Drupal Planet

How can more maintainable custom code in Drupal be written? Refactor it to follow SOLID software design principles. As long SOLID purity isn't pursued into an endless rabbit hole, SOLID principles can improve project maintainability. When a project has low complexity, it is worthwhile to respect these principles because they're simple to implement. When a project is complex, it is worthwhile to respect these principles to make the project more maintainable.

Content management systems (CMSs) are the engine that drive content creation on the web today. They form the foundation that we build on for publishing and sharing information, creating digital experiences and conducting online retail. WordPress and Drupal are staples in the CMS world and they have both been around a long time. WordPress is known for its intuitive and easy-to-use interface. Drupal is known for its flexibility and complexity. While both have their strengths and weaknesses, the usability gap between WordPress and Drupal is changing. This article will show you the current state of Drupal’s admin user experience in a side-by-side comparison with WordPress, the most widely used CMS. If you’re familiar with one CMS but not the other, this comparison is also a good introduction to the other.

TL;DR: The primary goal of this article is to dispel the perception that Drupal is widely different and harder for administrators to use than WordPress. If you don’t care about the background behind this perception, just skip down to the direct comparison.

But first, a little background. The dominant CMS in terms of number of sites running on it is WordPress. It’s estimated to power about 62% of all websites that use a CMS, meaning multiple millions of websites are using it. Why is WordPress so popular? WordPress started as a blogging engine with a focus on being easy-to-use. This proved to be incredibly important because it meant that nearly anyone could get a WordPress site up and running fast and be able to use it with little-to-no training. The idea caught fire with both individuals and local businesses who just wanted a simple, low-cost website that others could find online. Web developers and agencies also finally had a framework that allowed their clients to make simple content edits within an admin environment that was friendly. Of course, WordPress today can be used for much more than a simple website, but it is still ideal for simple websites. Another key takeaway here is this perception of WordPress as being easy-to-use. This reputation holds true just as much today as it ever did in the past.

This article isn’t actually meant to praise and promote WordPress. Instead, much of this article will focus on another popular CMS, Drupal. Drupal is a fantastic CMS and is incredibly powerful when used correctly. In many web development circles, Drupal is the go-to solution for providing a robust solution for today’s CMS driven website development. It’s thriving both in usage and as a community of enthusiasts, but while WordPress sits in #1 spot with 62% of the market share, Drupal holds steady at #3 with about 3%. It still means there are many hundreds of thousands of websites powered by Drupal, but the number of websites using it pales in comparison to WordPress.

Why isn’t Drupal more popular? Well, anyone who knows Drupal (and even many who don’t) will tell you that Drupal is best suited for large websites with high traffic and complex requirements. Universities, government, nonprofits and online retailers are a sample of who uses Drupal. Drupal out-of-the-box isn’t as ready to use as WordPress, so it’s unlikely a suitable fit for simple websites. For individuals, configuring Drupal is a steep learning curve. For local web agencies, it takes more time to setup which means they must charge more. These reasons alone largely take Drupal out of the running for many websites, so for Drupal it’s more about use case than mass adoption.

With that said, Drupal’s ability to be configured and developed on literally means it can handle nearly any situation required of it, whether that means selling products for enterprise businesses or being the integration layer between multiple platforms. While this inherent flexibility is great for software developers, Drupal’s perception of complexity combined with a historically underwhelming admin experience has cemented a reputation that Drupal is unintuitive and difficult to use for the end user, the people who will be using it every day. While in my opinion this isn’t true of today’s Drupal, like WordPress it’s reputation precedes it. In Drupal’s case, however, this reputation isn’t as flattering and it’s something that our sales and outreach teams battle with often.

Like WordPress, Drupal is open source software. It’s free to use and anyone has full access to the underlying code to modify and build upon. Both platforms have a core team for advancing key initiatives and a massive community of individuals and organizations that support the initiatives while also adding additional functionality through plugins (WordPress lingo) or modules (Drupal lingo).

While usability has always been important to WordPress (since it started as a blogging platform), Drupal was historically more focused on being open and flexible. It’s user experience has continuously improved with each version release, but late in 2018 marked the beginning of a big push towards modernizing the Drupal admin user interface (UI). Drupal is really amazing software and it’s time that the admin experience catches up.

Claro interface design mockup courtesy of Drupal.org

Claro is the new admin theme being built as part of the Admin UI Modernization initiative. It’s included with every Drupal 8 site, new and old, and can be enabled right now if you so choose. Just be aware that it is currently considered “experimental” while progress continues to be made. It’s not yet in its finished state, but you can view the development roadmap here to see what is still left to do.

On to the comparison!

For WordPress, I’m using version 5.3.2 (released Dec. 18, 2019) which comes with its own Twenty Twenty default theme and content.

For Drupal, I’m using version 8.8.1 (also released Dec. 19, 2019. How about that!) and the new, but experimental, Claro admin theme. If you’re looking at this at a later date, some aspects may be different (for the better!) as development of the theme continues. I’ve also installed Drupal using the official Umami demo install profile so that I have a theme and some content to work with.

In each of the 10 comparison categories below, I’ll give my opinion on which CMS has the edge out-of-the-box and why I think this. I’ve used both platforms and do have some bias towards Drupal, but I’ll do my best to keep that in check.

1. Admin toolbar
2. Login dashboard
3. Managing media
4. Creating pages
5. Editing pages
6. Managing widgets and blocks
7. Managing menus
8. Managing users, roles and permissions
9. Site status report
10. Plugins and modules
11. WordPress & Drupal comparison summary

The admin toolbar is always present on the page of both WordPress and Drupal.

