My role on the committer team is that of a release manager. We're the folks who actually create the Drupal core releases that you can install on your site.
xjm Sun, 12/11/2022 - 12:44Images are a crucial consideration when you’re updating or expanding your website. Done right, they're a powerful tool for communicating your message and enriching the user experience. Done wrong, they can leave a bad impression and weaken your digital presence.
This guide explains how to pick meaningful images that create a connection with your audience. You’ll also learn how to optimize, resize, and compress images so they’re ready for the web.
Selecting the Right ImagesTake time to explore the images available to you. You can search and download free images via Unsplash and Pexels.
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Here are some key points to consider:
The Princeton International website encourages students to explore international learning opportunities. Its visual design is inspired by travel websites to create a sense of adventure. It includes a variety of eye-catching photos that showcase the exciting destinations and diverse cultures students can experience.
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The Canada Foundation for Innovation website features banner images that reflect the key themes of each page. A variety of colours, environments, and angles creates visual interest, while simple compositions ensure they don’t get distracted. The white text is positioned over darker and cleaner parts of the image so that it’s easy to read.
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The OCAD U Admissions website features student-created art in a variety of striking styles. It’s a bold visual direction that supports the university’s reputation for excellence in art, design, and digital media.
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Making Touch-Ups
Once you’ve chosen your images, use a photo editing app to fine-tune them. There are a variety of correction tools in Photoshop under Adjustments. Or you could try a free app such as Pixlr or GIMP.
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Adjust the following settings if necessary to enhance your photo and match it to the style of other images on your site:
Use the crop and rotation tools to fix bad angles and reduce visual clutter. You’ll also need to crop images to the aspect ratio specified by your platform’s design. Aspect ratio is the ratio of width to height. For example, an aspect ratio of 1:1 is a perfect square. If you had a 2500px by 3500px image, you’d need to crop the top or bottom of the image by 1000px for a 1:1 aspect ratio.
Saving Images at Retina DimensionsRetina dimensions are a nice way to create a higher-resolution image. It means saving an image at double the required dimensions.
Here’s an example. Let’s say that we are designing a picture for a banner whose actual dimensions are 2400 x 1600px. We would save it as 4800 x 3200px to create a retina image.
The image won’t appear bigger than usual if you’re using web components. Drupal will automatically fit the image into the given physical space. By squeezing twice the number of pixels into the same space, it creates a higher pixel density and therefore a better quality image.
A retina image may appear bigger if you’re creating a WYSIWYG page. You can either force the image dimensions in the front-end or upload the image at its normal (non-retina) dimensions.
Compressing Images for Faster Load TimesIt’s important to balance image quality with image compression. Compressing your images reduces their file size so that loading them is faster and takes less data. This makes your platform more accessible, especially to users with slow-speed internet connections and those who are using mobile data while they’re on the move.
Images should typically be no larger than 300-500KB. Smaller is usually better, especially for smaller-scale images. If many of your images exceed this, users will experience a slow and laggy web performance.
You can run an action in Photoshop to automatically batch and save multiple images in one clean sweep. Export your images at a quality between 80-85%. Finally, compress the images with a free tool like TinyPNG or Compressor before uploading them to your platform.
ImageImage Defining Focal Points in Drupal
Drupal automatically scales your images for desktop, mobile, and tablet. This means you don’t have to upload different versions of the same image.
Some images will scale at the same aspect ratio meaning the image will look the same except smaller or bigger. Other images (e.g. mobile banners) may be cropped to fit various devices meaning parts of the image may not always be visible.
You can control how images scale on different devices by selecting a focal point on the image in Drupal. Preview the image on desktop, mobile, and tablet to ensure it looks good before publishing.
Need more guidance?This article is a great starting point for adding visual interest to your site and ensuring your images look as good as possible.
Want to take your knowledge to the next level? Sign up for training in UX design or content strategy.
//--> //--> //--> //--> //--> + more awesome articles by Evolving WebDrupal 10 will be released on December 14, 2022, with new features and new possibilities. Here's what you need to know.
