Kristen.org

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

If you use Drupal at all, you've probably already heard that 2021 is Drupal's 20th anniversary! Pretty cool. :) Check out wikipedia to see Drupal's initial release by Dries Buytaert was January 15, 2001.

In honor of Drupal's 20th year, DrupalFest is this month which is built around the popular DrupalCon North America event. Due to the pandemic, DrupalCon NA is online again this year, but this allows for a more unique content and contribution event model. The events are spread out throughout the month of April to allow for more participation and better integration into everyone's schedule. Hope to "see you" next week at DrupalCon or at one of the Drupal summits!

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

I just started the process of preparing my Drupal 6 (!) site for migrating to Drupal 9. One of the first steps of my migration process was to figure out where to host my Drupal 9 site. Right now kristen.org is on Pantheon. Yes, Pantheon supports Drupal 6! Maybe they don't want me to advertise that though. :)

In this post, I'll discuss my initial impressions of surveying some of the biggest Drupal managed hosting companies. If your favorite hosting provider isn't covered here, let me know and I might do a follow up post.

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

DrupalCon Global 2020 is in a couple weeks and there are a lot of amazing sessions. Hope you can make it! While preparing my own DrupalCon Global session, I reviewed the other sessions and made a list of ones you might want to watch to help you prepare for upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 or 8 to Drupal 9.

In some cases, it was very hard to choose just one on a particular topic. For example, there are 3 great layout builder talks! So, while these are some of my top picks, don't forget to check out all the DrupalCon Global sessions and add your favorites to your schedule.

If you are upgrading from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 and don't need to make any website improvements, then you can focus on the Drupal 9 sessions. If you will be doing a redesign and/or upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 9, check sessions for dreaming up your new site, planning your new site architecture, and implementing your new site.

As I'm sure you already know, Drupal 9.0.0 was released yesterday which was the result of thousands of people in the Drupal community coming together to make Drupal even more amazing. The release has a new Drupal 9 landing page and a Drupal 9 video that highlights the journey of Drupal and the Drupal community. We are truly better together.

You are also most certainly aware of the tragic killing of George Floyd as a result of police brutality and the resulting protests throughout the United States and other parts of the world. As an American, it sickens me to see how the Black community is treated in the US. Systemic racism is real and real change is needed urgently. Watching the peaceful protests throughout my country, I feel outrage, sadness, and hope.

Source: WYDAILY

For better or worse, I've been on Twitter a lot over the last couple months, and during the last couple weeks, it's been difficult to reconcile the content in my Twitter feed. Violence and anger and grief from yet another senseless tragedy in the Black community. Excitement and pride and joy from years of hard work on Drupal 9. I've struggled to take pleasure in the Drupal 9 release while watching the heartbreaking events unfold in the news.

I wanted to write a post about how amazing Drupal 9 is and how amazing the Drupal community is. Yet I'm preoccupied with thinking how I can make things better, how I can make the world better. Knowing many in the Drupal community, I am certain I am not alone with these thoughts and feelings. I did some research and have found some reactions from the Drupal community in light of recent events that I would like to highlight.

These are the steps I went through on "Drupal 9 porting day" on April 28, 2020, which was initiated by Drupal core "Initiative coordinator coordinator", Gábor Hojtsy. It was focused around timezones: Australia & New Zealand, Europe, and Americas.

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

Here are steps I use to update Drupal site code to the latest core and contrib module versions. This can be done via the command line using drush.

Doing 'drush up' (all by itself) is popular to update the site code but I don't use it. I suppose if you have a *very* simple site with very few modules that are all using pretty recent stable releases, then it is fine. But, I almost never deal with sites like that (except for simple test sites).

I love the Drupal Admin Menu module (in fact, I almost can't live without it!), but I guess I'm getting old because I find the microscopic font hard to read ;) Others have this problem as well, but it hasn't been made configurable yet, so here are your options:

0. Use the Admin Menu Toolbar

It's a Drupal site... it's good if you actually know Drupal

I'm working on a Drupal 7 project right now where the site was built by another company. This isn't the first time I've “inherited” a project, and I'm sure it won't be the last. Before this project, my other experiences with taking over existing Drupal sites weren't terrible. Yeah, there were issues with the sites and things could have been better architected but, on the whole, I could jump in and figure out how things were glued together and fix issues or make improvements as needed without too much head-scratching.

I'm sitting in the Denver airport killing time before flying back to California. As everyone in Drupal-land knows, we just finished up the very successful DrupalCon Denver conference with over 3000 attendees!