In WordPress, a single toolbar is used as a jump-off point for common admin pages, but you can also start the content creation process and access your account profile and information.

Drupal has a similar admin toolbar except you have access to everything including creating new content. Every admin page that your user role has permission to view is available through this menu. While it’s more to look at initially, experienced users enjoy fewer clicks to get where they want to go.

While the learning curve to know where everything is might be a bit steeper, experienced Drupal users enjoy being able to access everything in one familiar way. With that said, new users may find this larger menu intimidating.

After logging in, the login dashboard is the first page you see. WordPress and Drupal both take a different approach to their login dashboard.

WordPress has a robust dashboard right out of the gate. This dashboard takes admins away from the site frontend and into an interface that only they can see. The left side has a larger menu for accessing the rest of the admin interface. The main content area mix of useful information about your site and information specific to WordPress as a whole, such as training resources and upcoming WordPress events. The panes on this page can be toggled on and off and plugins can add new panes.

This is the first area where Drupal takes a different approach. Instead of a robust dashboard, you don’t actually get much of anything. The admin toolbar already gives you access to the entire site, so Drupal keeps you on the website frontend and instead shows you your “user page”. This page is entirely customizable although you will most likely need third-party or IT support to do so. It’s an open canvas to do with as you like. For ecommerce, you might show a customer their information, recently viewed products and their last order placed. For content creators, you might show a custom dashboard with quick links to their common tasks. What you do here is entirely up to you.

Although it’s not entirely useful, WordPress actually has a dashboard which is a nice touch for new users. Drupal's clean slate offers a lot of exciting potential for admins and visitors alike, but any potential must first be realized before this page is useful.

Images, videos, documents and more are uploaded and organized within a media manager. Both WordPress and Drupal offer a convenient content editor plugin which makes selecting and adding media into content easy.

WordPress really defined the way media can be managed within a CMS. Their interface for managing media contains a handy drag-to-upload feature and each piece of media is shown in a grid format by default. Media can be filtered by date, type and name.

Drupal admittedly isn’t as clean as WordPress in this interface yet but it’s functionality is essentially the same and solid for most users. The visual interface will improve as the development of Claro progresses. By default, Drupal displays media in a list, but you can toggle between list and grid. There are also similar filtering options. Like all other aspects of Drupal, advanced users can customize media types beyond what you see here and entirely new media types can be created. This advanced functionality is unique to Drupal and isn’t as easily done in WordPress.

WordPress does a great job of making media easy to manage. Drupal will continue to see improvements in the near future, but right now it still feels clunky.

Creating new pages, such as general content pages and blog posts, is a common interaction that most admin users will need to do.

As of version 5.0, WordPress includes their much anticipated Gutenberg editor experience. This editing format is sleek, modern, and very intuitive. You start with a title and then continue piecing together chunks of content by selecting various types of “blocks” to build the page with. Blocks are a single, reusable type of content such as a heading or paragraph of text, an image or gallery, a list, a quote, etc. Custom blocks can be created and plugins may also add additional blocks that content creators can use. Along the right side of the page is a settings pane. This pane provides various page specific settings and customizations such as page visibility, featured image, an option to allow comments, etc. Additional settings for the currently selected content block also appears here.

Out-of-the-box, creating a new piece of content looks like the screenshot above. Content in Drupal could potentially be something wildly different than just a basic page, so Drupal defaults to a standard “field based” editing interface where the different fields that are configured to make up the content are laid out on the page. All editors need to do is fill in the blanks. Field types can be text (with an optional WYSIWYG editor), and image, a file upload, a date, and anything else you can imagine. This again is where Drupal’s flexibility is both an advantage and a curse. The advantage is that a type of content can be anything you can imagine, but the downside is that someone has to configure that content type first. The field based editing experience is provided by default to ensure the editing experience is consistent across different content types.

Here’s the important thing to know about Drupal. Drupal doesn’t like to make assumptions as to what your editing experience should be. As an example, a used car dealership, a national newspaper, and an online retailer will all have entirely different content editing requirements. Drupal doesn’t want to get in your way and it doesn’t try to. What it does do is give you a solid foundation to create YOUR ideal editing experience. This might not be ideal for organizations and businesses with simple website requirements, but for those with complex workflows and unique requirements, Drupal is ideal.

One last important note to make on this topic is that Drupal does also have a Gutenberg editing experience, it just doesn’t come packaged with Drupal out-of-the-box. This module and other editing interface modules and initiatives can be installed in Drupal to make the default editing experience more capable and modular.

When based solely on out-of-the-box functionality, WordPress pre-packaged Gutenberg editing experience is modern and intuitive for new and experienced users. However, it’s important to note that Drupal modules exist that greatly improve Drupal’s default experience. You can even add the same Gutenberg experience.

Once a page has been created, sometimes you still need to go back and edit it once in a while. This is a different experience from creating new content, so let’s now look at how it works with each CMS.

Pretty standard, as a logged in administrator you have access to editing content by viewing the page on the website frontend and using one of the various “edit” buttons. You’re then brought to the same Gutenberg interface that you see when creating content.

I would say Drupal has the upper hand for editing existing content. Similar to WordPress, as a logged in administrator you have access to page edit links when viewing the content which brings you back to the same interface as when the content was created. However, in Drupal you also have additional links to view content revisions as well as the view and edit page translations for multi-language sites.

