Controversial? Sometimes. Opinionated? Usually. Talented developer? Definitely. I think it is fair to say that without Charlie, #drupal would not be where it is today. thedroptimes.com/interview/4…

🎉 "Behind the Scenes at BADCamp 2024" 🌉 In his latest article, Luke McCormick @cellear takes us on a vivid journey through the highs, challenges, and community spirit that made this year’s Bay Area Drupal Camp unforgettable. From the meticulous pre-event setup to the inspiring keynote by Kristen Pol @kristen_pol, and the lively post-camp gatherings, Luke recounts every detail of an organizer’s experience. Held in Oakland, California, @BADCamp 2024 re-energized the Drupal community. Attendees had the chance to dive into sessions ranging from Tim Lehnen’s @timlehnen "Next Decade of Drupal" vision to JD Leonard’s @drupal_jd fun “Cooking with Drupal 11” presentation. Luke even shared his own insights on simplifying Drupal maintenance, which were well-received, paving the way for his upcoming presentation at @NEDCamp. Each year, BADCamp reaffirms that the Drupal community is more than a network—it’s a family. 🥂 Here’s to another year of innovation, connection, and inspiration! To learn more, check the story out from the below link! thedroptimes.com/43830/luke-… #DrupalCommunity #BADCamp2024 #DrupalEvents #OpenSource #LukeMcCormick

Hey everybody. Want to see Simplify Drupal LIVE in concert? Then you should come to my talk at BADCamp, this Thursday at 4PM in Oakland CA! badcamp.org/schedule

I had a very disappointing experience with @Mailchimp today. I queued up an email to send tomorrow morning, planning to edit it today. I have a change to make, but they say tomorrow is in the past, and thousands of credits will be wasted now on a bad email going out tomorrow.

The BadCAMP 2024 call for speakers is now open! This is your opportunity to be a part of the 13th annual BADCamp. Click through and get started TODAY: sessionize.com/badcamp-2024 Don't wait, now is your time to shine! #drupal #webdevelopment #conferences #oakland #sfbayarea

Come to my talk at the San Francisco Drupal Users Group tonight, or tune in online. (RSVP to the Meetup invite to get the link.)

Do you do good Drupal dev work? Do you live or want to live in Austin? Do you want to work with me on interesting projects? If so my team is hiring! careers.apple.com/en-us/deta…

I believe Recipes will be a big part of the future of #drupal. @balint_pekker has a “prep manual” to get you ready. buff.ly/3IPwGbh

🚀 Upgraded my blog from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 in less than 24 hours with the open source Acquia Migrate Accelerate -- definitely a tool you should try if you ever need to migrate from Drupal 7 hojtsy.hu/blog/2024-feb-09/u…

#DrupalConPortland registration is NOW OPEN 🎉🎟️ During the Early Bird window, you'll save $100 on the ticket price. Join us in the City of Roses to network, collaborate, and learn with the #Drupal community🌹 See you in #Portland! Register now: events.drupal.org/portland20…

Today at @fosdem, the Open Website Alliance is announced by @drupal, @joomla, @typo3 and @WordPress with the message that we have more in common than different. The Alliance represents the open source CMSs powering more than 50% of websites online today. typo3.org/owa-charter

31/31 days of making Drupal simpler and easier to manage: Don't give your programmers access to your site! Ok, this one is going to be controversial, but hear me out. There's a lot of complicated programming contained within any Drupal site, but unless you've done something wrong it all plugs into Drupal's administrative interface, which can be operated by any reasonably tech-literate person. There is no reason the people who operate the administrative interface need to be experts in the arcane details of Drupal programming. While you need programmers to write the modules and themes, you don't need them to install the components for you -- you can, and should, take care of that yourself. Of course, the programmers need to have copies of the site, in order to be able to write the modules, themes, libraries, patches, and other assorted bits of code that are needed to create a fully-finished site. Of course they'll need copies of the code and (appropriately sanitized) database. They might even need to have access to an online dev environment to develop and test integrations. But unless you have a very unusual situation, they do not actually need access to the production environment. Don't just deploy a zillion Git commits, where nobody except for the programmer has any idea what's going on. If they're writing modules, have them give you the modules -- via email, if necessary. It's a HUGE advantage to have somebody install the modules and themes other than the person who wrote them. It ensures that the installation procedure is clear, well-understood, and documented. It encourages transparency among the team, so that everybody understands what everybody else is doing. And it increases the number of eyes on each step, without actually slowing things down and making it harder. Take control of your site. #drupal #webdevelopment #31daysofsimplifyingdrupal

