The following blog was written by Drupal Association Signature Hosting Supporter, Acquia. 

More and more developers are choosing content-as-a-service solutions known as decoupled CMSes, and due to this trend, people are asking whether decoupled CMSes are challenging the market for traditional CMSes.

By nature, decoupled CMSes lack end-user front ends, provide few to no editorial tools for display and layout, and as such leave presentational concerns almost entirely up to the front-end developer. Luckily, Drupal has one crucial advantage that propels it beyond these concerns of emerging decoupled competitors.

Join Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal and CTO at Acquia, as he shares his knowledge on how Drupal has an advantage over competitors, and discusses his point-of-view on why, when, and how you should implement decoupled Drupal.

Dries will touch on:

The following blog was written by Drupal Association Signature Hosting Supporter, Acquia. 

The rapid evolution of diverse end-user clients and applications has given rise to a dizzying array of digital channels to support.

Websites in the past were built from monolithic architectures utilizing web content management solutions that deliver content through a templating solution tightly “coupled” with the content management system on the back-end.

Agile organizations crave flexibility, and strive to manage structured content across different presentation layers consistently in a way that’s scalable.

Accomplishing this efficiently requires that teams have flexibility in the front-end frameworks that dominate the modern digital landscape. That’s why decoupled and headless CMS is taking off. That’s why you’re here. But now you need the right technology to support the next phase of the web and beyond.

Download this eBook on headless and decoupled CMS

A remote code execution vulnerability exists within multiple subsystems of Drupal 7.x and 8.x. This potentially allows attackers to exploit multiple attack vectors on a Drupal site, which could result in the site being completely compromised.

The security team has written an FAQ about this issue.

Upgrade to the most recent version of Drupal 7 or 8 core.

Drupal 8.3.x and 8.4.x are no longer supported and we don't normally provide security releases for unsupported minor releases. However, given the potential severity of this issue, we are providing 8.3.x and 8.4.x releases that includes the fix for sites which have not yet had a chance to update to 8.5.0.

Your site's update report page will recommend the 8.5.x release even if you are on 8.3.x or 8.4.x. Please take the time to update to a supported version after installing this security update.

Thunder is proud sponsor of the Media and Publishing Summit ahead of the DrupalCon in Nashville. Meet us on 9th April and during the DrupalCon to learn more about Thunder and how it is used in professional publishing.

https://thunder.org/

Thunder is the Drupal 8 distribution for professional publishing. Thunder was designed by Hubert Burda Media and released as open-source software under the GNU General Public License in 2016. As members of the Thunder community, publishers, partners, and developers build custom extensions and share them with the community to further enhance Thunder.

Thunder consists of the current Drupal 8 functionality, lots of handpicked publisher-centric modules with custom enhancements (our own Thunder Admin Theme, the Paragraphs module, the Media Entity module, the Entity Browser module, and lots more), and an environment which makes it easy to install, deploy and add new functionality (e.g. the Thunder Updater).

To learn more about Thunder projects, read these case studies: German magazine Mein Schöner Garten (Gardening Magazine for Hubert Burda Media), US magazine American Heritage (American Heritage Magazine Migration – Drupal 8), and Serbian television and radio station PannonRTV (News portal for media house – PannonRTV).

About the idea:

We at the Thunder Core Team believe that publishers do not compete with each other through technology, but rather through content and brands. That is why the German publisher Hubert Burda Media established the Thunder community which aims to join forces among media companies by sharing code and innovation power. The goal is to innovate faster and spend less money overall by working together.

Description

There will be a security release of Drupal 7.x, 8.3.x, 8.4.x, and 8.5.x on March 28th 2018 between 18:00 - 19:30 UTC, one week from the publication of this document, that will fix a highly critical security vulnerability. The Drupal Security Team urges you to reserve time for core updates at that time because exploits might be developed within hours or days. Security release announcements will appear on the Drupal.org security advisory page.