Making Drupal beautiful with Claro and OIiveroDrupal 10 will have two new default themes, and we are proud to say that we helped push these initiatives forward so that they would be ready and stable for this release.
What's so different about DDEV? It's a container-based local development environment. Here are a few reasons you should give it a try.
In 2022, you have a wide variety of local development environments to choose from, whether you're a designer, developer, tester, or any kind of open source contributor…
How and why we contribute influences our impact on the Drupal community and ecosystem. So, how can we become positive, long-term contributors?
by lee.rowlands / 7 December 2022Ok, so joke link-bait titles aside, this is actually a pretty serious topic. There was a Talking Drupal podcast episode about it and a lot of chatter on Twitter that was nicely summarised in this Drop Times article.
As someone with a long history of contributing to Drupal, I want to wade in on the topic in a constructive fashion to try and help achieve the best outcome for the project and contributors. So, here's some advice from a long-time contributor. Feel free to take it with a grain of salt.
Tip 1 - Work out why you want to contributeSource: https://drupalsouth.org/news/2022/drupalsouth-2022-videos-and-photosBoth individuals and companies need to determine their reasons for contributing. If your reason is to increase your contribution credits and improve your position in the marketplace, then stop. You're doing yourself and your employees a disservice and likely creating additional work for others.
For organisationsIf you're an organisation, your motivations should be something like this:
Co-founder of PreviousNext, Kim Pepper, gave an excellent presentation on the benefits to an organisation that encourages contribution. His talk might be four years old; however, it's still relevant.
PreviousNext has always encouraged contribution, making us an attractive employer for developers. Our average staff tenure is more than five years, which is unheard of in the tech industry. Additionally, it helps when you're pitching for new projects if you have RFQ line items asking you to demonstrate you understand a feature and someone in your team is a maintainer or significant contributor to that feature.
For individualsIf you're an individual, your motivations should be something like:
Whether you're an individual or an employer, it helps to define your contribution goal. Use it to guide your contributions and view each contribution through the lens of your goal. If it doesn't bring you closer to your goal, is it worthwhile? Is there some other way you could contribute?
Tip 2 - Treat contribution as a long-term investmentSource: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gfp-wisconsin-madison-sunset-over-the-train-tracks-by-the-lake.jpgSome forms of contribution are like a sugar hit. Sure, you get a credit, but do you get anything else out of it? Does it bring you closer to your goal? Some examples here include:
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all of these aren't valuable contributions. Some of them are valuable contributions and move the project forward. The reroll might breathe life into a stale issue, the coding standards violation fix might result in the issue passing tests for the first time, and a new README improves our documentation.
These are useful contributions for a new contributor getting used to the mechanics of creating patches or merge requests. However, once you have mastered that skill are you advancing your contribution goals from above if you continue to do it? Are you learning anything new? Are you robbing other newcomers of an opportunity to get started contributing?
So if you're beginning, these type of tasks could easily be what helps you achieve your first contribution goal–but set a limit, acknowledge that you've achieved that goal, and then set a new goal and leave this to other newcomers.
Core committer, security team member and release manager Jess (xjm) (side note, she's looking for work, you should consider hiring or sponsoring her to continue her work on core) once wrote
Even if I ... never visited Drupal.org again, and threw my laptop in Lake Monona, I would continue to get commit mentions for work I did in the past.
And she is 100% right. For the last 11 months, I've been busy on a major client project, but I've continued to receive commit mentions for investments I made in issues in the past. Contribution is a long-term investment, and so you need to wait for that investment to mature. Things can happen slowly at times.
Drupal is a huge and complex project run mostly by volunteer effort. It has a reputation for stability, which sometimes means things take a bit longer in order to consider all the possible side-effects, which leads me into my next tip.
Tip 3 - Get into a regular habitSource: https://flic.kr/p/D2n1NqThe best way to improve your contribution 'investment' yield is to get into a regular habit. Set yourself a target for regular contribution. But to be 100% clear, the target should be for 'acts of contributing' rather than 'contribution credits'.
