Drupal 11 is now open for development, Drupal 10.3.x is branched

Starting today, the Drupal 11.x branch is used for building the next major Drupal version, Drupal 11. This means that major version specific changes can now happen on the Drupal 11.x branch. This includes dependency and requirements updates and removal of deprecated API and extensions. Details are available in the allowed changes during Drupal core release cycle document. Drupal 11 is planned to be released either on the week of June 17, week of July 29 or week of December 9, 2024, depending on when beta requirements are completed.

Source: Drupal 11 is now open for development, Drupal 10.3.x is branched

Drupal core committers look to remove support for Windows in production in Drupal 11

Drupal added support for IIS in 2010 and we have supported that and WAMP (Running Apache and PHP on Windows). Unfortunately, we have never been able to provide automated testing for these environments. And since 2010, the use of Microsoft products for hosting websites has declined. Because of this, the Drupal core committers propose drop support for Windows when used on production web sites in Drupal 11. Support for development on Windows will continue.

Source: RFC Remove support for Windows in production in Drupal 11

I didn’t know that IIS on Windows was still being used in production. I guess I need to get out more.

Notes on better search 8/18/2023

Goal: better, more focused search for www.cali.org.

In general the plan is to scrape the site to a vector database, enable embeddings of the vector db in Llama 2, provide API endpoints to search/find things.

Hints and pointers.

  • Llama2-webui – Run any Llama 2 locally with gradio UI on GPU or CPU from anywhere
  • FastAPI – web framework for building APIs with Python 3.7+ based on standard Python type hints
  • Danswer – Ask Questions in natural language and get Answers backed by private sources. It makes use of
    • PostgreSQL – a powerful, open source object-relational database system
    • QDrant – Vector Database for the next generation of AI applications.
    • Typesense – a modern, privacy-friendly, open source search engine built from the ground up using cutting-edge search algorithms, that take advantage of the latest advances in hardware capabilities.

The challenge is to wire together these technologies and then figure out how to get it to play nice with Drupal. One possibility is just to build this with an API and then use the API to interact with Drupal. That approach also offers the possibility of allowing the membership to interact with the API too.

Drupal 8 end of life and future Drupal 10 release

Drupal 10 is coming in 2022 — discover what new features it is going to include, and what to do with Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 websites in relation to their end-of-life.

Source: Drupal 8 end of life and future Drupal 10 release

Drupal 7’s end of life is scheduled for November 2022, just one year from now. CALI is moving it’s D7 website to Drupal 9 by June 2022. I’m hoping Drupal becomes more like WordPress where major version updates are mostly point and click affairs with little or no need to rebuild a site.

Drupal 9.1.0 is available


The first feature release of Drupal 9 includes the new experimental Olivero frontend theme and various additions to the Claro administration theme. Installer performance is improved 20% and full Composer 2 and PHP 8 support is available. Images with known dimensions are set to lazy-load by default to improve frontend performance.

Source: Drupal 9.1.0 is available

Looks like PHP 8, Composer 2, Symphony 4,5,6 will get us to Drupal 9. Upgrades paths from Drupal 7 are stable.

Some Javascript Tour Libraries

Here’s a list of JS tour libraries that are open source and currently maintained. Tour libraries provide a way for site designers to create guides that will show the features of a website via a walk through of pop-up dialog boxes. They’re really handy for complex sites.

Mediacurrent Launches a Drupal Theme Generator

In a fast moving industry like ours, it is imperative that we have tools that allow us to build environments (front and back-end), quickly, while providing consistency all across. The same way we have DevOps processes for quickly spinning off a complete Drupal built with composer, drush, Drupal console and more, we need a system that automates the process of creating Drupal themes which include all the essential tools needed for a modern, best practices and standards compliant environment.

Source: Mediacurrent’s Drupal Theme Generator | Mediacurrent

This looks intriguing. While the demo highlights generating a Drupal 8 theme the underlying tool chain is general enough that it should adaptable for other platforms or straight web theming. Best of all, no Ruby required, making it a bit easier to run on Windows and elsewhere.