While Drupal 8.3.x and 8.4.x are no longer supported and we don't normally provide security releases for unsupported minor releases, given the potential severity of this issue, we are providing 8.3.x and 8.4.x releases that include the fix for sites which have not yet had a chance to update to 8.5.0. The Drupal security team strongly recommends the following:

The security advisory will list the appropriate version numbers for all three Drupal 8 branches. Your site's update report page will recommend the 8.5.x release even if you are on 8.3.x or 8.4.x, but temporarily updating to the provided backport for your site's current version will ensure you can update quickly without the possible side effects of a minor version update.

This will not require a database update.

Patches for Drupal 7.x and 8.3.x, 8.4.x, 8.5.x and 8.6.x will be provided.

What's new in Drupal 8.5.0?

This new version makes Media module available for all, improves migrations significantly, stabilizes the Content Moderation and Settings Tray modules, serves dynamic pages faster with BigPipe enabled by default, and introduces a new experimental entity layout user interface. The release includes several very important fixes for workflows of content translations and supports running on PHP 7.2.

Download Drupal 8.5.0

Media in core improved and available to all site builders

In Drupal 8.4, we added a Media API to core that drew on work from the contributed Media Entity module, but the module was hidden from the user interface due to user experience issues. In Drupal 8.5, many of the usability issues have been addressed, and the module now can be enabled normally. Media in Drupal 8.5 supports uploading and playing audio and video files, as well as listing and reusing media.

For an optimal user experience, we suggest enhancing the core feature set with the rich ecosystem of contributed modules that extends the core Media module. In future releases, we will improve the core user experience with a media library and other tools, add WYSIWYG integration, add support for remote media types like YouTube videos, and provide an upgrade path for existing basic File and Image field data on existing sites.

Settings Tray and Content Moderation now stable

Two experimental modules originally added with Drupal 8.2.0 have been steadily improving in past releases and are now stable. The Settings Tray module provides a quick solution to manage settings in context, such as moving items around in a menu block. The Content Moderation module allows defining content workflow states such as Draft, Archived, and Published, as well as which roles have the ability to move content between states. Drupal 8.5.0 also adds support for translations to be moderated independently.

After over four years of work with over 570 contributors and 1300+ closed issues, Drupal 8.5.0 releases the Migrate system's architecture as fully stable. This means that developers can write migration paths without worrying for stability of the underlying system.

On top of that the Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI modules (providing Drupal 6 and 7 to Drupal 8 migrations) are considered stable for upgrading monolingual sites. All of the remaining critical issues for the Migrate Drupal module's upgrade paths and stability are related to multilingual migration support (so multilingual site upgrades are still not fully supported).

Support for incremental migrations is now also available, which means that site owners can work gradually on their new Drupal 8 site while content is still being added to the old site. When migrations (including incremental migrations) are run through the user interface, site owners will now see a warning if some data on the Drupal 8 site might be overwritten. (A similar fix for Drush is not yet available, so be careful not to overwrite data if you run a migration on the command line.) 

Upgrade instructions for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 sites can be found in the Upgrading to Drupal 8 handbook. Your old site can still remain up and running while you test migrating your data into your new Drupal 8 site. If you happen to find a bug, that is not a known migrate issue, your detailed bug report with steps to reproduce is a big help!

Unlike previous versions, Drupal 8 stores translated content as single entities. Multilingual sites with reference fields (node_reference, entity_reference) or multilingual menus can upgrade to Drupal 8 using Drush, executing the desired migrations one by one. In this process you need to create and run a series of additional custom migrations to reflect the new entity identifiers assigned during earlier migrations. There is no automation implemented for this process yet.

The first release candidate for the upcoming Drupal 8.5.0 release is now available for testing. Drupal 8.5.0 is expected to be released March 7.

8.5.x makes the Media module available for all, improves migrations significantly, stabilizes the Content Moderation and Settings Tray modules, serves dynamic pages faster with BigPipe enabled by default, and introduces the new experimental Layout Builder module. The release includes several very important fixes for workflows of content translations and supports PHP 7.2. Finally, 8.5.0-rc1 also includes the same security updates that are provided in 8.4.5.

What does this mean to me?

