0 Comments
With three days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9. Unless you are on Drupal 8.8.x or Drupal 8.9.x, Upgrade Status will tell you to move to that version first, before you can upgrade to Drupal 9. (At this point it should really tell you that 8.9.x is the only acceptable version to upgrade to). Why is that? While Drupal 8's end of life in three days may sound too soon, it could easily happen that you are on Drupal 8 and are already on an end of life version. With the introduction of semantic versioning in Drupal 8.0.0, Drupal core went on a path of feature updates in minor versions (8.1, 8.2, etc) and bug and security fixes in patch versions (8.0.1, 8.1.3, etc.). However, bugfixes and security fixes are only released for older minor versions for a limited time. For bugfixes, that is 6 months, and for security fixes that is 12 months after release of the minor series. This one year support window started with 8.5.0, the end of life dates of prior minor versions of Drupal 8 were even sooner after their release. What does this practically mean? Let's say your site is on some version of Drupal 8.5.x, that release series started with Drupal 8.5.0 in March, 2018. It then received bugfixes until 8.6.0 was released in September, 2018. Finally, it continued to receive security fixes only until 8.7.0 was released, that is March, 2019. In other words, Drupal 8.5.x has been end of life since March, 2019. It did not receive security fixes since then. So if your site is on Drupal 8.5.x, then you are already on end of life software and the end of life of 8.9.x will not materially change your situation. When Drupal 9 was released at the same time as Drupal 8.9, the only supported versions that remained of Drupal 8 were Drupal 8.8.x (security) and 8.9.x (bugfix and security). No more releases were made to 8.7.x and before. So in case there were some critical issue to fix for the upgrade path, that would not have been possible to fix in earlier versions. Also, by limiting the upgrade potential to these two release series, we could limit the potential upgrade bugs that could happen with unsupported earlier versions. However, to support the upgrade to Drupal 9, and thanks to the early release of Drupal 9, we also made Drupal 8.9.x a long term supported release, which is why it will go end of life an additional five months later, after a total support of 17 months. At this time we are supporting Drupal 7.x (bug and security fixes), Drupal 8.9.x (security fixes), Drupal 9.1.x (security fixes), Drupal 9.2.x (bug and security fixes), preparing to release 9.3.0 in December, already opened 9.4.x for development and will very soon open Drupal 10.0.x for development and eventual release next year. That is a lot of versions of Drupal to support! While we do everything we can to make the transitions between these easier, it does depend on you too to keep your Drupal sites up to date. Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/3w4HBXp
Why Regular Website Maintenance is Important for Its Success
You must update and maintain your website regularly. Read this article to know how website maintenance can help your website and brand image.
Tanjeet Wed, 10/27/2021 - 14:48
Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2ZB21f7
With four days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9. One of the benefits of using Upgrade Status is it will tell you about environment compatibility alongside extension compatibility. It will note if your PHP or Apache or database versions are out of date. Of particular note are Drupal 9's MySQL/Percona and MariaDB version requirements. The MySQL/Percona/MariaDB driver that's included in Drupal 9 core requires MySQL/Percona 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.3.7+. The intention with raising the bar from Drupal 8's requirement of MySQL/Percona 5.6 and MariaDB 10.0 was to utilise some of the newer features in these database versions. There was also the risk of a dependency starting to require the new versions, given the end of life nature of the older database versions at this point. Neither happened yet but we did not know that ahead of time of course. MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 10.0 database driver for Drupal 9 to the rescue! If you are on a long term supported operating system and receive security coverage for your database, you might not need to update to MySQL/Percona 5.7 or MariaDB 10.3 immediately after all. Only a few contributed projects utilise the new capabilities, for example the JSON/JSONB field module. If you are certain that none of your modules require the newer versions, keep in mind that core itself can actually run fine with older database versions still. Follow the instructions on the project page to install this driver for Drupal 9. I would still suggest you plan an upgrade of your database, but now it can be decoupled from your Drupal major upgrade. Looking ahead, some of the Drupal 10 platform requirements are already defined, and MySQL/Percona/MariaDB requirements will not be raised further from Drupal 9's minimum versions. However there are no guarantees that the new features will not be actually utilised then. Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/3GyKmVI Posted on behalf of One Shoe and Exove What are the thoughts of Drupal Business leaders about 2021? For the sixth consecutive time, Drupal agencies One Shoe and Exove, together with the Drupal Association, took a deep dive into how Drupal business leaders experience the current state of Drupal business. We are still living in a time where there is constant change in our society. Year two of the pandemic has seen significant and most likely long-term growth in Drupal business for the second year in a row. Now it is time to look forward in order to see what we can do to keep this growth going for years to come. Characteristics of the participants77 people participated in this year’s edition of the Drupal Business Survey. 61,1% of the participants have a CEO/CTO/COO role in their company and 20,8% of the respondents are founders. A majority of the Drupal-centric businesses that participated in the survey have relevant business in Europe (61,1%) and North America (57,2%). The rest are (also) operational in:
Looking at the chart below, it is clear that small and mid-sized companies are well represented in this year’s survey. While the Drupal Business Survey does see quite a growth in the number of companies having 51-100 employees compared to last year, we also see a significant dip in the number of companies that have 101-500 employees this year. The reason for this change is hard to pinpoint and could very well be a coincidence in the composition of participants. Since Drupal business is doing very well in 2021, lay-offs are highly unlikely and not mentioned amongst the respondents in the survey. Growth is continuing during and most likely after the pandemicAs the title of this article and last year’s survey showed, Drupal business is doing very well during the pandemic. Based on The Drupal Business Survey, we are happy to note that this year is no different in that regard. When asked what has been the biggest success during the last 12 months, 36% of participants said that their business grew. One respondent says in the survey: ”We have landed some large stable accounts across a wide spectrum of verticals giving us stability.” and “We eclipsed our targeted growth”. suggesting that this growth is bigger than usual and also looks like it is not a short-term ordeal. Quite interesting is the positive change in pipeline development as seen in the graphic below: This major increase in business and deal size is possibly happening because of the way clients have been forced into the digital space more in the past two years. As one participant states: “Digitalization is speeding up, and the demand for services like ours is increasing”. By looking at the numbers, this may certainly be the case. This is also reflected in the participants’ expectations for the next 12 months. Compared to last year’s survey, the outlook on the pipeline expectation is a lot more positive. How to sustain growth in a post-pandemic landscapeThe current situation of Drupal business is very strong. But with restrictions being lifted in most countries, things could change once more. How do we make sure to sustain the growth that we achieved in the past 12 months? 1. PricingTo sustain growth, good margins on Drupal-related services are needed. That is why in the coming period, Drupal agencies need to upsell their services and Drupal itself. It is clear that for a lot of organizations, the need for digitization took a big leap in priority. This means that there are plenty of projects waiting to be picked up. It is essential that we are engaging in projects where Drupal has a good fit for customer needs in order to price projects with healthy margins. 2. SalariesGrowing your business means expanding your workforce. As you will read in this article and what you probably experienced first hand this year, is that Drupal talent is scarce. If you want to attract ample talent to take on the increased workload, you need to offer competitive salaries. Stagnating your growth in your workforce will lead to an overload of work and a halt in growth. 3. Being able to handle too much workIf you however still find yourself in a situation where you can no longer deal with the amount of work, don’t hesitate to act accordingly. You can easily decrease the amount of work without your revenue stream taking a hit by raising the prices of your Drupal services. This will of course attract fewer clients, but the clients that will request your services will pay more. Most popular Drupal industriesDrupal business is thriving in 2021. But what industries are the most lucrative for the Drupal companies? Each year the Drupal Business Survey asks participants in which industries their company operates. This is the top 10 of 2021: The most popular industry for Drupal projects is the Charities and Non-profit sector with 68,8% of the Drupal companies having clients from this sector. This is a big change from last year, where the Charities and Non-profit sector was served by only 55.4% of the respondents. The runners-up are Education (59,7%) and Healthcare and Medicine (51,9%) finishing our top three. While serving the Charities and Non-profit sector is a noble effort, it should be noted that this sector focuses heavily on reducing operating costs to ensure most of the money flowing to the charitable or non-profit cause. Drupal can, of course, help them to reduce costs at other areas of their operations – but at the end of the day also Drupal agency costs will be on the line. The Education sector and Government & Public Administration – fourth most popular – are known for investing heavily in digitalization, especially now due to pandemic and