The current version of Drupal, Drupal 8, also includes an additional edit icon that contains a new “quick edit” option. Depending on the content, the quick edit allows on-page inline editing (shown above) instead of taking you to a separate page! This makes simple edits quick and easy. Furthermore, the edit icon also appears when administrators hover over menus and other configurable page elements too, giving you a quick way to access their configuration.

While WordPress has the edge when creating new content, Drupal’s on-page inline editing feature makes editing existing content quick and easy by keeping content editors on the website frontend.

Widgets (WordPress lingo) and blocks (Drupal lingo) are two words for essentially the same thing. While not limited to these locations, the header, footer and often left and right columns beside the main content area contain defined regions where certain elements can be placed. I’m talking about slogans, menus, a search bar, your copyright, recent posts, social feeds, etc. WordPress and Drupal have similar but different ways to manage these elements.

WordPress includes a backend and frontend methods for editing page widgets, both of which are quite basic and lack a lot of real capability.

The backend method (shown above) is accessed through the backend Appearance menu. This page gives you a nice list of available widgets on the left side and another list of active widgets within the available regions on the right. A simple drag and drop interface lets you move elements around and opening each widget allows for basic configuration.

The frontend method is through a”Live Preview” mode (shown above) where a version of the site theme is presented and widgets are managed through the left column. Settings for existing widgets can also be quickly opened by clicking its blue edit icon, as you can see in the image above.

Out-of-the-box, it’s difficult to understand exactly where a widget will appear throughout the site because you don’t have the ability to see or control which pages accept the widget. Some third-party plugins are available to give you this functionality, but they must be added. New widgets are also a bit more difficult to add as they must be created by a developer or added though a plugin.

Like WordPress, Drupal has the ability to manage blocks from both the backend and frontend of the website, although Drupal handles both situations better.

The backend method (shown above) is accessed through the admin toolbar’s Structure menu. Here you can view all available regions and the blocks contained within each. Regions are a big part of Drupal theme creation, so you will often see 10+ available regions to choose from. If you’re not sure of your themes regions, the “Demonstrate block regions” link above the list of regions will give you a preview. Each region has a “Place block” button for adding new pre-configured blocks. Existing blocks can be moved dragged between regions and each block can be configured independently. Block configuration in Drupal is very robust, including but not limited to control over what pages the block is visible on and what account roles can view it. Like content, blocks can be translated and even have revisions.

Custom blocks can also be created by more advanced Drupal users in a similar way that new media and content types are created. In the screenshot above there is a link to the “Custom block library,” which is where new blocks can be created. Like WordPress, modules can also be installed which will add new blocks.

Drupal’s frontend method for managing blocks takes on the same familiar editing experience that we discussed for editing content. When logged in and viewing the website frontend, navigating to a page and hovering your cursor over an element will reveal an edit icon if that element is a configurable block. Options for the block are then given. The block in the screenshot above contains a menu, so we see options to configure the block and edit the menu. In this case, clicking one of these options will take you to the backend page for performing these actions. If the block contained text, we would also be given an option to edit the text directly on the page, just like we can with content.

Simply put, Drupal’s block management is robust yet not too difficult. Being able to manage existing blocks directly from the website frontend is both user friendly and familiar given that existing pages can also be managed in the same way.

Menus connect the pages within a website. Commonly you’ll find a primary navigation and some sort of footer menu, but menus are used in many other places as well.

The menu system in WordPress is a bit strange at first, but overall it’s pretty simple. You create a menu (or select an existing one using the menu selection dropdown), then add links by selecting pages, categories, or by creating custom links (add menu items in image above), then use a drag and drop interface for moving and nesting the menu items (menu structure in image above). Each menu item within the menu structure can be opened for a bit of customization.

The menu settings area controls where the menu is displayed within predefined template locations. Just check the box and the menu will appear once saved. Any menu created here can also be assigned to region as a widget or through the template live preview screen.

One odd thing I’ve found with WordPress is that, when editing a page, you’re not able to add it into a menu. I’m sure there are plugins that allow this, but out-of-the-box you have to add the page through the menu system or check a setting within the menu that all new pages get added… but then you might have to remove some.

Drupal’s approach to menus is what I wond consider more standard. You navigate the “menus” page which lists all of the menus that have been created, then you create a new menu or edit an existing menu. The screenshot above is what you see when editing a menu. Here you manage this menu’s links by either adding a new one or manipulating the existing ones. When adding a new link you can easily search for content that the link will link to or specify a custom link.

Pages can also be added to a menu when the page is being created or edited. Within the page settings, all you do is select the menu and specify a link title.

Like WordPress, once you create a menu you can then add it into a region of the site as a block. However, within the menu itself you don’t have the ability to put the menu anywhere.

A more standard approach makes managing menus clearer and more user friendly. Also being able to choose if a page should be included in a menu while creating the page is a nice feature. That said, I appreciate being able to manage a menu in its entirety on a single page like you do in WordPress.

Managing users is common for both controlling who can edit the website and who can login for other reasons, such as non-admin accounts for an online store or community.

WordPress has six predefined user roles: Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber. Each has varying degrees of what they can do, but it’s pretty clear for the most part and goes back to when WordPress was mainly a blogging platform. Users can be created and managed through a “users” page (shown above), which is laid out in a straightforward manner displaying

But WordPress has some major drawbacks here. First, WordPress doesn’t have any frontend user self-management, meaning users can’t view or edit their own profiles. Second, the predefined roles and their associated permissions don’t work for everyone and actually complicate user management when you don’t need it. Third, there is nowhere to really manage role permissions in a granular way. These drawbacks can be fixed through custom development and/or various plugins, but many consider this to be a general weak point of WordPress.

