Drupal's adoption of GitLab lead to five times faster test runtimes but for this post I will look at how it makes it much easier to update modules to a new major version. It is now possible to fully use the user interface of drupal.org and drupal.org's GitLab features to make modules compatible and even make new releases available. I'll use one of my modules as an example: Upgrade Rector. Let's walk through what I did.
Thanks to 13 wonderful contributors, Upgrade Status 4.2.0 is out today! The new version is beautiful in Gin (light and dark mode), but even looks better than before in core's Claro. It improves continuous integration compatibility and has more graceful parsing of Twig templates. It has an updated list of rectorable fixes and is more compatible with Nikic PHP Parser. Thanks (in alphabetical order) to andypost, bbrala, estherp, joseph.olstad, lhridley, loze, mglaman, moshe weitzman, mpaulo, Pasqualle, ressa, risforrocket and saschaeggi for their contribution! Read on to see all the new things!
DrupalCon Portland 2024 is coming up next month! The event provides good opportunities to get help with three major transitions of Drupal in 2024. Drupal 7's end of life is near, while Drupal 11 is released this year. Finally, DrupalCI testing is superceeded by much improved GitLab CI pipelines shortly after DrupalCon. Here are some highlights of related events to not miss at DrupalCon!
Today I made a new 4.1.0 feature release of Upgrade Status available. Thanks to these 23 contributors: DrupalDope, Grimreaper, MacSim, PapaGrande, Shubham Rathore, abramm, akshay.singh, apaderno, arti_parmar, gorkagr, joelpittet, lamp5, leymannx, lostcarpark, marvil07, mrinalini9, nsavitsky, prudloff, randallquesadaa, rishabjasrotia, samir_shukla, thakurnishant_06 and wells.
The new release adds Drush 12 support, fixes PHP 8.2 and 8.3 compatibility and adds Drupal 11 environment readiness checking. Various additional bugs have been fixed related to CSS deprecation checking, info file handling and so on. This is also the first tagged release that relies on GitLab CI entirely for testing in three PHP and core version combinations.
The Drupal community and Drupal Association has been working with Kuoni Tumlare Congress since 2019 to make DrupalCon Europe happen. I have the privilege to be deeply involved with the event originally to "help keep the Drupal spirit". But Kuoni has been really wonderful in integrating with the Drupal community and now knows not just the event but the Drupal community inside and out, so it is a really great and fun collaboration.
Last November the Drupal project announced that Drupal 10 will receive long term support until mid-late 2026. That is when Drupal 12 will be released, so this long term support does not mean that Drupal 11 will not be released as well in the meantime. And by meantime, I mean Drupal 11 will be released this year, in 2024, in June or July or December.
I have the pleasure to organize the DrupalCon initiative keynotes now twice a year. The genius idea of this I believe came from Angie Byron, and ever since we include them, they are among the top rated sessions at each DrupalCon. The goals of this keynote are manyfold. First, we want to show the people who lead important work in core, humanising the software. While we do explain the state of each topic, the main thing we are looking for is to inspire and involve attendees at the event, which is possible by making connections between the presenters and attendees on the contribution day following the keynote. It is the humans that make it possible to create these amazing innovations in Drupal! DrupalCon Portland 2024 is coming up and this keynote is on again!
After 16 years, I was back in Brussels for another FOSDEM last weekend. Back then, as the lead maintainer, I presented about the brand new Drupal 6 version. Now I revisited the pieces that made the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative super successful (dedicated post about that coming soon). That reminded me how much I used this website and other custom websites to support initiatives I worked on, and how I neglected to take care of the site in recent years. I wanted to move a bit forward, and kind of got carried away in the best way possible.
Last week was DrupalCon Portland, our first in-person big DrupalCon back together with 1300+ attendees. I was fortunately one of the attendees along with leaders of in-the works Drupal admin theme Claro and frontend theme Olivero. Both Claro and Olivero have been in the works for years, and both were quite close to get done, yet we did not even dream of getting both be the new defaults in Drupal within the week. But we did it!
I have decades of experience in event organization starting from student summer camps in high school all the way to developer conferences for hundreds and then thousands of people. Especially with open source events, we found that these gatherings are especially good to get on the same page even on contentious questions and could be very effective to involve new contributors, if you provide the appropriate environment. Here is a model that worked in my experience if you plan to involve people in your projects.