public subsidies given to digital transformation. Prices in these sectors are typically lower than in private sectors. This is however balanced with long contracts, a steady flow of work, and certainty that the invoices are paid. Besides the top industry being different from last year’s edition, we do see a significant drop in the Media sector. This is a trend that requires attention because this is an industry that is usually good for some interesting contracts. Promising industriesThis year, the Drupal Business Survey also asked participants what industries they think are the most promising moving forward. This is what they had to say: The answers to this question are in line with the current most popular industries except for one major difference. The current number one, Non-Profit, only scores 5% of the answers here. This might be due to the high number of companies already working on it, or low-profit expectations. Another curious thing is that most people (19%) do not see any particular industry standing out. People elaborate with: “I think this is more a question of the size of projects not of their industry.” and “Drupal is pretty ubiquitous these days.” It is true that Drupal can be used in all industries, as all of them require communication platforms, and in smaller markets companies cannot be industry-specific. Going forward, industry focus is relevant to keep Drupal on the growth trajectory, as the harder to penetrate industries require attentive work within the industry to gain an understanding of the business and references to win new clients. Lack of Drupal talent is an ongoing struggleLike we mentioned above, the lack of Drupal talent is still one of the biggest challenges the Drupal business community is facing. When asked what the biggest challenges have been in the past 12 months, 27% claimed that recruiting has been their main concern. “We've been on a growth path so it feels like we're forever recruiting” clearly states the case at hand and what this lack of talent means for the growth of Drupal businesses. Hardships in finding and hiring Drupal talent has been an ongoing theme in the past Drupal Business Surveys. The last 12 months have also shown us a new challenge in recruitment: employee churn. Employee churn fueled by the pandemicAs one participant states: "Several long-term staff members have been enticed by other job offers. This appears to be a global issue of staff re-assessing their personal priorities.” and “It's getting harder and harder to find and retain talent”. Looking at these answers, it seems that the pandemic has triggered people to rethink their situations and values, and take actions. For Drupal companies, it perhaps broke the normal cycle of daily work and started a period of employee churn. Beware of the vicious cycleThe danger of an understaffed workforce can be the start of a vicious cycle that is tough to break. By not having a big enough workforce in a growing company, there will be too much work per individual. This overload in work, combined with the toll the pandemic took on people, could cause more people to develop mental health issues and burn-outs – a concern among 8% of the survey’s participants. This will leave you with an even smaller workforce thus the cycle begins anew. Take good care of your employeesBased on the survey findings, a priority going forward is to invest properly in your workforce. The companies should do their utmost to make sure that their staff is healthy, happy, feel safe, and can handle their workload. This will help with stability, make it more attractive for new hires to stay and will prevent a lot of concerns cascading through your organization down the line. One participant stated that “Give raises through the pandemic.” has been their biggest success as it lays a great foundation for stability. Challenges regarding Drupal’s popularityOne thing that stood out to us while viewing this year’s results was the number of participants being worried about Drupal’s popularity decreasing in the coming 12 months. When asked: “What are you most worried about regarding Drupal business in the coming year?”, 28% responded that Drupal’s popularity decreasing is their biggest worry. Leaving 'Nothing' (23%) and ‘Recruitment’ (19%) as a respective 2nd and 3rd place. The Drupal Business Survey dove deeper into the major reasons, and we found out that the competition from cloud CMS platforms is a big factor. “Competing products and content as a service CMS platforms are slowly gaining ground and eating into areas where Drupal was traditionally dominant such as sites/platforms that needed more than basic customization.” and “Clients currently on Drupal 7 choosing a different platform rather than migrating to Drupal 9” are clearly showing how people experience the current perception on Drupal in their day-to-day activities. How to overcome these challengesDrupal is naturally still a very strong option in a lot of situations, and it has its own edges, such as high flexibility and configurability to cope in different situations. So, it is up to Drupal business owners to make sure we play to Drupal’s strengths and market Drupal in a way that attracts the best kind of projects. The SaaS CMS platforms are getting better and are attractive to a lot of people, and their development should be followed closely to maintain Drupal’s competitive edge. We need to make sure that we are not competing with these new platforms – or