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

Last month, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, released a draft order that would soften net neutrality regulations. He wants to overturn the restrictions that make paid prioritization, blocking or throttling of traffic unlawful. If approved, this order could drastically alter the way that people experience and access the web. Without net neutrality, Internet Service Providers could determine what sites you can or cannot see.

The proposed draft order is disheartening. Millions of Americans are trying to save net neutrality; the FCC has received over 5 million emails, 750,000 phone calls, and 2 million comments. Unfortunately this public outpouring has not altered the FCC's commitment to dismantling net neutrality.

The commission will vote on the order on December 14th. We have 10 days to save net neutrality.

Although I have written about net neutrality before, I want to explain the consequences and urgency of the FCC's upcoming vote.

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

For the past couple of years I have been talking about the holistic development and operations environments at different camps. As this year’s highlight,  I gave  a session in DrupalCon Vienna around that same topic. The main focus of my talk has been on the improvement opportunities offered by a holistic approach, but there is another important aspect I’d like to introduce: The collaboration model.

Every organization has various experts for different subject matters. Together these experts can create great things. As the saying goes “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, which means there is more value generated when those experts work together, than from what they would individually produce. This however, is easier said than done. 

These experts have usually worked within their own specific domains and for others their work might seem obscure. It’s easy to perceive them as “they’re doing some weird voodoo” while not realizing that others might see your work in your own domain the same way. Even worse, we raise our craft above all others and we look down at those who do not excel in our domain.

How IT people see each other:

But each competence is equally important. You can’t ignore one part and focus on the other. The whole might be greater than the sum of its parts, but the averages do factor in. Let's take for example a fictional project. Sales people do great job getting the project in, upselling a great design. The design team delivers and it gets even somehow implemented, but nobody remembered to consult the sysops. Imagine apple.com, the pinnacle of web design, but launched on this:
 

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

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

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

Multisite Drupal Migration to Score the Best Fan Experience

Major League Soccer (MLS Digital) is a professional soccer league representing the sport's highest level in both the United States and Canada. Since its initial season in 1996, the league has expanded to include 22 teams - 19 in the U.S. and 3 in Canada. The organization sought Phase2’s assistance to migrate each team’s site to a single Drupal 7 platform.

A Customized, Flexible, and Consistent Platform

Migrating 20 club sites onto a new platform while maintaining the legacy platform was no small task. MLS also needed highly sophisticated customization options based on each team’s design, content priorities, and site maintainers’ capabilities. Each site had to have the same code base and capabilities, but offer full flexibility for each team’s site owners. At the same time, each legacy site had to be supported as the migration took place over several months.

Learn more about Phase2 and Sports

Over the last few years, many of us have seen the need to evolve community governance. Up until now, we had to focus on other priorities, but now is the time to address our needs for community governance especially in light of recent community events.

Our project has matured greatly and participation has expanded from developers and site builders to also include more content editors, designers, and marketing managers who work not only as freelancers or at Drupal shops, but also for large digital agencies or system integrators. We want all community members to be included in these community discussions so the redefined community governance serves everyone. This is an exciting time to create an even healthier future for our ever-growing community.

The Drupal Association is committed to staying in a support role as the community determines how to best evolve community governance to support everyone’s needs. We started helping by hosting Community Discussions that were mediated by Whitney Hess. There were 7 sessions at DrupalCon Baltimore and 7 virtual sessions between April and May. You can find the meeting minutes here.

The Community Discussions surfaced several common needs and identified several strategies for addressing those needs.

The most commonly shared needs of the community are (in order of frequency):

Surrounding Drupal is a thriving global business ecosystem and thanks to collaboration with One Shoe and Exove, we’ve created an annual survey that gives insight into its health, focus, and needs. Businesses benefit by learning from their peers and seeing Drupal’s business trends. This survey also helps the Drupal Association find new ways to help support this community. Analysis of the 2016 edition of the survey can be found here.

We encourage all business leaders to take this year’s Drupal Business Survey.  

The survey aims to provide a picture of the current Drupal Business landscape, including the health of Drupal companies, obstacles and enablers for Drupal’s business success and D8 adoption.

Participation is completely anonymous and takes fewer than 10 minutes. The first results will be presented at the Drupal CEO Dinner at DrupalCon Vienna on Wednesday, September 27th, 2017. Analysis and insights will officially be published on Drupal.org and in Drupal Watchdog Magazine.

Participate!

You can participate anytime now until July 19th, 2017.

Drupal 8.3.4 and Drupal 7.56 are maintenance releases which contain fixes for security vulnerabilities.

Updating your existing Drupal 8 and 7 sites is strongly recommended (see instructions for Drupal 8 and for Drupal 7). This release fixes security issues only; there are no new features nor non-security-related bug fixes in this release. See the 8.3.4 release notes and the 7.56 release notes for details on important changes and known issues affecting this release. Read on for details of the security vulnerabilities that were fixed in this release.