For Drupal 8 site owners

Drupal 8.4.5, a security update and the final release of the 8.4.x series, has also been released this week. 8.4.x sites should update immediately to 8.4.5, but going forward, 8.4.x will receive no further releases following 8.5.0's release date, and sites should prepare to update from 8.4.x to 8.5.x in order to continue getting bug and security fixes. Use update.php to update your 8.4.x sites to the 8.5.x series, just as you would to update from (e.g.) 8.4.2 to 8.4.3. You can use this release candidate to test the update. (Always back up your data before updating sites, and do not test updates in production.)

If you're an early tester who is already running 8.5.0-alpha1 or 8.5.0-beta1, you should update to 8.5.0-rc1 immediately. 8.5.0-rc1 includes security fixes (the same fixes that were released in Drupal 8.4.5).

Site owners should also take note of the fact that Drupal 8's support for PHP 5 will end in one year, in March 2019. PHP 7.2 is now the best recommended PHP version to use with Drupal 8.

In 2017 we saw the passing of J-P, community friend, mentor, leader, and contributor. Within the community J-P's was known for his passions: Drupal, programming culture, gardening, cycling and the environment. We invited people to share their memories of J-P and his impact; we share them with you now in memoriam. This is a moving tribute and a celebration of his life.

We invite you to also share your tributes in the comments section.

The person

J-P was a bright intelligent, quirky chap, ADORED animals, he would melt at the mention of our pets names, he would happily spend hours cooing over stories of his beloved cat Indie, he'd oblige you in hours and hours of stories about your beloved animals - kae76

Whenever I was with JP he was always smiling. He was always there to help and it was always a pleasure to see JP at Drupal events and chat to him on IRC - aburrows

Nice. My overriding memory of J-P is how nice he was. When he moved up to Sheffield and started attending the Yorkshire meetups he fitted right in straight away. He always found time to ask how people were doing and genuinely cared what they were saying. He was always patient, positive and happy to help others - kmbremner

This security advisory fixes multiple vulnerabilities in both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. See below for a list.

Comment reply form allows access to restricted content - Critical - Drupal 8 - CVE-2017-6926

Users with permission to post comments are able to view content and comments they do not have access to, and are also able to add comments to this content.

This vulnerability is mitigated by the fact that the comment system must be enabled and the attacker must have permission to post comments.

JavaScript cross-site scripting prevention is incomplete - Critical - Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 - CVE-2017-6927

Drupal has a Drupal.checkPlain() JavaScript function which is used to escape potentially dangerous text before outputting it to HTML (as JavaScript output is not auto-escaped by either Drupal 7 or Drupal 8). This function does not correctly handle all methods of injecting malicious HTML, leading to a cross-site scripting vulnerability under certain circumstances.

The PHP functions which Drupal provides for HTML escaping are not affected.

The following blog was written by Drupal Association Premium Supporting Partner, DrupalCamp London.

The people surrounding Drupal have always been one of its strongest selling points; hence the motto “Come for the code, stay for the community”. We bring individuals from a multitude of backgrounds and skill sets together to push forward towards a common goal whilst supporting and helping each other. Within the community, there are a number of ways to connect to each other; both online and in person. A good way to meet in person is by attending DrupalCons and DrupalCamps.

DrupalCamps

A DrupalCamp can be similar to a DrupalCon but is on a much smaller scale. Where a ‘Con has 1,600+ attendees a ‘Camp ranges anywhere from 50-600 people. In Europe alone there were over 50 camps in 2017, including DrupalCamp London.

DrupalCamp London

DrupalCamp London brings together hundreds of people from across the globe who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform. It’s a chance for Drupalers from all backgrounds to meet, discuss, and engage in the Drupal community and project. DrupalCamp London is the biggest camp in Europe (followed very closely by Kiev), at ~600 people over three days. Due to its size and location, we’re able to run a wide range of sessions, keynotes, BoFs, Sprints, and activities to take part in.

What happens over the three days?

Friday (CxO day)

Friday (CxO day) is primarily aimed at business leaders who provide or make use of Drupal services (i.e web development agencies, training companies, clients etc), but naturally, everyone is welcome. Throughout the day we'll have speakers talking about their experiences working with Drupal and Open Source technologies in their sector(s) or personal life. With a hot food buffet for lunch and a free drinks reception at the end of the day, you'll also have ample time to network with the other attendees.