User management is another area where Drupal shines. In contrast to WordPress, Drupal only starts with three default roles: Anonymous, Authenticated and Administrator. Anonymous is a user who is not logged in, authenticated is a user who has an account but isn’t someone who typically isn’t managing content and site configuration, and administrator is a user with full site and admin access. These three roles are minimal, clear and cover all of the basic needs of most sites. If and when another role with different permissions are created, this is easy to do right out-of-the-box.

The image above shows Drupal’s version of the current list of users. It follows a similar look and style to the rest of the admin pages, giving administrators a place to add and manage user accounts, including assigning users to specific roles. Anonymous and authenticated users can also create or manage their own account through the website frontend (although this functionality can be turned off in desired).

Drupal’s strength in user management comes in the form of roles and permissions. When a role is created, a column of permission checkboxes for the role is added to the Permissions page (shown above). Almost every piece of functionality within Drupal has an associated permission. Simply checking the boxes determines what each role can and can’t do. It’s powerful and easy.

A simple yet powerful user management system combined with frontend self-service functionality gives Drupal a clear edge over WordPress.

Both WordPress and Drupal include a site status page that gives you information about the website and server configuration as well as an overall health report that outlines any issues. These automated health checks help keep your CMS up-to-date and secure.

The “Site health” page (shown above) gives you an overall health status and list of any issues. This status page is clean and each item can be expanded for more information, but there is no visual urgency that makes the “2 critical issues” stand out. In my opinion, critical issues should be resolved and so highlighting these issues in some way is a necessary UX improvement.

An info tab at the top of the page can be opened which gives more information about your installation of WordPress, the server, the PHP version, and the database.

Drupal contains both site information and site health in one “Status report” page (shown above). Like WordPress, this page gives you everything you need to know at a glance about your Drupal installation and the other components that make it run. Here we can also clearly see what errors and warnings have been found and some information on how they can be resolved.

While both WordPress and Drupal have similar pages that show similar information, Drupal’s status report does a better job at laying out the information and visually capturing the severity of any issues.

Plugins (WordPress lingo) and modules (Drupal lingo) extend core CMS functionality and add new features. Extensions are usually created by third-party developers and released to the platform communities for anyone else to use. Whether it’s to increase performance, enhance SEO capabilities or create an online store, extensions are a powerful way to improve and adapt the CMS platform.

Visiting the “Plugins” page (shown above) is a quick way to see what additional plugins are currently packaged with your WordPress installation and can be activated if desired. Plugins shown here all provide some sort of new functionality or feature that is not part of the core WordPress software.

When you need new functionality, WordPress provides an excellent and convenient plugin library browser (shown above) accessible within the website backend. Here you can search for, view, and install plugins easily with the click of a button.

Drupal’s module list is where you can see all current extensions, activated or not, for your Drupal installation. The big difference here between WordPress and Drupal is that for Drupal you are able to see all modules installed, even those that are part of the core software. Modules are also nicely grouped which nicely organizes the large list.

Installing new modules isn’t nearly as easy in Drupal. Unlike WordPress, Drupal doesn’t include a module library browser within the backend interface. Instead, users must search for modules within a web browser and manually install them. Finding modules can be difficult if you’re not familiar with the process.

While both platforms have a massive library of extensions, WordPress offers users a much friendlier and intuitive way of finding and installing extensions that users of any skill level can appreciate. This may or may not be an issue for you if you have a capable IT team or development partner, but for small teams WordPress has the clear edge.

I hope after going through this comparison you now have a good understanding of the differences and similarities between WordPress and Drupal. As you can see, both platforms out-of-the-box have different strengths and weaknesses, but it’s important to know that all of the weaknesses can be overcome through platform extensions and experience. In extreme cases, both platforms support custom development to overcome unique problems.

For convenience, here is a quick summary showing which CMS has the edge in the 10 categories compared. However, I would recommend that you go back and read the edge summary for each category, if you haven’t done so already.

In my opinion, you shouldn’t be turned off from one platform or the other simply because you’ve heard that one is better or easier to use. Both platforms are mature and constantly improving, user experience is top of mind, and usability gaps have become less of an issue in recent years.

My advice, select the platform you use based on your requirements. WordPress is a great authoring tool and is good for small and medium sized organizations. Drupal is fantastic for medium and large sized organizations or anyone who has complex workflows, products, and/or a need to integrate with other platforms. That’s a pretty general summary, but if you’re considering either of these platforms, first know what your requirements of the platform are and then start talking to the experts for each.

Acro Media is an ecommerce consultation and development agency who can help you in this regard. We specialize in open source ecommerce and a large part of our work is based around Drupal. Drupal typically works better for our clients but we know WordPress, too. If you’re researching your requirements or evaluating your options, hit us up for a quick chat, we would love to help. Otherwise, check out some of these related resources.

• Services: Open Source Ecommerce Development at Acro Media
• Blog: Why You Shouldn’t Choose an Ecommerce Platform Based on Features
• Blog: What to Know When Comparing Ecommerce Platform Capabilities
• Ebook: Understanding the Three Approaches to Digital Commerce Architecture
• Video: How to Plan for an Open Source Commerce Architecture
  
  
  

New legislation from the EU means that public sector websites must comply with the EU Web Accessibility Directive if they are launched after 23rd September 2019. For existing websites, public sector organisations have slightly longer to make their services accessible to everyone. With the next deadline for existing sites in September 2020, not too far away, this guide explores the practical steps organisations can take to comply. 

