Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.wrekinproducts.com

A leading UK designer, manufacturer and supplier of specialist products for the civil engineering industry with over 40 years’ experience.

Wrekin knew that their brochure website could be so much more. They wanted something dynamic, something useful, not just for their customers but for their team of employees, too.

They began with a website, and ended up with a bells-and-whistles platform that works hard for their customer and their teams. A destination site for all things construction. A comprehensive product information library. A marketing tool and industry news site. A secure members’ zone where people can self-serve quotes and product specs.

The new site looks slick and professional, and it’s earning its keep, too.

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://covid.ri.gov

With a network of websites mired in old, outdated platforms, the State of Rhode Island was struggling to serve the communication needs of government agencies and their constituents. And then the pandemic hit.

COVID accelerated the demand for better, faster communication and greater efficiency amid the rapidly changing pandemic. It also spotlighted an opportunity to create a new centralized information hub. What the government needed was a single, cohesive design system that would allow departments to quickly publish and manage their own content, leverage a common and accessible design language, and use a central notification system to push shared content across multiple sites. 

With timely, coordinated news and notifications plus a visually unified set of websites, a new design system could turn the state’s fragmented digital network into a trusted resource, especially in a time of crisis.

Date: 2022-February-23Description: 

Drupal 7's End-of-Life extended to November 1, 2023

More than a decade after its first release, Drupal 7 is still widely used across the web. It can be found powering civic engagement in government installations; managing vast amounts of content for faculty, students, and staff in educational institutions; and providing the digital backbone for many businesses and non-profit organizations. Drupal 9 is well-maintained, secure, stable, and feature-rich, but many organizations still rely on Drupal 7.

The teams that built and still maintain these legacy Drupal installations, and the end users they serve, are important constituents of the Drupal community. Although these users should still plan their upgrade to a newer version of Drupal, if they are unable to upgrade before the currently announced end-of-life, it would not be responsible of us to leave them vulnerable.

Therefore, we are announcing that moving forward, the scheduled Drupal 7 End-of-Life date will be re-evaluated annually. As of today, we are extending the end-of-life by one year to November 1, 2023.

The Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert, the Drupal Association, and the Drupal Security Working Group have been monitoring the Drupal 7 ecosystem since the previous end-of-life extension. As a majority of all sites in the Drupal project are still on Drupal 7, we have decided that there is a clear need to provide additional support to the members of our community still using this version. At the end of the day, we have a moral imperative to keep as many of those sites secure as we can.

We will announce by July 2023 whether we will extend Drupal 7 community support an additional year. Factors that we will consider are community support, Drupal 7 usage, and active Drupal 7 maintainers. Current support is made possible thanks to the many Drupal 7 maintainers and companies that are paying to support Drupal 7.

You can donate to the Drupal Security Team on our Donations page.

For press contacts, please email security-press@drupal.org.

Coordinated By: 

The following people contributed to this public service announcement.

Michael Hess
Tim Lehnen
Greg Knaddison
Dries Buytaert
xjm
Gábor Hojtsy
Madison Atkins

If you’ve never been to a Drupal event before, you might not realize what all the fuss is about. But attending an event that gathers the community together to talk about Drupal for a few days is a priceless experience. And the thing is, it’s going to be better if you’re there! 

My favorite part of Drupal events is the little interactions with people who have a common interest in Drupal but might use it in a completely different context and come from a completely different background. The Drupal community comprises designers, project managers, developers, translators, content and accessibility experts, and folks with other roles or who do Drupal as one of their many responsibilities. And all of you are welcome at DrupalCon!

You should especially come to Drupal if you’re new to the community. It might feel like a leap to go from trying a piece of software to attending a conference all about it. But if you count up all the hours you spend doing research, trying to find the right video to watch, and poking around at different modules, you’re guaranteed to get a much richer experience and a better understanding of Drupal’s open source ethos if you attend DrupalCon.

Who should attend?

We especially want you to attend if you’re new! I attended my first DrupalCon as a new user, and while it was a lot of information to absorb, it shaped my understanding of the Drupal way and made me realize first-hand the benefits of an open source project that I would come to depend on in my professional life. Don’t worry, there are conference sessions, training, and social events designed specifically for newcomers to help break the ice and get you started.

If you’re trying to decide if DrupalCon is for you, I think DrupalCon is especially relevant for: 

• Decision-makers responsible for choosing a digital platform
• Developers and technologists learning Drupal (the training courses are particularly relevant!)
• Drupal users who aren’t active in the community, and want to pick up new skills
• Anyone who inherits a Drupal project
• Agencies who are using Drupal for the first time
• People looking to switch careers

Before you attend!

Here are some things to do before you go to DrupalCon to help you get the most out of the experience.

Install Drupal - If it’s your first DrupalCon and you’re relatively new to Drupal, I would recommend installing a sandbox Drupal before heading to DrupalCon. I spent my first DrupalCon jotting down modules to try out, and techniques to explore, and having a sandbox ready-to-go will make that experimentation much easier! 

Join the Drupal Slack - If you’re already using Slack daily, this will give you a gateway to lots of conversations and expertise. And while you’re at DrupalCon, ask people which channels they belong to so you can continue those interesting conversations you start at the event!

Review the chedule - There’s so much great content at DrupalCon! Take a look at the sessions on offer in advance so you can scout out the most intriguing topics. Don’t ignore the “Birds of a Feather” more informal sessions. And keep in mind that great conversations are just as valuable as presentations.

Consider Contribution - If you’ve always been curious about the open source project, DrupalCon is a great way to see it in action. You can attend contribution events at the conference to get involved and see how you can help improve Drupal itself. Note that everyone is welcome to contribute, and I guarantee you that your skills are needed!