Back when Drupal 8 was nearing release, I started the patch a day challenge. Little did I know it would be a further two years until Drupal 8 came out. But I kept up the challenge and uploaded at least one patch a day on average for those two years. When Drupal 8 came out, I wound up close to the top ten contributors. To further illustrate xjm's point above, some of these investments continue to result in commit mentions even now, nearly seven years later.
Now, I realise this isn't something everyone can do. At the time, I was working part-time and caring for two school-aged children, so I had some spare time every afternoon as well as an employer willing to give me sponsored contribution time of around 6 hours a week. The luxury of time is something only some have. But getting yourself into a regular habit lets you build up an investment that will mature with time.
Former colleague Donna Benjamin (@kattekrab) once said something along the lines of, "A website is like a garden, not a house, you need to continually tend to it" (sorry if I'm paraphrasing incorrectly, Donna). Contribution is similar; a little bit each day or week, and your investment will bear fruit.
Tip 4 - Find your nicheSource: https://flic.kr/p/y89qMjThe Drupal mentoring team's website slogan was once 'We've got issues'. It's a fun play on the number of tasks in the Drupal issues queues that's still true today. There are over 60,000 open issues for Drupal core alone (9 and 10 only). And the number of open issues for contrib would easily be just as many. So, there are plenty of opportunities for contribution.
My advice would be to find your niche. You could:
For me (@larowlan), my introduction to core development was to find something no-one cared about: the forum module.
For my colleague Mohit Aghera (@mohit_aghera) it was the Needs tests tag (2500 issues in core alone). Through this effort, Mohit gained a deep understanding of writing tests for Drupal core, a highly valued skill–so much so that we asked him to come and work for us.
For Stephen Mustgrave (@smustgrave), it is the Needs review queue status (2700 issues in core alone). By reviewing other people's work, Stephen achieves his contribution goal of learning the inner workings of Drupal and gives back to something he uses every day. Reviewing is an under-appreciated contribution task that allows you to learn from and teach other developers by reviewing and suggesting changes to their code, all whilst steadily increasing the areas of core you understand. Stephen is now a maintainer of the Block Content module in core and (at the time of writing) proposed as maintainer for both the Telephone and Text modules. In addition, he has built relationships with several core contributors who know him by name and recognise his value to the community.
Tip 5 - Contribute in ways that help the ecosystemSource: https://flic.kr/p/2kBZB1VThe health of Drupal relies on contributions from the community. If contributions don't benefit the long-term health of the ecosystem, does Drupal continue to be relevant and innovative? Contributions that actively move the project forward are more likely to have a greater velocity.
Think of helpful contributions like:
Suppose you're an organisation looking to increase your contribution but are unsure how to start. In that case, one approach could be to sponsor an existing experienced contributor to establish, grow or maintain your team's capabilities. As mentioned above, Core committer, security team member and release manager Jess (@xjm) is looking for work, as is Core Javascript Maintainer Théodore Biadala (@nod_).
Here at PreviousNext we sponsor V Spagnolo (@quietone) to work on Drupal core. When announcing this sponsorship, we described it as a new and exciting way for PreviousNext to give back to the project as well as the community.
In this scenario, @quietone works solely on Drupal contribution, but there are other models where organisations can bring in an experienced Drupal contributor for a mix of contribution and client work. For example, Kristen Pol (@Kristen Pol) is employed by another Australian agency to work on client projects and to help turbo-charge company Drupal contribution efforts. With her existing network of contacts and experience contributing to Drupal, Kristen can help her colleagues navigate the issue queues and contribute. With Kristen on the team, they get the dual benefit of Kristen applying her expertise on client projects and her contribution experience to help their team maximise the impact of their contributions.
Thoughts and comments?What do you think? Let me know in the comments, or feel free to reach out to me on the shiny new Drupal Community Mastodon Instance. And of course, if you want to get more involved with contributing to Drupal, say hi in the Drupal community slack on any of the many general or specialist channels we have dedicated to co-ordinating contribution such as #contribute, #d10readiness or #bugsmash.
Tagged Contribution