This is the final educational article on Drupal 8 migration. 

Here we will tackle the topic of migrating from Drupal 7. The love is not gone, but we cannot neglect the fact that Drupal 8 can provide many more benefits for business.

Read Why migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8

Wow, what a year 2019 was for Acquia!

At the beginning of every year, I like to publish a retrospective to look back and take stock of how far Acquia has come over the past 12 months. I take the time to write these retrospectives because I want to keep a record of the changes we've gone through as a company and how my personal thinking is evolving from year to year.

If you'd like to read my previous retrospectives, they can be found here: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009. This year marks the publishing of my eleventh retrospective. When read together, these posts provide a comprehensive overview of Acquia's growth and trajectory.

Our product strategy remained steady in 2019. We continued to invest heavily in (1) our Web Content Management solutions, while (2) accelerating our move into the broader Digital Experience Platform market. Let's talk about both.

In 2019, for the sixth year in a row, Acquia was recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. Our tenure as a top vendor is a strong endorsement for the "Web Content Management in the Cloud" part of our strategy.

We continued to invest heavily in Acquia Cloud in 2019. As a result, Acquia Cloud remains the most secure, scalable and compliant cloud for Drupal. An example and highlight was the successful delivery of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's long-awaited report. According to Federal Computer Week, by 5pm on the day of the report's release, there had already been 587 million site visits, with 247 million happening within the first hour — a 7,000% increase in traffic. I'm proud of Acquia's ability to deliver at a very critical moment.

Time-to-value and costs are big drivers for our customers; people don't want to spend a lot of time installing, building or upgrading their websites. Throughout 2019, this trend has been the primary driver for our investments in Acquia Cloud and Drupal.

• We have more than 15 employees who contribute to Drupal full-time; the majority of them focused on making Drupal easier to use and maintain. As a result of that, Acquia remained the largest contributor to Drupal in 2019.
• In September, we announced that Acquia acquired Cohesion, a Software-as-a-Service visual Drupal website builder. Cohesion empowers marketers, content authors and designers to build Drupal websites faster and cheaper than ever before.
• We launched a multitude of new features for Acquia Cloud which enabled our customers to make their sites faster and more secure. To make our customer's sites faster, we added a free CDN for all Cloud customers. All our customers also got a New Relic Pro subscription for application performance management (APM). We released Acquia Cloud API v2 with double the number of endpoints to maximize customer productivity, added single-sign on capabilities, obtained FIPS compliance, and much more.
• We rolled out many "under the hood" improvements; for example, thanks to various infrastructure improvements our customers' sites saw performance improvements anywhere from 30% to 60% at no cost to them.
• Making Acquia Cloud easier to buy and use by enhancing our self-service capabilities has been a major focus throughout all of 2019. The fruits of these efforts will start to become more publicly visible in 2020. I'm excited to share more with you in future blog posts.

At the end of 2019, Gartner announced it is ending their Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. We're proud of our six year leadership streak, right up to this Magic Quadrant's end. Instead, Gartner is going to focus on the broader scope of Digital Experience Platforms, leaving stand-alone Web Content Management platforms behind.

Gartner's decision to drop the Web Content Management Magic Quadrant is consistent with the second part of our product strategy; a transition from Web Content Management to Digital Experience Management.

We started our expansion from Web Content Management to the Digital Experience Platform market five years ago, in 2014. We believed, and still believe, that just having a website is no longer sufficient: customers expect to interact with brands through their websites, email, chat and more. The real challenge for most organizations is to drive personalized customer experiences across all these different channels and to make those customer experiences highly relevant.

For five years now, we've been patient investors and builders, delivering products like Acquia Lift, our web personalization tool. In June, we released a completely new version of Acquia Lift. We redesigned the user interface and workflows from scratch, added various new capabilities to make it easier for marketers to run website personalization campaigns, added multi-lingual support and much more. Hands down, the new Acquia Lift offers the best web personalization for Drupal.

In addition to organic growth, we also made two strategic acquisitions to accelerate our investment in becoming a full-blown Digital Experience Platform:

1. In May, Acquia acquired Mautic, an open marketing automation platform. Mautic helps open up more channels for Acquia: email, push notifications, and more. Like Drupal, Mautic is Open Source, which helps us deliver the only Open Digital Experience Platform as an alternative to the expensive, closed, and stagnant marketing clouds.
2. In December, we announced that Acquia acquired AgilOne, a leading Customer Data Platform (CDP). To make customer experiences more relevant, organizations need to better understand their customers: what they are interested in, what they purchased, when they last interacted with the support organization, how they prefer to consume information, etc. Without a doubt, organizations want to better understand their customers and use data-driven decisions to accelerate growth.

We have a clear vision for how to redefine a Digital Experience Platform such that it is free of any silos.

In 2020, expect us to integrate Lift, Mautic and AgilOne, as well as make them the best solution for Drupal. We believe that this will benefit not only our customers, but also our agency partners.

Demand for our Open Digital Experience Platform continued to grow among the world's most well-known brands. New customers include Liverpool Football Club, NEC Corporation, TDK Corporation, L'Oreal Group, Jewelers Mutual Insurance, Chevron Phillips Chemical, Lonely Planet, and GOL Airlines among hundreds of others.

We ended the year with more than 1,050 Acquians working around the globe with offices in 14 locations. The three acquisitions we made during the year added an additional 150 new Acquians to the team. We celebrated the move to our new and bigger India office in Pune, and ended the year with 80 employees in India. We celebrated over 200 promotions or role changes showing great development and progression within our team.

