Planet Drupal

Drupal 9 to 10 Transition Made Simple: Real Code Insights kanapatrick Tue, 04/23/2024 - 10:31

Have you found yourself gearing up for the transition from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10, only to be met with complexities and uncertainties along the way? You're not alone in this journey. Making the switch between major versions of a CMS can feel like navigating through a maze of code and updates, leaving you puzzled and overwhelmed.

As a content writer, one thing that poses a serious concern for professionals in this field is plagiarism. It refers to the act of using someone else’s work and calling it your own. It can be frustrating and is ethically and legally unacceptable. Duplicate content is no less than plagiarism. In fact, it can cause concerns not only for content professionals but also for website owners and SEO professionals. Surprisingly, 25-30% of the content on the internet today is duplicated without people even realizing it. In this blog, we’ll talk about duplicate content, the significance of this issue in today’s metrics, and how Drupal helps you solve the problem with convenience. What is duplicate content Duplicate content simply means identical content that exists across various URLs on the internet. When identical content shows up on different URLs, search engines typically face confusion in determining which URL to prioritize in their search results. This leads to low-ranking issues for all the URLs that display similar content, while preference slides over to alternative web pages. Why is it a significant problem As mentioned earlier, duplicate content can cause issues for marketers, website owners, and SEO professionals. Let me categorize the types of issues it can bring you: For Search Engines Identification: Search engines struggle to determine which version(s) of content to include or exclude from their indexes. Link Metrics Distribution: They face uncertainty in distributing link metrics like trust, authority, anchor text, and link equity among multiple versions or a single page. Ranking Ambiguity: It becomes unclear which version(s) should rank for specific search queries. For Website Owners Search Engine Optimization: To enhance user experience, search engines tend to display only one version of duplicated content. This reduces the visibility of all duplicates. Link Equity Dilution: Inbound links are divided among duplicates rather than consolidating on one page. This disperses the link equity, affecting the search visibility of the content piece. Consequently, duplicated content fails to achieve the search visibility it could otherwise attain. What causes duplicate content Now that you’ve gathered some information about the seriousness of the issue of duplicate content, here are a few potential and technical causes that lead to content duplication. URL Parameters: This issue arises when you apply URL parameters or tracking in your website’s code. According to Google, these URL variations are created by pairing a key and a value which are separated by an equal sign, and linked by an ampersand. Consequently, although the URLs may seem distinct, users end up on the same page regardless of the link they click. Session IDs: Similar to applied URL parameters, session IDs are assigned different IDs within the URL to each user visiting your site. Multiple Versions of Your Site: This issue arises with websites that have both a www.example.com and an example.com version of their pages. It also applies to sites with an SSL certificate that maintain both HTTP and HTTPS versions of their site. Faceted Navigation: Faceted or filtered navigation allows users to refine details on your site to find the information they are looking for. It enables them to customize their search experience. However, search engines may perceive these filtered URL results as duplicated content. Types of duplicate content Duplicate content affects your SEO ranking. Having said that, in terms of search engine optimization, duplicate content is of two different types:    1. Site-wide/Cross-domain Duplicate Content Site-wide duplicate content occurs when identical or similar content is available across different pages within the same website or across multiple domains. For instance, some e-commerce platforms may use similar product descriptions on their primary domain (store.com), mobile version (m.store.com), or localized domain versions like store.ca. Such duplication of content challenges your SEO ranking.  If the duplicate content extends beyond a single website to multiple websites, determining the organic search result becomes a challenging task, requiring specific strategies to deal with the same.    2. Copied Content/Technical Problems This sounds like an oversight yet a major issue at that. Such duplicate content occurs from directly copying content to multiple locations or due to technical issues that result in the display of similar content on various URLs. This may be the case with URLs with parameters lacking canonical tags, duplicate pages without the no index directive, and copied content published without proper redirection.  