We have had a tradition since 2005. Every new year we have a posting on the predictions for the year ahead for our beloved open source CMS and community. Sometimes this posting went up in december, sometimes in January. But never in February.

Time to start a new tradition, predict the year ahead from February on :-)

Leave a comment if you do think that blogging will get hip again, RSS will gain new ground. What will the roll of the Drupal Association be in the new year? Where will the next DrupalCon be? Will the community grow and in what direction? API first, customer first, mobile first?

Polish your crystal ball and tell us what the future of Drupal wil be.

If you need some inspiration, take a look at 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015.2016 and 2017.

The following blog was written by Drupal Association Signature Supporting Partner, Open Social by GoalGorilla.

A living style guide - a way to control markup or CSS - has been making a name for itself. And for a good reason; they’re an important tool for web development. They keep developers in sync, communicate design standards, and help organize complex interfaces. In this post, I want to discuss how and why living style guides are important and how to implement one for Open Social using Drupal for software.

We're using a living style guide because it serves as a valuable internal resource for development; we’re able to write reusable and consistent code that's easy to maintain. And it’s a great external resource for client deliverables. Ready to see how to make a living style guide work with Drupal software? Let’s go!

Moving From Static to Dynamic

We didn’t always rely on a living style guide. Open Social was built and maintained using different strategies such as component libraries and atomic designs. These strategies have advantages, such as reusability, facilitating collaboration within the team, and ensuring design consistency. There were, however, disadvantages to a static style of working.

In the past, a component library or style guide was usually graphic-based. The designer would create a visual representation of a component (in PS or Sketch, for example) and then the front-end developer would transfer these visuals to HTML and CSS. This immediately meant double maintenance; for instance, if the markup or CSS changes, the graphics style guide would need to be updated to reflect this change and vice-versa. In our experience, the shelf life of these “static” systems is only a few iterations before the graphic version gets left behind and forgotten due to too much maintenance and not enough return. Yikes.

The following blog was written by Drupal Association Premium Technology Partner, Lingotek.

It wasn’t a question of if, but a question of when and the Drupal.org weekly usage statistics are showing it’s happening now. Usage of Lingotek’s Drupal 8 Module finally caught up to and exceeded that of Drupal 7. Is this the tipping point? Is the community finally making the switch to the latest Drupal module?

The Drupal.org Usage Statistics for Lingotek Translation provides information about the usage of the Lingotek Translation project--Lingotek - Inside Drupal 7 Module and the Lingotek - Inside Drupal 8 Module--with summaries across all versions and details for each release. It shows the week and the number of sites that reported using a given version of the project.

The usage figures reflect the number of sites using the project/item that week. The results can give an idea of how popular the different projects are and may help users choose modules and themes for their own sites. The figures are an indicator of which modules are being used. Note: Only Drupal websites using the Update Status module are included in the data.

In the past 6 months, the Drupal.org weekly statistics showed Drupal 7 usage was still going strong. There were twice as many users using the Drupal 7 version in April, May, June, July, August, and September. But starting in October, Drupal 8 usage began to tick upward. In the first week, only 269 reported using the D8 version. Then the momentum quickly shifted. By the second week of October, they were almost equal with 441 users of Drupal 7 and 420 using Drupal 8; they were a scant 19 users apart. Then came the tipping point.

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog. Please leave your comments on the original post.

Seventeen years ago today, I open-sourced the software behind Drop.org and released Drupal 1.0.0. When Drupal was first founded, Google was in its infancy, the mobile web didn't exist, and JavaScript was a very unpopular word among developers.

Over the course of the past seventeen years, I've witnessed the nature of the web change and countless internet trends come and go. As we celebrate Drupal's birthday, I'm proud to say it's one of the few content management systems that has stayed relevant for this long.

While the course of my career has evolved, Drupal has always remained a constant. It's what inspires me every day, and the impact that Drupal continues to make energizes me. Millions of people around the globe depend on Drupal to deliver their business, mission and purpose. Looking at the Drupal users in the video below gives me goosebumps.