We continued to introduce Acquia to more people in 2019. Our takeover of the Kendall Square subway station near MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April, for instance, helped introduce more than 272,000 daily commuters to our company. In addition to posters on every wall of the station, the campaign — in which photographs of fellow Acquians were prominently featured — included Acquia branding on entry turnstiles, 75 digital live boards, and geo-targeted mobile ads.

Last but not least, we continued our tradition of "Giving back more", a core part of our DNA or values. We sponsored 250 kids in the Wonderfund Gift Drive (an increase of 50 from 2018), raised money to help 1,000 kids in India to get back to school after the floods in Kolhapur, raised more than $10,000 for Girls Who Code, $10,000 for Cancer Research UK, and more.

With such a strong focus on product and engineering, 2019 was one of the busiest years for me personally. We grew our R&D organization by about 100 employees in 2019. This meant I spent a lot of time restructuring, improving and scaling the R&D organization to make sure we could handle the increased capacity, and to help make sure all our different initiatives remain on track.

On top of that, Acquia received a substantial majority investment from Vista Equity Partners. Attracting a world-class partner like Vista involved a lot of work, and was a huge milestone for the company.

It feels a bit surreal that we crossed 1,000 employees in 2019.

There were also some low-lights in 2019. On Christmas, Acquia's SVP of Engineering Mike Aeschliman, unexpectedly passed away. Mike was one of the three people I worked most closely with and his passing is a big loss for Acquia. I miss Mike greatly.

If I have one regret for 2019, it is that I was almost entirely internally focused. I missed hitting the road — either to visit employees, customers or Drupal and Mautic community members around the world. I hope to find a better balance in 2020.

2019 was a busy year, but also a very rewarding year. I remain very excited about Acquia's long-term opportunity, and believe we've steered the company to be positioned at the right place at the right time. All of this is not to say 2020 will be easy. Quite the contrary, as we have a lot of work ahead of us in 2020, including the release of Drupal 9. 2020 should be another exciting year for us!

Thank you for your support in 2019!

For a nonprofit, raising enough funds to do the most good is at the forefront of goal setting this new year. Direct and recurring donations have always been time-proven and effective ways to achieve this goal. But how can a nonprofit differentiate themselves and maximize the revenue available to aid their cause? Adding an e-commerce store with profitable products that both connect to your organization’s vision and add funds to fuel your efforts can be a game-changer.

Charity:Water’s success in the e-commerce space is both aspirational and strategic genius. By implementing an e-commerce solution, powered by a payments processor similar to the Commerce iATS module available for both Drupal 7, 8 and the iATS extension on CiviCRM, Charity:Water has turned branded products into additional brand recognition, a compelling story, and increased financial support. They are successfully speaking the language of millennials, providing authentic alternatives to traditional donations.  

While nonprofits explore different income streams, there are important considerations.

Make an Impact with your Product Selections

Reflect on the demographics of your donors when choosing products to boost profit possibilities. Some products will appeal to different age groups and doing your research ahead of time will allow you to curate the most appealing product lineup.

Keep your Nonprofit’s Mission Top of Mind

The e-commerce addition that best represents the values and aspirations of your organization are more likely to be received as genuine by your existing donors. 

Protect your Organization

Avoid costly fraud complications by selecting a payment processor that is secure and easy to use. With the payment processing modules and extensions already available for Drupal 7, Drupal 8 and CiviCRM, you’ll have your store up and running in no time.

Ready to get started or have questions? Feel free to reach out for more information.

My journey with Drupal contributions started in Oct 2019 and I started by understanding basic issues and reviewing  patches created by the experienced contributors.  

As we start a New year, I am proud that my contribution has played an important part in moving Unimity to Page one of the Service Providers list. I wish to share in this blog my learnings and I hope that this will inspire organizations and developers to contribute in the new year! 

Five aspects I have learnt through my contributions are:

1. Understanding of  how Drupal software is built

2. Connecting  with core contributors

3. Improving my Technical knowledge

4. Staying up to date with Drupal

5. Mentoring  others

Drupal is built from community contributions from all over the world. Lot of hard work by core contributors results with the successful implementation of this open source software. Other aspects about Drupal and the issue queues include:

1. Understanding the  issue workflow from how an issue starts from active to needs work, needs work to needs review and needs review to reviewed & tested by community, RTBC to fixed.
2. The different ingredients of this software include: modules/components, issue queues, core contributors, patches, tags, version control, credits, commits
3. Understanding Drupal’s roadmap and the features mapped to each of the releases
4. Initiative leads & initiative meetings

Had the privilege of interacting with top 10 core contributors:  Kjamlaluno, Jrockowitz, RajabNatshah, Volkswagenchick,  Bojanz, Alonaoneill, Thalles, Wim Leers, Webchick, Lauri, Jhodgdon, Xjm and few others.

It was a truly wonderful experience to get appreciated by core Drupal maintainers for my work .
 

Recognized by Alexpott

Recognized by Webchick

Drupal Contributions also helped me in gaining the technical knowledge in many areas such as :

1. Drupal’s folder structure
2. Concepts such as Layout Builder, View modes, JSON API, Help topics
3. Front end CSS, JS and TWIG implementations
4. Writing Test Cases
5. Documentations

Drupal Contributions introduced me to Drupal roadmap. Following the roadmap helped me to stay updated with  new features. When Drupal 8.8 was rolled out, I knew about the New Administration Theme Claro and Media Library. I also follow core maintainers on twitter and have recently started working on the new Olivero Theme that Dries spoke at length during his session at DrupalCon Amsterdam.