When canonical tags or redirects are not appropriately set up, search engines may index and attempt to rank nearly identical versions of pages, leading to potential SEO complications. How Can Google Help Detect Duplicate Content One of the most popular and verified methods of assessing duplicate content is by simply selecting a few words from the site, enclosing them within quotes, and inputting them into Google search.  Ideally, this test on any page from your website should show your webpage in the search results, without other entries. However, if other websites also appear along with yours, Google considers the top results to be the original source of content. If you don’t find your webpage on top of the results, it might be a concern of duplicate content. You can repeat this procedure by testing several short, random sentences from your webpage using Google. Additionally, there are various free tools to check for duplicate content over the web, such as Copyscape, Plagspotter, Duplichecker, Smallseotools, and more. The Global Redirect Module: Fixing Duplicate Content SEO Issues in Drupal For those who’re unaware, Drupal is an open-source content management system that works towards simplifying development and creation processes for its global community. It offers many core and contributed modules that serve its purposes. One such module works towards fixing the issue of duplicate content - the Global Redirect Module.  The Global Redirect module is an SEO-friendly module that offers you a user-friendly interface to manage your URL path redirects. In Drupal, the alias system can sometimes lead to duplicate URLs, which can affect your website's search engine ranking. This Drupal module tackles this issue by checking for existing aliases and redirecting to the correct URL. Additionally, it manages URL formatting by removing trailing slashes, ensuring clean URL usage, and verifying node permissions and access. As per the module’s documentation source, here’s what it does to correct/fix duplicate content: Verifies if the current URL has an alias and performs a 301 redirect to it if it's not currently in use. Checks for a trailing slash in the current URL, then removes it if found, and repeats the first check with the updated request. Determines if the current URL matches the site's front page and redirects to the front page if there's a match. Ensures that Clean URLs are enabled and confirms whether the current URL is accessed using the clean method rather than the unclean method. Validates access to the URL; if the user lacks access to the path, no redirects occur. This feature helps protect private aliased nodes from exposure. Enforces the case sensitivity of the accessed URL to match the one set by the author/administrator. In non-technical interpretation of the above information, the Drupal Global Redirect module  Establishes fresh redirects. Detects faulty URL paths (ensure the “Redirect 4040” sub-module is activated for this feature). Configures redirects at the domain level (utilize the “Redirect Domain” sub-module for this purpose). Imports existing redirects. This way, you avoid the risk of having the very same content displayed on multiple URL paths. How to Configure the Global Redirect Module Before you configure the module, make sure to download it from https://www.drupal.org/project/globalredirect and then proceed with the following steps to configure the module to fix the issue of duplicate content on your Drupal site: Navigate to the Configuration page in your Drupal dashboard. In the Search and Metadata section, click on the URL redirects option. If you don’t find it, try clearing your Drupal cache and check again. On the URL redirects page, find the list of created redirects. Click on the +Add redirect button to add a new redirect. In the Path field, enter the old title or URL alias that you want to redirect from. In the To field, specify the relative internal path or the absolute external path that you want the old URL to redirect to. Choose the appropriate Redirect status from the drop-down menu. Click on Save at the bottom of the page to save the redirect configuration. Navigate to the Settings tab at the top of the page to access additional configuration options for the Global Redirect module. In the Settings tab, modify the default redirect status and adjust global redirect settings as needed.Click on Save Configuration to apply the new settings. Final Thoughts To wrap up, duplicate content affects your search engine rankings and impacts user experience as well as link equity distribution. It poses threatening challenges for content creators, website owners, and SEO professionals. Understanding the causes and types of duplicate content can help devise effective strategies to fix this issue. In Drupal, the Global Redirect module offers a convenient solution to manage URL redirects and prevent duplicity of content. While there are many other ways to boost your SEO ranking, Drupal users trust this module to work best in fixing duplicate content issues. It ensures clean URLs, proper redirection, and improved SEO performance on your Drupal site. So, employ effective measures to rank your Drupal website - avoid duplicate content, stick with Google algorithms, stay up-to-date with the latest technological measures, or you could connect with an expert Drupal development agency to enhance your Drupal SEO and boost your site’s search engine ranking.

