsle’s pytest for unittesters and Amitosh Swain’s Testing Data Pipelines queued up</li> </ul></li> </ul> <p><strong>Extras</strong> </p> <p>Brian:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://courses.pythontest.com/hello-pytest?featured_on=pythonbytes">Hello, pytest!</a> course available as of last Friday. <ul> <li>Now the fastest way to get started using pytest. </li> <li>16 lessons (really 12 + intro, outro, code download, pytest flag cheat sheet)</li> <li>The whole shebang is about 90 min. (faster if you bump up the video speed. :)</li> </ul></li> </ul> <p>Michael:</p> <ul> <li>Cutting back on digital distractions, trying <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dumb-phone/id6504743503?featured_on=pythonbytes">Dumb Phone</a> for iPhone. <ul> <li>See <a href="https://python-bytes-static.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/dumb-phone-experiment.jpeg?featured_on=pythonbytes">screenshot</a></li> </ul></li> <li><a href="https://www.codeinacastle.com/python-zero-to-hero-2024?featured_on=pythonbytes">Code in a Castle Event</a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Joke:</strong> <a href="https://www.talisman.org/tao/?featured_on=pythonbytes">The Tao of Programming: 4.3</a></p> <p>A master was explaining the nature of Tao of to one of his novices, "The Tao is embodied in all software -- regardless of how insignificant," said the master.</p> <p>"Is the Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice.</p> <p>"It is," came the reply.</p> <p>"Is the Tao in a video game?" continued the novice.</p> <p>"It is even in a video game," said the master.</p> <p>"And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?"</p> <p>The master coughed and shifted his position slightly. "The lesson is over for today," he said.</p>

Simon Morvan discusses EvolvingWeb, Drupal development, and CKEditor 5 migration at DrupalCon Portland 2024.