Mentoring  others:- Contributions improved my role as Drupal Trainer at Unimity. I started being a mentor to all those willing to contribute and give back to Drupal. 

It has been an exciting journey and I thank Unimity for sponsoring the time to contribute. I also want to share few other members at Unimity who have Contributed to Drupal in 2019 are:

1. Gayathri: Contributed in various areas as :- Help Topics , Media Library Documentation, Umami Profile 
2. Madhura: Contributed in areas such as :- Migration, Help_topics
3. Vinodhini:- Contributed in Claro new Admin Theme, Deprecated code
4. Gnanagowthaman:- 
5. Tarun: Contributed in Olivero New Front end theme
6. Iyyappan:- Contributed in Migration
7. Punam:- Contributed in Migration 

Together Unimity contributed: 13 core patches, 3 olivero patches, 1 Claro patches, 38 contributed patches.
I welcome more users from the Drupal community to join and benefit from the contributions.

Are you looking for help to climb the Drupal Contribution ladder? Just reach out to  me "Shimpy" on drupal_ contribute slack channel! Happy to help :) 

The large business world knows no compromise. Your website should stand out from the competitors and keep up with all the business requirements. And not just keep up — a site can move your business forward by offering advanced digital experiences to customers.

Whether the website is capable of doing this, largely depends on the choice of the platform to build it with. In this post, we discuss why it’s worth choosing Drupal for large business website development.

Drupal 8 and higher provide a continuous upgrade path with a deprecation policy that requires old APIs to be marked deprecated and retained until the next major version. Drupal 8.8 was the final release to introduce new deprecations that will be removed in Drupal 9. This means that all new deprecations in 8.9 and higher will be retained in Drupal 9 and marked for removal in Drupal 10 instead.

For now, in order to continue work on issues that add new deprecations without causing disruption and noise for Drupal 9 readiness tools that detect deprecations, issues with new deprecations for Drupal 10 should be moved to the 9.1.x branch.

9.1.x is not yet open for development and so patches will not apply to it, but work can continue on these patches in the meanwhile by testing them against 9.0.x instead when the patch is uploaded:

We may change our policy in the future and allow 10.0.x deprecations to be backported to 8.9.x and 9.0.x in certain cases (discussion in issue #3088246). Otherwise, 9.1.x will open for development in either March or April, depending on progress on Drupal 9 release blockers.

Having more companies working with Drupal is a good and necessary thing, but it means we need to improve the way that we onboard, recognize, and differentiate those who help sustain and innovate Drupal.

A few weeks ago, I earned my first ever Drupal contribution credit for my DrupalCamp Colorado keynote. While I am oddly excited about that, I also find it somewhat ironic, as that keynote should not be mistaken for my first contribution to Drupal.

According to my Drupal.org profile, I’ve been a community member for over twelve years. In that time, I’ve presented keynotes for three other DrupalCamps, presented sessions and participated in panels going back to DrupalCon Boston 2008, led the RFP process for the redesign of Drupal.org, chaired DrupalCon Chicago 2011, served on the board of the Drupal Association for nine years and, most recently, served on the Executive Director Search committee. That is but a partial tally of my individual contributions; of course my company, Palantir.net, has also made considerable contributions of time, talent, and treasure over all these years.

Recognition is not my motivation for these efforts; like so many open source contributors, I give back to Drupal because I am committed to stepping up when I see a need or an opportunity. When I was new to the community, the karma earned from such efforts, code and non-code, was informally held in the living memory of those who were there. I always felt that I had earned the credibility and support of those with whom I collaborated closely to move on to the next opportunity, to tackle and solve the next problem. In many ways, as a woman on/of the internet, I appreciated the relative anonymity of it.

In that way, Drupal has become the largest independent community-driven open source project. And many of us believed that our collective success and the impact we made was enough to sustain the virtuous cycle of open source. But was it?

Open source has won: we now have legions of people and companies who rely on Drupal and other open source tools and products; however, these companies picked the best tool, which just happened to be an open source tool, and they don’t necessarily yet know the open source way. Twelve years ago, the Drupal community was small enough that those established norms and expectations were passed on person-to-person, along with the lore and the legends. The old ways of influencing behavior and enforcing norms through social bonds (aka peer pressure) aren’t strong or explicit enough for the swells of newcomers.

There is a lack of shared understanding, visibility, and support for what it takes to not just keep Drupal sustainable, but to have it thrive and win in a competitive landscape. This lack of clarity has led to the emergence of multiple subcultures within the commercial ecosystem and a worrying disparity between those who benefit the most from Drupal versus those who give the most.

In his Amsterdam 2014 keynote, Dries noted that while open source has a long history of credit (for code) to the individual contributors, this does not adequately recognize (or incentivize) the organizations. He proposed a simple way to give organizations credit in addition to individual credits for the core issues their teams either performed directly or sponsored, which the Drupal Association released in late 2015. Over time, this system has been expanded to capture more than just code contributions.

And yet, the contribution credit system has not wholly replaced karma. As my own experience shows, so much of the vital work that Drupal relies on is not yet captured in credits. Due to my privilege (not looking for a job, having well-established connections in the community, etc.), the lack of visibility was a feature, not a bug, for me as an individual contributor.