WordPress for that matter – in fields where Drupal has additional challenges to overcome. It is also extremely crucial to compete with value and not with prices, as the race to the bottom will erode companies’ ability to develop themselves and their offering further. That is why it is very important to take a close look at what the client is looking after, and check whether Drupal would be a good fit. It is also good to know whether people are enticed by the open-source ecosystem or would rather work with something else. Reasons for clients to (not) choose DrupalWhat makes clients pick Drupal? The Drupal Business Survey is happy to report that ‘having used Drupal before’ is no longer the number one reason for working with it. This means that people have other motives to choose Drupal and it’s not just out of habit. Drupal being open source is the number one reason with 63,6%. Another great development is the fact that more companies use Drupal because it is the best fit for their business requirements, and that it is no longer picked because of low costs. This again plays well into the narrative of upselling your services and Drupal to the right organizations. The main reasons for clients not choosing Drupal are still playing a part in the well-known points of improvement. The top three reasons are:
It is important to know why companies choose Drupal for projects and why they choose other CMSes. With this knowledge, it is possible to reassess Drupal’s position in the market and adjust the proposition if needed. ContributionDrupal’s strength has always been an active development community that builds the product further. Drupal companies play a major role in the contribution, as they pay the salaries for most of the people contributing back to the platform. The Drupal Business Survey researched how and why companies contribute. The diagram below shows the amount of companies contributing to the certain facets of the project. Almost all companies (80-85%) contribute documentation and code changes, and around half of them help to fund the community with donations and sponsoring events. The share of companies contributing has stayed roughly the same compared to the previous year. Major drops are in organizing events, which is natural due to pandemic, and donations, which is explained by a bigger funding drive that took place in spring 2020. The main reason for not contributing is lack of time, mentioned by several companies that do not give back to the community. This resonates well with the overall situation with finding and hiring Drupal talent. Fortunately, these companies are a small minority and the company support towards open source Drupal project continues to stay on a high level. ConclusionAs said multiple times already, Drupal business is at a high. But it is now up to all of us to keep it that way. Pick your learnings from this past year and make sure you market your services and Drupal to the right organizations. This will help you increase your pricing, keep a close eye on your workload and attract more talent with interesting salaries. Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/3bpnIkg With five days to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9. If you took my advice a couple days ago and took on co-maintainership of a project, you may be wondering about the fastest way to get drupal.org projects Drupal 9 compatible. Last year, we introduced the Project Update Bot that submits compatibility issues with patches to drupal.org projects. If it detects all compatibility issues identified are fixed, it will also suggest updating the core compatibility information for the project within the same patch. Committing such patches will potentially entirely fix extension compatibility. Hundreds of those issues have been reviewed and marked as tested by folks in the community and a lot more are waiting for review or are under discussion. For your own custom code, I highly advise that you use the tools behind the update bot, specifically the Drupal Rector tool funded by Palantir.net. It will attempt to fix as many deprecated API uses as possible. According to our analysis of all contributed projects, almost half of all identified Drupal 9 incompatibility issues on drupal.org are covered by Drupal Rector automated fixes. So running Drupal Rector on your own code first will save you a lot of manual work and time. Upgrade Status will help identify the rest of the problems too and link to documentation to help fix them. You can and should make all of these changes on your Drupal 8 site, given that the fixed code will keep running fine on Drupal 8. Once you updated contributed projects used on your site, fixed your custom code and ensured a compatible environment, you can upgrade to Drupal 9. Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/3nFBCo5