Description

PECL YAML parser unsafe object handling - Critical - Drupal 8 - CVE-2017-6920

PECL YAML parser does not handle PHP objects safely during certain operations within Drupal core. This could lead to remote code execution.

File REST resource does not properly validate - Less Critical - Drupal 8 - CVE-2017-6921

The file REST resource does not properly validate some fields when manipulating files. A site is only affected by this if the site has the RESTful Web Services (rest) module enabled, the file REST resource is enabled and allows PATCH requests, and an attacker can get or register a user account on the site with permissions to upload files and to modify the file resource.

Files uploaded by anonymous users into a private file system can be accessed by other anonymous users - Moderately Critical - Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 - CVE-2017-6922

Private files that have been uploaded by an anonymous user but not permanently attached to content on the site should only be visible to the anonymous user that uploaded them, rather than all anonymous users. Drupal core did not previously provide this protection, allowing an access bypass vulnerability to occur. This issue is mitigated by the fact that in order to be affected, the site must allow anonymous users to upload files into a private file system.

Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

After returning from DrupalCon Baltimore at the end of April, we spent May regrouping and focusing on spring cleaning tasks. It's important for any technical team to spend time on stability and maintenance, and we used May to find improvements in these areas and look for some other efficiencies.

Drupal.org updates

🎉 UTF8MB4 Support

Support for the UTF8MB4 character set has been a long outstanding issue for Drupal.org and the sub-sites. This expanded character set supports supplementary characters outside of the basic unicode multilingual character plane, including symbols and emoji.

Previously the use of any of these characters on Drupal.org would result in an error. This extended support has been rolled out to Drupal.org and all of the sub-sites except Groups, our legacy Drupal 6 site on LTS.

Protecting Localize.Drupal.org from Spam

After a spike in spam form submissions was reported (thanks Gábor!) we enabled form protection on Localize.drupal.org. Hopefully this will keep our many translation volunteers focused on the hard work of localizing Drupal, instead of on spam fighting. The techniques that spammers use to bypass protections continue to escalate, so we'll be continuing to evaluate new ways to fight spam as time goes on.

This guest blog post is from Drupal Moldova's Association (not affiliated with Drupal Association). Get a glimpse of what is happening in Moldova's community and how you can get involved.

Drupal Moldova Association’s mission is to promote Drupal CMS and Open Source technologies in Moldova, and to grow and sustain the local community by organising Events, Camps, Schools, Drupal meetups and various Drupal and Open Source related trainings, and by establishing partnerships with Companies, the Government, and NGO’s.

Come and share your expertise in Moldova at our events! We're looking for international speakers to speak about Drupal and open source.

Among DMA’s (short for Drupal Moldova Association) numerous commitments, the following are of special importance:

to gather the community around Drupal and Open Source technologies;

Remember how we are making changes to DrupalCon Europe? These were hard decisions and some things we love we found just weren’t financially viable. Like free t-shirts. But one thing we heard a lot was “please don’t take away the t-shirts!”  

We heard you. And while it doesn’t make financial sense to give free t-shirts to all attendees, we still want to be able to continue to offer them. So we’ve come up with a plan.   

At DrupalCon Vienna, t-shirts will be offered to the following groups:

Individual Drupal Association members who register for DrupalCon Vienna between 5 - 16 June 2017. You must register in this two week window AND be an individual member of the Drupal Association.

Volunteers who work at least four (4) hours onsite in Vienna 26 - 29 September. You must check the volunteer box during registration and must show up on site to volunteer for four (4) hours or until released by event staff.

Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

At the end of April we joined the community at DrupalCon Baltimore. We met with many of you there, gave our update at the public board meeting, and hosted a panel detailing the last 6 months worth of changes on Drupal.org. If you weren't able to join us for this con, we hope to see you in Vienna!

Drupal.org updates

DrupalCon Vienna Full Site Launched!

Speaking of Vienna, in April we launched the full site for DrupalCon Vienna which will take place from September 26-29th, 2017. If you're going to join us in Europe you can book your hotel now, or submit a session. Registration for the event will be opening soon!

DrupalCon Nashville Announced with new DrupalCon Brand

Each year at DrupalCon the location of the next conference is held as closely guarded secret; the topic of speculation, friendly bets, and web crawlers looking for 403 pages. Per tradition, at the closing session we unveiled the next location for DrupalCon North America - Nashville, TN taking place from April 9-13th in 2018. But this year there was an extra surprise.

We've unveiled the new brand for DrupalCon, which you will begin to see as the new consistent identity for the event from city to city and year to year. You'll still see the unique character of the city highlighted for each regional event, but with an overarching brand that creates a consistent voice for the event.