So. Many. Updates. What's New in 2022 at Drupalize.Me?

Every week we update the content on Drupalize.Me. Many times the updates are in response to a member who used the "Was This Helpful?" form at the bottom of every tutorial. It might be fixing a typo; updating a code example; or adding/removing/clarifying a sentence, section, or entire tutorial. Each time a scheduled minor update to Drupal is released, we comb through the changes and see what we need to update on the site. When a major release happens, this can also mean planning out new tutorials that teach folks how to use the new or updated features of Drupal, like Layout Builder, JSON:API, Views API, and more. When Drupal 8 was released, this was a massive undertaking because of the major API and system-wide changes. It was important to distinguish between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. And so, up until relatively recently, the term "Drupal 8" was used liberally throughout our tutorials. But now, Drupal 8 has its EOL (End-Of-Life) date, Drupal 9 has been out for over 9 months, and Drupal 10 is on the horizon. So while we'll continue to distinguish Drupal 7 tutorials, from here on out, when we refer to "Drupal" we mean the latest version of Drupal.

So, what does this mean for you? It means that we've updated many of our tutorials to use "Drupal" or "the latest version of Drupal" instead of "Drupal 8". You can still use the search facets or taxonomy term labels to find specific major versions. Exceptions exist if a specific version is being referenced or used for comparison. Most of the time, this was a minor issue of replacing "Drupal 8" with "Drupal" or an equivalent phrase like, "the latest version of Drupal". But in the case of the Automated Testing course, a pretty significant update was needed. (Goodbye, simpletest!) We've completed a major update to the Automated Testing course, so now is a great time to brush up or learn how automated testing works in Drupal. Check out the whole course, Automated Testing in Drupal, or jump to a specific tutorial:

• Introduction to Testing in Drupal
• Software Testing Overview
• Frameworks for Testing in Drupal
• Install Drupal Development Requirements with Composer
• Organize Test Files
• Run Drupal Tests with the run-tests.sh Script
• Run Drupal Tests with PHPUnit
• Convert Tests from Simpletest to PHPUnit
• Create a PHPUnit Config File for Your Project
• Set up a Functional Test
• Implement a Functional Test
• Implement Drupal Functional Test Dependencies
• Implement a Unit Test in Drupal
• Functional JavaScript Testing
• Functional JavaScript Testing with Nightwatch.js

What other updates have we been working on?

Acquia certification exam guides updated for Drupal 9

With Drupal 8's End-of-Life (EOL), Acquia is no longer offering certification exams for Drupal 8. We've updated all of our Acquia Certification Exam Prep Guides for Drupal 9, including:

• Acquia Certified Site Builder Exam
• Acquia Certified Drupal Developer Exam
• Acquia Certified Drupal Front End Specialist Exam
• Acquia Certified Backend Specialist Exam

All topic pages updated for Drupal 9

We've reviewed all of our topic pages and updated them all for Drupal 9. You can find a complete list of our topic pages on the bottom half of the Guides page. For each topic, we have a list of Drupalize.Me tutorials, courses, or related topic pages that pertain to the topic (if we have them). We also have a list of external resources we think might help you better understand the topic -- especially if we don't have Drupalize.Me-specific content on the subject. If you have an external resource on a topic we cover that you have found especially useful, we'd love to hear about it. Use the "Was This Helpful?" form at the bottom of the relevant topic page to let us know. You can also let us know if an external resource was not helpful, out-of-date, or the link was broken.

Drupal 8 EOL text updates

We've updated links to API docs and the Drupal Wiki to ensure that they're going to the latest version of Drupal when appropriate (which is most of the time), instead of "Drupal 8" specifically. And, when referring to Drupal, we've chosen to refer to Drupal more generically, or to the "latest version", unless version-specific comparisons are being made in a tutorial. This is due to the fact that since Drupal 8, the development cycle of major version releases have fundamentally changed. Through the deprecation process, scheduled releases, and new features released within the minor release cycle, upgrading from Drupal 8 to 9 to 10 is something you can keep up with by staying on top of deprecation notices and minor releases, instead of planning for a major migration project for each new major release.

You can learn more about the new way major releases are handled in this short explainer video.

Menu items vs. menu links

As I was reviewing and perusing issues in the Drupal issue queue, I came across Consistently refer to "menu links" as that, not "menu items", in the UI, which has been fixed. This led to me checking up on our 5 tutorials about menu links for developers and seeing that we were using "menu item" not "menu link". So those 5 tutorials have been recently updated as well to use "menu link" instead of "menu item" to align with standards in Drupal core and what's reflected in the UI:

• Overview: Menu Links in a Module
• Add a Menu Link in a Module
• Add an Action Link in a Module
• Add a Contextual Link in a Module
• Add a Local Task Link in a Module

Copy edits for consistency

All of our tutorial content is version-controlled and managed in GitHub. This means that all of our updates, from simple typo fixes to major content updates, are reviewed by at least 1 other person. For major changes and new tutorials, our tutorials get reviewed by a minimum of 2 people, often 3: a technical review, a copy edit, and a final pass (by me, usually) when the content is published. Not to mention the expertise that our internal and external trainers bring in their creation of the tutorial in the first place.

Part of the advantage of using GitHub is the ability to chain together automated checks. GitHub checks for merge conflicts. But we've also added 2 linters: 1 powered by Vale and 1 powered by RemarkJS. You can read more about our Automated Enforcement of our Style Guide, but the short story is that we've updated tens of tutorials to consistently show the required sections in our tutorial template (Summary, Goal, Prerequisites, Recap, Further your understanding, and Additional resources), as well as Markdown updates to use consistent syntax for code formatting.

Not all style guide rules can be added to our linters, so we've manually updated things like how we refer to "Drupal.org" as a proper noun when listing resources from Drupal.org in a tutorial's Additional resources section. We know we're not 100% perfect or consistent with our style guide, but we're striving for it and are continually updating any inconsistencies we find. Recently, we've done a comprehensive search on known inconsistencies and updated many of our tutorials. Why should we bother? Well, one of our core values is to "Do Great Work" and we try to practice that value, especially when it comes to our content.

Was this helpful?

As usual, you can use the "Was This Helpful?" mini-survey at the bottom of any tutorial to give us direct feedback on a tutorial, guide, or topic. Your questions and comments are reviewed by People Support and Trainers, and we do our best to answer your questions, correct or clarify content, or point you to resources to help you along. We read every submission. We know that learning can be a frustrating experience and we want to be here to help you along your journey.