Blog

When I was writing documentation for Drupal CMS’s SEO Tools recommended add-on (aka “recipe”), I realized that not all Drupal site users may be up-to-date on the essentials of SEO and how Drupal can help you make your site discoverable by your target audiences.

While Drupal has long been a solid foundation for building search-friendly websites — that doesn’t mean every Drupal user knows where to start with SEO.

In this post, I’ll define essential SEO concepts and highlight best practices direct from the documentation I wrote about promoting your site with SEO for the Drupal CMS User Guide.

Whether you're configuring a custom Drupal 11 site or using Drupal CMS, these tips apply to you. All of the tools mentioned below may be installed on any Drupal 11 site or installed via the SEO Tools recommended add-on in Drupal CMS.

Since the launch of the Drupal CMS earlier this year, we’ve been hard at work documenting everything you need to build and maintain a site using this new, streamlined Drupal experience. Our goal is to make the Drupal CMS User Guide a go-to reference for site builders of all experience levels — especially those coming to Drupal for the first time.

In this post, we'll share an update on the current state of the guide, highlight two new sections we’re especially excited about, and show you how your team or company can help move the project forward.

When Drupal CMS launched, we built a guide to help users get started—but now we’re facing a big question: how does it relate to the existing Drupal User Guide? Should we keep them separate or merge them into a single, streamlined resource? In this post, Joe breaks down the challenges, and explores what’s next.

This week, we've added 7 new videos to existing tutorials in our Module Developer Guide. The Module Developer Guide was created for developers familiar with PHP but new to Drupal module development.

We have been working on recording, editing, and publishing videos for the step-by-step "task" tutorials in our Module Developer Guide. As many of these tutorials are code heavy, you have the advantage of a video walk-through as well as code examples to copy and paste in the written version of the tutorial. Read more to see which tutorials in the guide now have videos embedded.

With the release of Drupal 11.1, there’s a cool new feature for developers: Hooks can now be implemented as class methods using PHP attributes instead of functions. This change is a major step forward in modernizing Drupal’s codebase. While procedural function-based hooks are still supported (and will be for some time), developers writing new code should strongly consider using the object-oriented (OOP) approach introduced in Drupal 11.1.

One of our core commitments at Drupalize.Me is ensuring that our tutorials remain accurate and relevant as Drupal evolves. So we’re working on updating all of our tutorials to take into account the new OOP approach to adding hooks in a module. We’re also aware that procedural hooks have been around for 24 years, and aren’t going to disappear overnight. You’ll see them in example code and existing documentation for a long time to come. So for now we’ll be including both approaches in our content whenever doing so makes sense.

You should plan on learning both approaches, and then using the one that makes the most sense given your specific case.

Continue reading to learn a bit about the evolution of hooks in Drupal core and how to implement hooks as classes in Drupal 11 in this latest Drupalize.Me blog post by Joe Shindelar.

Here's an update from Joe at Drupalize.Me about the progress of the Drupal CMS Guide -- and the challenge of creating docs for a fast-moving open source product like Drupal CMS!

Have you ever wondered "What is the difference between cache keys and cache tags?" One of our Drupalize.Me members wrote in asking about it, and the answer provides insight into how Drupal's Cache API works.

We've added a new tutorial, Upgrade to Drupal 11. And, we've updated all tutorials and code in our Module Developer Guide for compatibility with Drupal 11.

We updated our Drush tutorials to be inline with current best practices around the use of PHP attributes and autowiring dependencies. This post looks at the changes we made, and the work required to keep these resources up-to-date for our members.

At Drupalize.Me, one of our goals is to provide learners with up-to-date resources that align with the latest best practices. To that end, I recently worked to update our tutorials to reflect the transition from PHP annotations to PHP attributes for plugin discovery. I blogged previously about why this transition is happening.

As Drupalize.Me’s tutorial library continues to grow, these kinds of changes touch ever larger numbers of existing tutorials. Plugins is an interesting one because we have tutorials that teach the inner workings of the Plugin API. And, we have tutorials about things like blocks, field types, and views plugins, that while not specifically about the Plugin API, make use of it. This ended up being one the most significant updates we’ve made since the release of Drupal 8.

In short, the updates are necessary because Drupal is transitioning from annotations to native PHP attributes. And while annotations will continue to work for the foreseeable future, we wanted to make sure that the code examples, and recommendations, you find on our site are aligned with that code you’ll see in the latest versions of Drupal core.

After watching the Driesnote earlier this week, I wanted to try and play around with the AI tools that were demonstrated. Here's my notes so far. And instructions on how you can set it all up to experiment with the new AI tools in Drupal.