Drupal's success is not only marked by the organizations it supports, but also by our community that makes the project more than just the software. While there were hurdles in 2017, there were plenty of milestones, too:

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog. Please leave your comments on the original post.

In this post, I'm providing some guidance on how and when to decouple Drupal.

Almost two years ago, I had written a blog post called "How should you decouple Drupal?". Many people have found the flowchart in that post to be useful in their decision-making on how to approach their Drupal architectures. Since that point, Drupal, its community, and the surrounding market have evolved, and the original flowchart needs a big update.

Drupal's API-first initiative has introduced new capabilities, and we've seen the advent of the Waterwheel ecosystem and API-first distributions like Reservoir, Headless Lightning, and Contenta. More developers both inside and outside the Drupal community are experimenting with Node.js and adopting fully decoupled architectures.

Let's start with the new flowchart in full:

The following blog was written by Drupal Association Premium Supporting Partner, Phase2.

If you’re a marketer considering a move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, it’s important to understand the implications of content migration. You’ve worked hard to create a stable of content that speaks to your audience and achieves business goals, and it’s crucial that the migration of all this content does not disrupt your site’s user experience or alienate your visitors.

Content migrations are, in all honesty, fickle, challenging, and labor-intensive. The code that’s produced for migration is used once and discarded; the documentation to support them is generally never seen again after they’re done. So what’s the value in doing it at all?

YOUR DATA IS IMPORTANT (ESPECIALLY FOR SEO!) 

No matter what platform you’re working to migrate, your data is important. You’ve invested lots of time, money, and effort into producing content that speaks to your organization’s business needs.

This month’s Drupal Spotlight is a Q&A snapshot from some amazing speakers and organisers behind the recent DrupalSouth in Auckland, New Zealand. We look in and beyond the code at the voices and perspectives of people  building in Drupal and influencing our community, including how they got into technology, and vision for the future.

Please note: videos of the DrupalSouth presentations will be up in the New Year - we will let you know when they are up so you can come back and watch!

Katie Graham

Code | Lego | cats (or for a second opinion) Interested | introverted | innovator

How did you get your start in technology?

As a kid I was always interested in finding out how things worked so I was obsessed with computers from when I first encountered one when I was four or five. We got dial up internet when I was about 14 and I soon figured out how to create websites, later learning PHP and MySQL. I never wanted to get paid for developing websites as I thought it might make it less fun, but a few years later I ended up doing a design degree and it was there that everything came together and I realised that development is what I should be doing. I started using Drupal in the final year of my degree and haven’t looked back!

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog. Please leave your comments on the original post.

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog. Please leave your comments on the original post.

Earlier this year, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts launched Mass.gov on Drupal 8. Holly St. Clair, the Chief Digital Officer of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, joined me during my Acquia Engage keynote to share how Mass.gov is making constituents' interactions with the state fast, easy, meaningful, and "wicked awesome".

Constituents at the center

Today, 76% of constituents prefer to interact with their government online. Before Mass.gov switched to Drupal it struggled to provide a constituent-centric experience. For example, a student looking for information on tuition assistance on Mass.gov would have to sort through 7 different government websites before finding relevant information.

To better serve residents, businesses and visitors, the Mass.gov team took a data-driven approach. After analyzing site data, they discovered that 10% of the content serviced 89% of site traffic. This means that up to 90% of the content on Mass.gov was either redundant, out-of-date or distracting. The digital services team used this insight to develop a site architecture and content strategy that prioritized the needs and interests of citizens. In one year, the team at Mass.gov moved a 15-year-old site from a legacy CMS to Drupal.

The team at Mass.gov also incorporated user testing into every step of the redesign process, including usability, information architecture and accessibility. In addition to inviting over 330,000 users to provide feedback on the pilot site, the Mass.gov team partnered with the Perkins School for the Blind to deliver meaningful accessibility that surpasses compliance requirements. This approach has earned Mass.gov a score of 80.7 on the System Usability Scale; 12 percent higher than the reported average.