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.

This weekend (Friday to Sunday) is Drupal Global Contribution Weekend 2022! While there are some in person events such as in Ukraine, there are various online events that allow anyone to join. I'll highlight three opportunities to work on your Drupal 9 or Drupal 10 readiness.

I apparently released the Drupal configuration schema cheat sheet 7 years ago (wow!) to help people adopt the then new format to describe configuration structure. I keep getting questions and requests about it, so decided to make a major update to it now and bring it to the present day for Drupal 9.

As you may know, we are planning to release Drupal 10 in 2022 (as early as June), because Drupal 9's Symfony 4 and CKEditor 4 are both end of life the year after, around the end of 2023. So we plan go give enough time for people to update to Drupal 10 before Drupal 9 goes end of life. A similar situation happened with Drupal 8 to 9 driven by Symfony 3 to 4. However, moving Drupal 10 from Symfony 4 to 5 would again only give us a couple years of time to move on to Symfony 6 next, so the current plan is to move to Symfony 6 straight.

It is hard to believe that almost 6 years passed since Drupal 8.0.0's release on November 19th 2015. What feels like it was just yesterday, Drupal 8 brought lots of amazing new things to the platform. Near and dear to my heart was full multilingual support that I worked on with over 1600 people for several years. Also stars of the Drupal 8 show were content authoring with the bundled CKEditor, the vastly improved configuration management system, Views in core, built-in web service support, more semantic markup, in-place editing, PHPUnit integration, better caching, improved accessibility, even aural announcements for page changes, and so on and on. Drupal 8 embraced collaboration within the PHP ecosystem and beyond with our use of Symfony, Twig, Guzzle and gradually embraced application of Composer.

With one day 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. Given that there is only one day left, you will highly likely not be on Drupal 9 tomorrow.

With two 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.

Drupal 8 was released on November 19th, 2015. The end of life comes on November 2, 2021, after almost 6 years of support. Is this too soon? I think the answer will be different from situation to situation. But why do we need to end of life Drupal 8 in the first place?