Today we are talking about Drupal Single Sign On, The Benefits it brings to the Drupal Community, and A new book called Fog & Fireflies with guest Tim Lehnen. We’ll also cover Drupal.org Username Field as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/447

Topics

• What is Single Sign On (SSO)
• Does Drupal already support SSO
• Why is SSO on drupal.org important
• Camps using SSO
• Other possibilities
• Gitlab login
• Cloud IAM
• Why did the Drupal Association choose Cloud IAM
• How do you see the collaboration growing
• Where are we now
• What are the next steps
• How far are we from this becoming a reality
• What does onboarding look like
• Will third party sites be able to use D.O SSO
• Can the community help
• Fog & Fireflies
  • First book
  • Can you buy it now

Resources

• Single Sign On is coming to Drupal.org thanks to Cloud IAM
• A new book called Fog & Fireflies
• Open ID Connect module
• Keycloak
• Neil Drumm
• Lucas Heddn
• Marco Villegas
• Tim Lehnen

Guests

Tim Lehnen - aspenthornpress.com hestenet

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Matt Glaman - mglaman.dev mglaman

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to have a field on user profiles specifically designed for drupal.org usernames? There’s a module for that
• Module name/project name:
  • Drupal.org Username Field
• Brief history
  • How old: created in August 2019 by hussainweb AKA Hussain Abbas of Axelerant
  • Versions available: 2.0.0-beta4
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, that release was made less than 6 months ago
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: 8 open issues, none of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • 1 site
• Module features and usage
  • The module provides a new field type, along with its own widget and formatter
  • With a simple checkbox, you can get the module to validate that the provided username is registered on drupal.org
  • What’s really powerful about this module is that it can also pull other information from the drupal.org profile, such as first and last name, country, bio, and more
  • It does this by leveraging a Guzzle-based API client for drupal.org that Hussain created as part of a DrupalCon Asia developer contest
  • I believe the intended use of the modules is to use a provided drush command to copy the values from the drupal.org username field into other fields, where they would be displayed to site visitors
  • Although this module isn’t something that a lot of sites will need, I could see it being really useful for Drupal camp websites, to automatically collect a lot of the information that many such sites ask users to populate manually
  • I think it’s also an interesting use of the Drupal.org API, and could be a useful reference for anyone needing to implement a custom integration

Dear Readers,

At the core of any vibrant community lies the foundational practice of open and effective communication—where growth is nurtured, and innovation is sparked. For The DropTimes, our mission transcends beyond the basic dissemination of information; we actively facilitate a platform for dialogue, connecting the latest technological evolutions with an engaged readership. This integral role embodies our commitment to not only inform but also to catalyze conversation and change, ensuring that every voice can be heard and every insight can be shared, thereby driving Drupal's growth.

The vitality of these discussions within the Drupal community is observable. Whether debating the necessity of new modules for Drupal 10 or discussing the release dates for Drupal 11, each dialogue enriches our collective understanding and propels the platform forward. These conversations, highlighted in our articles and series, testify to the importance of discussing diverse perspectives and disseminating varied opinions. 

By engaging in such dynamic exchanges, the community not only addresses immediate needs and challenges but also shapes the future of the technology. This ongoing dialogue ensures that Drupal remains at the cutting edge, constantly evolving in response to the contributions and concerns of its global user base. With that, let's move on to last week's highlights.

Kazima Abbas, a sub-editor with The DropTimes [TDT]  in the second part of the "Drupal's Innovation & Future: 2024 and Beyond" series, takes a closer look at the thoughts and predictions of Drupal experts: Carlos Rincon Sanchez, Oscar Loria, Stella Power, Krishna R P, and Sinduri Guntupalli. The series aims to examine what might lie ahead for the Drupal platform with meticulous discussions.

In another interesting exchange, I had the opportunity to sit with Grzegorz Bartman, the CEO of Droptica, to discuss Droopler 4, the latest version of their Drupal distribution. Droopler is a Drupal distribution, a pre-built website that users can customize and manage to fit their requirements without having to start from scratch. Learn in-depth about Droopler 4 with this interview with Greg Bartman.

Last week's TDT Spotlight featured Gai Technologies, an organization rooted in the open-source ethos with more than 12 years of experience in web solutions. Elma John, our sub-editor, discussed the inception and journey of Gai Technologies, which is located in the serene setting of the Himalayas, with N. Krishnan, the CEO.

Pantheon, a leading SaaS-based WebOps platform, has entered into a strategic partnership with Lytics, a premier customer data platform (CDP) fully integrated with Google Cloud. Chris Yates, Pantheon’s vice president of products, and James McDermott elaborated on the technical synergies during a detailed discussion with The DropTimes. Read the detailed article to learn how this synergy will benefit Pantheon and Lytics' customers.

TDT is actively seeking volunteers to cover DrupalCon Portland 2024. Meanwhile, the insights from our DrupalCon Pittsburg 2023 volunteers can be read here. Aiden F Dean Dunn, a then-recent graduate from the University of Pittsburgh, provides a fresh perspective on the event in a conversation with Varun Baker, highlighting the welcoming and diverse nature of the Drupal community. Additionally, the regular registration window of DrupalCon Portland 2024 has ended; late registration is open today.

Drupalers can now win a free ticket to DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 with the promo video contest. All are encouraged to record a brief video—preferably in landscape mode—stating their name and country of origin and send it to the organizers. Participants are also urged to share their videos on social media to encourage others to join the campaign, which aims to highlight the Drupal community's global diversity. The deadline for submissions is April 24, 2024.