30/31 days of making Drupal simpler and easier to manage: Wireframes are better than comps. Everyone know what a wireframe is -- the name practically describes it, it's a sketch that looks like it's made out of wires. Or, more likely, drawn with a pen on a napkin. You probably think it's done with simple boxes and lines because that's easier, right? So when you have a meeting to look at wireframes, and you see some beautiful comps made in Photoshop that look just like web pages, with colors and textures and photos and everything, you should be happy -- that's better! Right? Isn't it? It's not. Send it back, and demand the sketches. Wireframes are not low-fidelity comps, any more than Starry Night is a blurry picture of a nighttime sky. What's important about a wireframe is not what's left out, it's what's left in -- the key ingredients, the elements that matter. A good wireframe distills the essence of a design into the fewest number of elements possible. If done right, you shouldn't actually need comps -- from the wireframe you can go straight to code. Don't like something? It's easier to change a few lines of CSS than it is to redo a layered photoshop file, and more representational too. Websites are dynamic things, and the extra detail you get in a comp is just an illusion anyway -- the quicker you get to some sort of prototype, the quicker you'll be able to confidently make the decisions you need to make. Less is more. #drupal #webdevelopment #webdesign #uxdesign #31daysofsimplifyingdrupal

28/31 days of making Drupal simpler and easier to manage: Look at the SQL. At its surface, Drupal seems to be a lot of CSS and Javascript being pushed around by lots and lots of PHP code -- these days with healthy chunks of Composer, Twig, and some other things. Inside, though, at its core, is a SQL database. (Usually -- but if your Drupal site isn't running SQL, you're probably not actually interested in simplifying Drupal.) Taking a peek at the database tables inside of a Drupal site and you'll often see a simpler structure than you see on the outside. Nodes, fields, taxonomy relationships -- it's amazing what you can learn with a few simple select statements. (Want help writing them? Ask ChatGPT, its happy to help.) Have fun spelunking!

28/31 days of making Drupal simpler and easier to manage: Backdrop CMS. From its earliest days, major version upgrades of Drupal were difficult. New versions were incompatible with previous versions, requiring lots of work to upgrade from one version to the next. But the magnitude of the change from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was much larger than any changes before or since. Backdrop CMS (backdropcms.org/) is a "fork" of Drupal -- it started with Drupal's code as it existed in 2013, just before Drupal incorporated some very large structural changes. The biggest one of these was Drupal's decision to replace the very core of the project with Symfony, an independent PHP framework. While there are some important advantages to Symfony, it's requires an entirely different way of building modules. Drupal 8 also changed the way themes are constructed, so essentially every add-on component for every Drupal site needed to be rewritten. (And to further complicate matters, the decision was made to heavily promote the use of PHP's Composer package manager, instead installing Drupal and its components directly off the server as had been done previously.) Backdrop not only resisted this push towards greater complexity, it built a culture devoted to serving the needs of smaller development teams, who were being left behind by Drupal. It supports much older versions of PHP and MySQL, while also supporting the latest versions. It takes great pains to make sure that add-on modules and themes continue to work, even as it adds features. It very deliberately makes decisions that make things easier and more accessible for small developers, rather than favoring large enterprise teams. And it does all this while maintaining a deep commitment to security, coordinating responses to emerging threats in close cooperation with the Drupal security team. Finally, because it's built on the same architecture that Drupal 7 was, migrating from Drupal 7 to Backdrop is relatively straightforward and easy, compared to migrating to recent versions of Drupal. This is good news for the hundreds of thousands of sites that have so far found the migration to recent versions of Drupal too daunting. In many ways, Backdrop is a comprehensive approach to simplifying Drupal. simplifydrupal.com/ #drupal #backdrop #backdropcms #webdevelopment #31daysofsimplifyingdrupal