However, wearing my Palantir CEO hat I’ve come to realize that the failure to capture fully what and how companies do (and are expected to) contribute is far more problematic for the sustainability of the project. Some of the most essential work in the community (Drupal Association Board of Directors, the Community Working Group (CWG), the Security Team and non-code Core team work including release management, communication, sprint organizing, and overall project and initiative coordination) is severely undervalued or all-in-all ignored by the contribution system. George DeMet's ongoing commitments as the chair of the CWG often average anywhere from ¼ - ½ of his time (more at intense times) and over the last year he received four credits (the other members of the CWG received even less!). The community and the project suffer because this invisibility obscures, and indeed over time deteriorates, the community expectations and norms by measuring what is easy to measure, rather than what matters.

When Drupal 7 was released, the firms that built Drupal enjoyed a competitive advantage: those who wanted to use Drupal knew which firms meaningfully contributed and why it mattered. However, over the last five years, the Drupal ecosystem has expanded to include many new, larger firms that leveraged partnership and sponsorship programs to establish their Drupal credentials.

These programs and the new implementers and agencies they ushered into the Drupal community are essential to Drupal’s growth and adoption. They are a welcome addition to the ecosystem. However, there are serious problems with the ways that these programs have been structured to date and their unintended impact on our culture of contribution:

• Status within these programs is primarily pay-to-play and non-financial contributions to the project are not required.
• The programs do not directly support or indirectly incentivize the time or talent contributions on which the Drupal project depends.
• The financial proceeds of such programs benefit infrastructure initiatives (Drupal.org and more broadly the Association) and market visibility, which are not necessarily the areas of greatest need for the project or community.
• These programs have undermined the reputational system that prioritized successful outcomes (successful client implementations AND contributions back to the project) and replaced it with one that favored outputs (financial success and client list).

Allowing companies to position themselves as leading experts in Drupal without validation that these firms are contributing commensurate with the benefits derived from Drupal has been corrosive to the sustainability of the project. This has tacitly supported the commoditization of Drupal services, devalued the competitive advantage received from direct contribution, and simultaneously incentivized and conditioned all in the ecosystem to increase indirect contribution (sponsorship and advertising on Drupal.org and events including DrupalCon).

As I noted on a panel at OSCON, I see all of this as a success problem. Having more companies, including large scale implementers and agencies, working with Drupal is a good and necessary thing. What we need to improve is the way that we onboard, recognize, and differentiate those who help sustain and innovate Drupal to (re)establish a culture of contribution for Drupal. Doing this well will involve creating new and easy-to-access avenues for contribution that match the project’s weighted needs and companies’ available resources (be they time, talent or treasure). A concerted focus on what matters will shore up Drupal’s path to long-term sustainability.

A versatile solution for importing large CSV files into Drupal.

• Point one
• Point two
• Point three

Migrating content from an existing site or an external data source can help reduce the effort required by content editors to get a new site ready for launch. As a result, constructing and executing content migrations is a common task we undertake as part of the site build process. While these migrations can vary in type, typically spreadsheets are exported in a comma separated value (CSV) format due to their simplicity.

While Drupal has robust support for migrating in from a CSV file, the current structure can struggle when presented with large CSV files. In particular, the migration import process can run out of memory part way through the migration process. We encountered this problem while migrating tens of thousands of locations for a client. Increasing the PHP memory limit for the migration was an initial step, but proved not to be enough:

Memory usage is 1.21 GB (80% of limit 1.51 GB), reclaiming memory.

[warning]

Memory usage is now 1.21 GB (80% of limit 1.51 GB), not enough reclaimed, starting new batch
[warning]

Even though the migration module attempts to reclaim memory and start a new batch, the process does not always complete.

Some approaches to get around this issue include scripting your migration and utilizing the limit option when running a migration. However, we wanted a solution that could be more versatile and wouldn’t require custom scripting for each new migration we would write.

As a result, we wrote a custom Drush command that acts as a wrapper around the default Migrate import command. Our custom command splits a large CSV file into smaller files that can be imported in batches.

As an example, the following command may be run:

drush migrate:import:batch sample_migration --batch-size=100

When the migration is run, the CSV source file for the sample_migration is split into smaller CSV files with 100 lines each. The migration runs for each of these files. These files are temporarily stored in the private files directory and are cleaned up after the migration is finished.

Other migration operations run like normal and all of the default options may be passed in. Migration mapping hashes are maintained, so the migration may be rolled back like normal, too.

The module’s code currently exists in a Github repository which also contains more information on the module’s usage, but we plan on releasing it as a contributed module on Drupal.org in the future. Feel free to give it a try on your project and let us know how it works for you!

Fall migration copy by ashokboghani licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Happy New Year, everyone! If you’re not willing to let go of the holiday spirit just yet, you’re in luck - we’ve prepared an overview of our favorite Drupal blog posts from December. We hope you enjoy revisiting them!

Mike and Matt talk with the leads of Drupal's "Automatic Updates" initiative to discuss the security, limitations, status, and gotchas of automatic updates.

We're thrilled to announce that we will be back in Berkeley on October 14th - 17th, 2020!

We are stoked to be returning to The Hotel Shattuck for 4 days of roaring sessions, training classes, summits, sponsors, and parties for all you flappers, philosophers, and Drupallers!

We’re still working on all the details, so if you want to follow along with news hot off the presses, sign up for our mailing list!
 

As 2019 comes to an end and we wrap up another decade of Drupalling, we’re excited to announce another BADCamp that’s sure to be the bee’s knees, and invite you to join us over at 2020.badcamp.org. We'll be back in Berkeley on October 14th - 17th, 2020!

We are stoked to be returning to The Hotel Shattuck for 4 days of roaring sessions, training classes, summits, sponsors, and parties for all you flappers, philosophers, and Drupallers!