Mobomo’s Drupal GovCon 2021 Training Each year, the best and brightest in the web development community gather at Drupal GovCon to expand their expertise and share the latest insights and trends regarding Drupal, the free and open-source web content management system (CMS) that provides the back-end framework for at least 1300 of the top websites worldwide. Mobomo, a leader in scalability who has worked with federal agencies from NASA to the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association), has been a key contributor to Drupal GovCon since its inception in 2015 and, as the sole Accessibility Sponsor for this year’s convention, our team of experts embraced the honor of hosting several shorter presentations in addition to an extensive training on Drupal infrastructure best practices. Widely recognized for a track record building some of the most trafficked sites for government entities, the Mobomo technical team is committed to serving the 1.4 million strong Drupal community as a partner and thought leader. This year, Mobomo aces Jason Schulte, Dan Narkiewicz, and Jeff Beagley focused on Mobomo’s unique approach and philosophy regarding what doing Drupal right really looks like. An infrastructure, hosting, and web development veteran with more than 20 years experience fostering cohesive teams dedicated to innovation, Jason Schulte, Mobomo’s CTO, joined Dan Narkiewicz, a Full Stack Developer and Engineering Manager who specializes in Docker-in-the-Cloud solutions for Drupal 7, 8, and 9, and Jeff Beagley, a DevSecOps Engineer with a wide-ranging background in software development and a focus on building automated and efficient applications/architectures at scale. Together, they created a playbook for the more technically savvy Drupal GovCon attendees to hone their abilities in designing sites that strike the right balance between speed and aesthetics without sacrificing long term scalability capabilities. The “Mobomo Way” deep dive Jason, Dan, and Jeff engaged in with the group began with Drupal on a single server using docker containers and then scaled it to a high-availability, production-ready cloud deployment utilizing AWS managed cloud services to scale the Drupal infrastructure with the capability to leverage AWS automation to its fullest extent. Taking advice from John Wooden, who famously once said, “If you don’t have the time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”, Jason, Dan, and Jeff shared the most critical elements involved in building sites that perform – and will keep performing no matter the scale; namely, memcache, docker containers, and appropriate planning of the reverse proxy caching layer and CDN. Memcache Speeding up dynamic web applications by reducing the database load, memcache is an open source, high-performance distributed memory caching system that is widely recognized for optimizing the user experience. Mobomo believes every Drupal site should be built using memcache because, without it, sites can encounter performance issues in the long term. We have seen it too many times and the scalability issues that arise from not using memcache can become cost and performance prohibitive for you and your clients. Docker Containers Packaging applications and all their dependencies together in the form of “containers”, Docker ensures that each application is independent of other applications, will not interfere with one another, and is easily replicable by QA teams. This containerization platform works seamlessly in any environment but most importantly, Docker Containers force developers to view site infrastructures in terms of separate components and separate the site components at the beginning of the development process, which allows for easy scalability of individual layers throughout all site expansion efforts today and into the future. Reverse Proxy Caching Layer and the CDN Maximizing site performance is critical to the user experience, but a great deal of care and planning must go into a reverse proxy caching layer and the CDN (Content Delivery Network). This can truly be one of the most difficult things to set up and configure properly, primarily because this is never a one size fits all situation. The reverse proxy and CDN is how you make the site perform really fast for the public, but whenever you publish new content to the site, you run up against the CDN – so, striking a balance between these two forces (pushing content out quickly without hitting the backend all the time) is very challenging. Mobomo’s training seminar touched on this, but in reality, reverse proxy caching and the CDN is a topic that could have its own intricate training course. In other areas, developers can be prescriptive, but in this instance, the way in which each is calibrated is entirely dependent upon the site needs and usage. For example, a news organization that publishes articles by the minute will require different planning than a government entity with static pages updated on an infrequent basis. Jason, Dan, and Jeff made this look extremely easy through their training, but suffice it to say, practice makes perfect – and as experts in their fields, these gentlemen have seen and worked their way through many challenging site builds/rebuilds. Have questions about performance audits or scaling your site? Interested in learning more from Jason, Dan, and Jeff? We at Mobomo pride ourselves on redefining the status quo in product design and DevSecOps engineering and are committed to sharing knowledge with our colleagues, so we’ve made our Drupal GovCon training presentation accessible via the links below. We welcome any thoughts you have on our work and or suggestions you have for future training that would be valuable to you and your organization. Please feel free to reach out to us via LinkedIn or click this link to access our contact form and share how we can help you. The post Drupal Infrastructure Done Right appeared first on . Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/311hl4M |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2023
Categories |