The Healthcare Summit at DrupalConPortland, scheduled for Thursday, May 9, is hailed as a must-attend event that will offer valuable insights for navigating the complexities of the healthcare industry in the digital age. Tickets are now available for Drupal Camping 2024 in Wolfsburg. Tickets, priced between 80 € and 100 €, offer access to four days of camping, chilling, swimming, barbecuing, and, of course, all things Drupal. 

There are Drupal events around the globe each week to keep Drupal enthusiasts engaged. A complete list of events for the week is available here.

Jeff Greenberg, a seasoned Drupal Architect at iFACTORY, recently sparked a discussion on LinkedIn about the apparent lack of a Drupal 10 module that enables users to subscribe by email to be notified when new content is posted. This query led to a broad response from various Drupal community experts, each offering insights or potential solutions. Dive into the discussion here.

The organizers of Splash Awards, Deutschland & Österreich, have announced the date for this year's Splash Awards 2024 Germany & Austria, set to take place on November 7 in Berlin. The Singapore Government Digital Services team has recently introduced Purple A11y, a comprehensive open-source accessibility testing tool designed to enhance website usability for persons with disabilities. 

The BAT API module, widely recognized for its robust booking and availability management capabilities, has officially launched support for Drupal 10. Baddy Sonja Breidert, CEO and Co-Founder of 1xINTERNET, recently discussed enhancements to the Frontend Editing module they designed to streamline the editor experience. 

In other news, Smile launched a new no-code Drupal profile named Sobki at DrupalCamp Rennes 2024 on March 27.

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Also, join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you,
Sincerely
Alka Elizabeth
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

READ MORE

The efficiency of any website is a must in this fast-paced world of web development. One of the most important tools to maximize the efficiency of your Drupal site is cron jobs. 

Cron jobs are powerful tools that automate any kind of routine tasks of the website which decreases the big load of a developer or site administrator. In this article, I will give you important insights about cron jobs and how we can use them within Drupal, followed by how we customize the tasks by overriding services of the ultimate cron job module.

What is Cron Jobs in Drupal? 

Cron in Drupal works quite well as it coordinates all the backstage tasks. It handles everything from clearing caches to checking for updates of any kind of content and executing scheduled tasks set by your modules.

Discover what lies ahead for Drupal as we delve into insights and predictions from experts Carlos Rincon Sanchez, Oscar Loria, Stella Power, Krishna R P, and Sinduri Guntupalli. Join us as we explore the future of this resilient platform and ask: What is your vision for Drupal in 2024 and beyond?

Discover the latest strategies for a seamless transition to Drupal 10 at the DrupalTO meetup, where experts and enthusiasts converge to share insights and foster community. Dive into discussions that bridge knowledge gaps and strengthen ties within the Drupal community. Explore more in the detailed event recap!

Boosting Productivity in Drupal with Composer 2 Editor Fri, 04/19/2024 - 16:10

Composer 2 is an effective solution for increasing productivity when working with Drupal. Everyone knows the situation when simple operations take a lot of time. Using Composer in Drupal makes developers' lives easier.
To speed up workflows, web developers often use the same code many times in many projects. This code can be written not only by other people; that's not the point. Regarding programming, rewriting code is a concern for many developers. Composer allows you to get rid of this problem. You can save parts of PHP code and use them for other projects.

When you're adding a new feature, like connecting your contact form to Mailchimp, on your Drupal website, you'll want to make sure it works the same way when you move it from one stage to another. Luckily, Drupal has a handy feature called Configuration Synchronization for this. 

This feature helps you easily export and import all the settings and setup between different copies of your Drupal website. In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at how Configuration Synchronization works and some tips for using it effectively. We will also understand the best ways to make sure your Drupal development stays consistent across different environments.

This is how I update my Drupal modules to Drupal 11 with only GitLab and drupal.org in my browser!

Drupal's adoption of GitLab lead to five times faster test runtimes but for this post I will look at how it makes it much easier to update modules to a new major version. It is now possible to fully use the user interface of drupal.org and drupal.org's GitLab features to make modules compatible and even make new releases available. I'll use one of my modules as an example: Upgrade Rector. Let's walk through what I did.

Gábor Hojtsy Fri, 04/19/2024 - 10:35

Tuning Drupalize.Me Search Results with Solr Query Re-Ranking and Search API

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.

joe Thu, 04/18/2024 - 15:44

I attended my first DrupalCon in 2010 in San Francisco, and since then have attended six more in the US and two in Europe.  Many elements stay the same, and are a welcome and treasured part of the DrupalCon experience: The DriesNote, the group picture, the keynotes, the BOFs, the sessions and trainings and parties and hallway conversation, on and on.  While you can look forward to more of those this year, here are a few additional features that have been added this year to Drupalcon Portland 2024:

Marketing Track

Recognizing the value that effective marketing brings to Drupal websites, DrupalCon 2024 will feature a substantial amount of content specifically targeted to marketers.  The Marketing Track features a dozen sessions of particular interest to CMOs and other marketing professionals, including presentations about AI, Personalization, Content Strategy, and multi-channel engagement.  Stay tuned for more information about content of particular interest to CMOs.  

