Blog

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.

At Drupalize.Me, we've been talking with Dries and folks at the Drupal Association about how we can contribute high quality documentation for Drupal CMS. The plan for Drupal CMS documentation is emerging. We believe Drupal CMS documentation should be a highly polished and organized user guide for end-users of Drupal CMS. And that it should be funded. Why?

Drupal 11 was released recently. Yay. And with it comes a bunch of minor (and sometimes major) changes to the way Drupal works and the need to update the documentation to reflect those changes.

We’ve completed a major overhaul in how our tutorials are organized on Drupalize.Me. Take a look at the new Guides page and find something to new to learn about Drupal.

Heads up! We’re rolling out a new organization structure of our tutorials, courses, and guides, so that we can implement our new guide navigation. You may find the course navigation change at any time within the next couple of weeks. Use the “Was This Helpful?” form at the bottom of any tutorial to reach out if you need help or have a question.

This Wednesday, May 8, I'm speaking at DrupalCon Portland 2024 as part of the Drupal Project Initiatives Keynote. The keynote is kicking off Contribution Day on Wednesday first thing in the morning. I'll be highlighting initiatives and programs that are helping people contribute in a strategic way, and as a result, increasing throughput in the core issue queue. Throughput is the rate that a project’s issues are resolved and committed. And it’s one way to gauge the health of an open source project like Drupal.

Check out these resources to learn more about the initiative and programs I highlight in this presentation.

We have been working for a long time on a new Drupal Module Developer Guide. We'll be sharing more about our process and approach, but today we want to simply announce, it's here! The Drupal Module Developer Guide is an introduction to Drupal module development that uses a project-based approach to learning and helps people with some knowledge of PHP transition from Drupal Site Builder to Drupal Developer. The guide gives learners tangible wins, early and often, motivating students to keep learning.

TL; DR: Use this prompt and the text from a Drupalize.Me tutorial to experiment with using generative AI as a tutor for learning Drupal.

A while ago, I wrote an article and gave a presentation about why learning Drupal is so hard. One of the key challenges I identified is the “pit of despair”. It's that point in the learning journey where you can no longer rely on the hand holding of step-by-step tutorials. You need to step out into the chasm and come up with your own unique solutions to your specific problems. That point where you know just enough to realize the breadth of what you don’t yet know. And I had said, based on input from many peers, that the quickest way through the dip is real-world experience and drawing on the expertise of others. The advice could be summed up as: if you want to learn fast, get a tutor.

It can be hard to find a mentor. As much as we would love to be able to do so, our small team at Drupalize.Me can't scale personalized individual tutoring. So I've been thinking about how you might be able to use AI to help get at least some of the benefits of tutoring.

During the Drupal 7 era, we created tutorials on a variety of topics such as Views, Drush, Form API, and theming. When Drupal 8 was released, we updated this content for Drupal 8, 9, and 10. The significant changes between Drupal 7 and modern versions necessitated maintaining two versions of each tutorial on our site: one for legacy Drupal and another for modern Drupal.

Today, we still maintain both versions. The use of our legacy Drupal content has steadily decreased, yet it still has a substantial presence in search results. This often leads to confusion, especially when members trying to learn about features in modern Drupal find themselves on a legacy Drupal tutorial.

In this article, Joe Shindelar writes about his coding experiments to tune search results on Drupalize.Me to favor Drupal 10 content, and demote Drupal 7 content.

Like everyone else, I've been experimenting with ChatGPT. In this conversation, ChatGPT does a surprisingly good job of role playing as Drush, the command line tool for Drupal administrators.

In Drupal 10.2, you’ll notice a new UI when you create a new field. It’s designed to help you recall what each field type means, so that you can make the right choice. Let’s check it out.

As of PHP 8.1, the PHP language has native support for attributes that are compatible with Drupal’s plugin system use case. As a result, Drupal will transition from the use of annotations to PHP attributes, to supply metadata and configuration for plugins. This will require developers to learn the new PHP attributes syntax, and update their existing code to use it. For now, Drupal will continue to support both annotations and attributes. But the proverbial clock is ticking.

So let’s take a look at how we got here, and what you’ll need to do to update your code for future versions of Drupal.