Drupal (core)

Our dedicated Global Maintenance Team works diligently with our clients to keep their sites updated, secure, and fresh. In this blog, we’ll outline three common maintenance practices we use to keep our clients happy and their sites running smooth. 

Episode Number:  235 The Drupal 8 Override Node Options module is a simple module that allows you to set who can edit specific node options when creating or editing nodes. This includes things such as the published checkbox, sticky checkbox ... [More] , promoted to frontpage checkbox, revision information, and authoring information. This is a useful module for building out a more complex content workflow or perhaps just simplifying the content editing experience on your Drupal 8 site by hiding unneeded node options. Tags:  Drupal Drupal 8 Drupal Planet [Less]

Drupal Core Initiative Meetings Recap - September 16th-20th, 2019 Alona Oneill Tue, 09/24/2019 - 21:55

Today, we announced that Acquia has agreed to receive a substantial majority investment from Vista Equity Partners. This means that Acquia has a new investor that owns more than 50 percent of the company, and who is invested in our future success. ... [More] Attracting a well-known partner like Vista is a tremendous validation of what we have been able to achieve. I'm incredibly proud of that, as so many Acquians worked so hard to get to this milestone. Our mission remains the same Our mission at Acquia is to help our customers and partners build amazing digital experiences by offering them the best digital experience platform. This mission to build a digital experience platform is a giant one. Vista specializes in growing software companies, for example, by providing capital to do acquisitions. The Vista ecosystem consists of more than 60 companies and more than 70,000 employees globally. By partnering with Vista and leveraging their scale, network and expertise, we can greatly accelerate our mission and our ability to compete in the market. For years, people have rumored about Acquia going public. It still is a great option for Acquia, but I'm also happy that we stay a private and independent company for the foreseeable future. We will continue to direct all of our energy to what we have done for so long: provide our customers and partners with leading solutions to build, operate and optimize digital experiences. We have a lot of work to do to help more businesses see and understand the power of Open Source, cloud delivery and data-driven customer experiences. We'll keep giving back to Open Source This investment should be great news for the Drupal and Mautic communities as we'll have the right resources to compete against other solutions, and our deep commitment to Drupal, Mautic and Open Source will be unchanged. In fact, we will continue to increase our current level of investment in Open Source as we grow our business. In talking with Vista, who has a long history of promoting diversity and equality and giving back to its communities, we will jointly invest even more in Drupal and Mautic. We will: Improve the "learnability of Drupal" to help us attract less technical and more diverse people to Drupal. Sponsor more Drupal and Mautic community events and meetups. Increase the amount of Open Source code we contribute. Fund initiatives to improve diversity in Drupal and Mautic; to enable people from underrepresented groups to contribute, attend community events, and more. We will provide more details soon. I continue in my role I've been at Acquia for 12 years, most of my professional career. During that time, I've been focused on making Acquia a special company, with a unique innovation and delivery model, all optimized for a new world. A world where a lot of software is becoming Open Source, and where businesses are moving most applications into the cloud, where IT infrastructure is becoming a metered utility, and where data-driven customer experiences make or break business results. It is why we invest in Open Source (e.g. Drupal, Mautic), cloud infrastructure (e.g. Acquia Cloud and Site Factory), and data-centric business tools (e.g. Acquia Lift, Mautic). We have a lot of work left to do to help businesses see and understand the power of Open Source. I also believe Acquia is an example for how other Open Source companies can do Open Source right, in harmony with their communities. The work we do at Acquia is interesting, impactful, and, in a positive way, challenging. Working at Acquia means I have a chance to change the world in a way that impacts hundreds of thousands of people. There is nowhere else I'd want to work. Thank you to our early investors As part of this transaction, Vista will buy out our initial investors. I want to provide a special shoutout to Michael Skok (North Bridge Venture Partners + Underscore) and John Mandile (Sigma Prima Ventures). I fondly remember Jay Batson and I raising money from Michael and John in 2007. They made a big bet on me — at the time, a college student living in Belgium when Open Source was everything but mainstream. I'm grateful for the belief and trust they had in me and the support and mentorship they provided the past 12 years. The opportunity they gave me will forever define my professional career. I'm thankful for their support in building Acquia to what it is today, and I am thrilled about what is yet to come. Stay tuned for great things ahead! It's a great time to be an Acquia customer and Drupal or Mautic user. [Less]

Aegir is often seen as a stand-alone application lifecycle management (ALM) system for hosting and managing Drupal sites. In the enterprise context, however, it’s necessary to provide mutiple deployment environments for quality assurance (QA) ... [More] , development or other purposes. Aegir trivializes this process by allowing sites to easily be copied from one environment to another in a point-and-click fashion from the Web front-end, eliminating the need for command-line DevOps tasks, which it was designed to do. [Less]