Extended Welcoming Party

Everybody likes a party, and this year the opening reception is two full hours.  You can look forward to dancing to the robot DJ on a light-up dance floor, recording yourself in the 360 photobooth, playing with a giant Lite Brite, and enjoying free food and drink. 

Nonprofit Summit

It’s back!  After a short break, the Nonprofit Summit returns to DrupalCon, connecting Drupal users from the Nonprofit sector with each other.  Facilitated discussions, round table group sessions, and special pricing for the conference and summit are just a few of the features that will help deliver the power of Drupal to one of our most important communities. 

Enhanced focus on students

Drupal needs to continuously attract new people.  Recognizing this, DrupalCon 2024 is making extra efforts to reach out to students.  Targeted advertising to local student communities, focusing on the career-enhancing opportunities of the Drupalcon job fair, mentorship, resume help, and a special student discount price of only $50, job fair, mentorship, and resume help are a few of the enhancements that are specifically aimed at students. 

Community-designed DrupalCon T-shirt

New this year, the Drupal Association ran a design contest for the official DrupalCon Portland t-shirt.  Many great entries were received, and the winning design will be announced at DrupalCon, and available on the free attendee T-shirt.

As you can see, there are lots of new reasons to join the Drupal community in Portland this May.  We can’t wait to see you, so register here!

New Upgrade Status 4.2.0 is beautiful in Gin, improves continuous integration compatibility and more

Thanks to 13 wonderful contributors, Upgrade Status 4.2.0 is out today! The new version is beautiful in Gin (light and dark mode), but even looks better than before in core's Claro. It improves continuous integration compatibility and has more graceful parsing of Twig templates. It has an updated list of rectorable fixes and is more compatible with Nikic PHP Parser. Thanks (in alphabetical order) to andypost, bbrala, estherp, joseph.olstad, lhridley, loze, mglaman, moshe weitzman, mpaulo, Pasqualle, ressa, risforrocket and saschaeggi for their contribution! Read on to see all the new things!

Gábor Hojtsy Thu, 04/18/2024 - 14:20

Discover the pinnacle of Drupal discourse at DrupalCamp Colorado 2024, where industry leaders and enthusiasts gather against the backdrop of Colorado's warmth to share expertise, forge connections, and shape the future of Drupal innovation.

Explore the Frontend Editing module, a new release from 1xINTERNET that transforms the Drupal editor experience. Industry leaders discuss its impact and compatibility with current web technologies.

Discover insights from leading Drupal professionals on the challenges and solutions for creating a module that notifies users when new content is posted, as discussed by Jeff Geerling and other community members on LinkedIn.

Series Overview & ToC | Next Article (coming Apr 24th) ### SERIES INTRODUCTION Today, we are excited to launch a detailed blog series that serves as an in-depth guide on utilizing the Drupal 10 Migrate API. This series is designed to equip you with thorough explanations and step-by-step guidance for migrating all your data from a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 10, facilitating a smooth upgrade to the most current version of the platform. As we progress, we will introduce a DDEV-based development environment, complete with instructions to set it up. This environment is prepared with a Drupal 7 site already installed and a Drupal 10 site set as the migration target. Through the course of this series, we will walk you through the entire data migration process, covering a wide range of topics along the way, empowering you to migrate your own sites confidently. Contact Our Solutions Experts Helping you navigate the next steps on your Drupal Migration Journey Want to learn more? The Migrate API, created and co-maintained by Tag1 team members, is a flexible and powerful system that can be used to collect data from multiple sources and import it into Drupal. While migrating...

Read more mauricio Thu, 04/18/2024 - 13:23

Explore Purple A11y, an advanced open-source accessibility tool from Singapore Government Digital Services, aimed at improving web usability for individuals with disabilities. This tool facilitates comprehensive website scanning and offers a user-friendly interface for all users.

Join Bryan Gruneberg at LagoonCon on May 6 to explore the benefits of open-source hosting for the Open Website Alliance's CMS platforms. Discover how Lagoon's Kubernetes-based solutions can enhance your open-source strategy and streamline web development.