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Planet Drupal

November 25, 2021

Multiple version compatibility in Drupal--managing the tradeoffs

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Summary

If you're a seasoned Drupal module developer, or even a relatively new one, it's hard not to like the fact that, starting with Drupal 8.7.7, it's possible for a single version of a module to be compatible with multiple versions of Drupal core. Suddenly, maintaining your module became way easier. It's noteworthy enough that the process of making a module work with the Drupal 9 release was incomparably easier than any previous major version upgrade. But beyond that, you could actually maintain a single version for both Drupal 8 and 9, or both Drupal 9 and 10. How great is that?

But - and there always is a but, isn't there? - it's not quite so straightforward. There are some significant tradeoffs to sticking with a single release branch for two major versions of core. I'll look at a couple here - deferred refactoring and missed improvements - and ways to mitigate them.

November 23, 2021

What do the usage data on Drupal.org actually mean?

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Summary

Many Drupal insiders recognize that data on Drupal usage that's collected and displayed on Drupal.org have their limitations. Since 2018 there's been a proposed Drupal core telemetry initiative to expand and improve the data collected. Meantime, though, the usage stats are widely referred to and cited. So it's worth spending a bit of time with them. What do they actually capture?

November 16, 2021

Drupal 8: Towards a postmortem

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Summary

As Drupal 8 entered its last months of life, I found myself reflecting. What did version 8 mean for the project? What was lost? What was gained? What were the roads not taken? To try to puzzle out at least some preliminary answers, I read up on what others had shared and spent some time with various sources--Drupal core and contrib code bases, usage statistics, old conference presentations, release announcements and more. I started the exercise motivated by personal interest but now that I've wrapped it up I figure I may as well share my observations in case they're of interest to others.

August 27, 2018

Managing Shared Configuration Part 1: Configuration Providers

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Summary

At the Drutopia project, one of our big focuses has been improvements to configuration management in Drupal 8. In this series, I'll be covering our work to date along with related efforts and contributions.