Here are our picks for the must-see business, marketing and industry sessions at next month’s DrupalCon Amsterdam. We hope to see you there! READ MORE

Drupal 8.8.0 will be released in December 2019 and the upcoming changes in JSON:API module codebase introduce huge performance benefits. by Jibran Ijaz / 24 September 2019 Here are ... [More] three things to prove that: 1. Recent patches committed to JSON:API in Drupal 8.8 https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3039730 is a simple issue which is making sure that if you are requesting information of related entities then it statically caches the resource type information for that relationship so that when multiple entities of the same entity type and bundle are requested it doesn’t have to collect the resource type information for the related entities over and over again. https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2819335 adds a cache layer to store the normalized entities so that if we need the normalized version of an entity we can just get it from the cache instead of normalizing the whole entity again which can be a very expensive process. https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3018287 introduces new cache backend to store JSON:API resource type information which was stored in the static cache. This means that instead of creating JSON:API resource types every request, we are just creating them once after cache clear. 2. Profiling using blackfire.io I was able to do some profiling to compare the JSON:API core module in Drupal 8.7 versus 8.8 . Here are the initial conditions: PHP 7.3 JSON:API version 8.7 No JSON:API Extras Page Cache module disabled. Dynamic Page Cache module is set to cache.backend.null, which forces a 100% cache miss rate. Cleared all caches. Visit user login page to rebuild the container and essential services. Case I Visit the first JSON:API endpoint which loads 50 nodes with 8 fields, 2 computed fields, 2 filters, and sorted by title. Case II Visit the first JSON:API endpoint which loads 2 nodes with 45 paragraph fields, each paragraph field has 6 fields and 2 computed fields, 1 filter. Then update the JSON:API to 8.8, all other initial conditions were the same as before. Case I Visit the first JSON:API endpoint which loads 50 nodes with 8 fields, 2 computed fields, 2 filters, and sorted by title. Case II Visit the first JSON:API endpoint which loads 2 nodes with 45 paragraph fields, each paragraph field with 6 fields and 2 computed fields, 1 filter. Comparison: Case I The comparison shows 79% improvement in response time. There are 39 more SQL queries on JSON:API in Drupal 8.8. After having a detailed look at those shows that there are additional calls to new cache bin added by JSON:API but the most important thing was 50 fewer queries to url_aliase table. Function calls also show the reduced number of function calls to Entity API and normalizers. Case II The comparison shows 66% improvement in response time. There are 35 more SQL queries on JSON:API in Drupal 8.8. These are the same additional calls to the new cache bin. Function calls also show the reduced number of function calls to Entity API and normalizers — same as before. I ran the same scenarios with redis cache backends instead of the default database backends. The results show the same kind of improvements. 3. Raw response comparison: What matters is how this all plays out on the website. JSONAPI:8.7 first page load on cold cache JSONAPI:8.8 first page load on cold cache Before After Improvement URL1 2.6 sec 1.3 sec 2x faster URL2 4.5 sec 1.8 sec 2.7x faster URL3 7.7 sec 2.5 sec 3.1x faster URL4 7.5 sec 2.4 sec 3.1x faster URL5 7.2 sec 2.5 sec 2.9x faster Overall 10.3 sec 3.8 sec 2.7x faster Conclusion: In short, JSON:API in Drupal 8.8 is going to be significantly faster than its predecessor! To improve the performance like this takes enormous effort and this was a community accomplishment but special thanks to @ndobromirov, @kristiaanvandeneynde, @itsekhmistro, and last but not least the hardworking maintainers of JSON:API module @e0ipso, @gabesullice, and @Wim Leers, without their work, support and guidance this would not have been possible. Please give them a shoutout on Twitter or come say ‘hi’ in Drupal Slack #contenta channel. If you are interested in JSON:API and its performance then please feel free to help out at https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search?status%5B%5D=Open&issue_tags_op=all+of&issue_tags=Performance%2C+API-First+Initiative. Thanks to @Wim Leers for feedback on this post! Tagged jsonapi, Performance Optimisation, Drupal Modules [Less]

Did you know that 42% of companies say that implementing e-learning has lead to a revenue increase? In the article Teach employees with the Drupal platform and reduce corporate training expenses we made a review of Drupal modules and profiles which will suit an e-learning platform. Read and choose the best for your business.

The friendliness of Drupal 8 for content editors and website administrators grows every day. New handy features come thick and fast — updated Media Library interface, built-in drag-and-drop Layout Builder, media embed button in CKEditor, and so much ... [More] more.  Today, we are happy to announce another lucrative improvement — a new and modern administration theme Claro is supposed to come to D8.8 core!  Why Drupal 8 needed a new administration theme The idea of a new administration theme arrived as part of the Drupal team’s striving to make Drupal more competitive in everything.  [Less]