In conclusion, don’t feel intimidated if it’s your first DrupalCon. If you’re new to the Drupal community, we cannot wait to welcome you with open arms, and I hope to see you at DrupalCon Portland this year! Learn more and register now.

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.key.aero

If you love aviation, transport, history or sport, you’ll probably have come across Key Publishing. It publishes over 25 magazines and digital editions on these subjects, plus websites, databases, books and directories. The content is available in 200 countries and is read in six different languages.

Just like lots of publishers, Key had a traditional commercial model that relied on print. The team knew they needed to switch this up because the industry is changing. Print revenues are under pressure and audiences increasingly want digital delivery.

To make a success of the switch Key focused on three requirements. A revamped web presence because the existing sites were too difficult to manage and didn’t pull their weight. A streamlined process of publishing online to make it more feasible. And a way to monetise a huge amount of evergreen legacy content.

Drupal was the springboard. Today, Key has a digital-first approach that drives digital subscribers. It’s working too. Key’s new revenue streams grow year-on-year.

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://bouldercolorado.gov

The City of Boulder has a unique brand. A mecca for startups, and a gateway to adventure in the Rocky Mountains, the city stands out as an iconic destination in Colorado. For its citizens, the City of Boulder is committed to creating and sustaining an exceptional quality of life through fantastic customer service and a strong focus on equity. 

The City of Boulder provides governance and utility services, recreation information, relevant news, and the tools and resources necessary to get involved with local government. Website content and functionality are managed by a broad team spanning dozens of departments and audiences include a similarly wide collection of users like residents, city employees, prospective residents, visitors, and citizens engaged with local government.

Aten worked with the City of Boulder to re-organize their many services and detailed how-to information into a task-oriented, user-centered, visually stunning digital experience.

What’s new in Drupal 9.3.0?

The third feature release of Drupal 9 introduces experimental support for CKEditor 5, makes the Olivero theme stable and introduces various content editor and developer improvements.

The Olivero frontend theme is now stable!

The new Olivero frontend theme was added in Drupal 9.1.0 and thanks to various contributors since then is now stable. A modern and clear theme, Olivero is planned to become the new default Drupal theme later (replacing Bartik). Subtheming Olivero is currently not supported, but formal support may be included in the future.

The theme is named after Rachel Olivero (1982-2019). She was the head of the organizational technology group at the National Federation of the Blind, a well-known accessibility expert, a Drupal community contributor, and a friend to many.

New experimental support for CKEditor 5

A new beta experimental CKEditor 5 module is included with Drupal 9.3.0. Version 5 of CKEditor is an entirely new editor with visual and architectural improvements. While building the integration, the team worked hard with CKSource to implement functionality crucial for Drupal sites, such as General HTML Support and ways to dynamically load CKEditor plugins, so the visual web based setup of the editor is still available in Drupal. Also special care was given to providing a fluid upgrade path from CKEditor 4 configurations.

Drupal extensions that integrate with CKEditor 4 still need to be updated for CKEditor 5, however the plan is to remove CKEditor 4 support in Drupal 10, so we encourage everyone to try the new module on non-production environments.

New Content Editor role

A new dedicated Content Editor role was added to the standard profile with content editing, media management, translation, content workflow and revision handling permissions enabled by default.

Various developer improvements

Entity bundles can now declare their own class, encapsulating the required business logic. A bundle class must be a subclass of the base entity class, such as \Drupal\node\Entity\Node. Encapsulating all the required logic for each bundle into its own subclass opens up many possibilities for making more clear, simple, maintainable, and testable code.

Each user role now depends on the modules that provide the role's permissions, which means that permissions will be automatically cleaned up when a module is uninstalled.

PHP 8.1.0 was recently released and Drupal 9.3.0 comes with full support for the new version. The recommended PHP version to install Drupal 9.3.0 is PHP 8, but PHP 7.3+ support is kept.

Read the 9.3.0 release notes for more information on developer improvements and changes.

What does this mean for me? Drupal 8 site owners

Drupal 8 is end of life as of November 17, 2021. To continue receving security coverage upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.2x at least as soon as possible to continue receiving security coverage. Upgrading is supported directly from 8.8.x and 8.9.x. 99% of the top 1000 most used drupal.org projects are updated for Drupal 9, so the modules and themes you rely on are most likely compatible.

Drupal 7 site owners

Drupal 7 is supported until November 28, 2022, and will continue to receive bug and security fixes throughout this time. From November 2022 until at least November 2025, the Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support program will be offered by vendors.

On the other hand, the migration path for Drupal 7 sites to Drupal 9 is stable. Read more about the migration to Drupal 9.

Translation, module, and theme contributors

Minor releases like Drupal 9.3.0 include backwards-compatible API additions for developers as well as new features.

Since minor releases are backwards-compatible, modules, themes, and translations that supported Drupal 9.2.x and earlier will be compatible with 9.3.x as well. However, the new version does include some changes to strings, user interfaces, internal APIs and API deprecations. This means that some small updates may be required for your translations, modules, and themes. Read the 9.3.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your modules and themes.

This release has further advanced the Drupal project and represents the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and contributors from various organizations. Thank you to everyone who contributed to Drupal 9.3.0!

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.srijan.net/case-studies/orchestrated-a-seamless-website-migration-fo...

Our client is a global leader in education technology and has helped millions of students to identify their strengths, explore different career options, match best-fit educational opportunities, and reach their education and career goals.

They wanted to upgrade their near ‘end of life’ CMS, facing challenges in storing, managing, and retrieving information from its colossal database. As a result, the website performance was adversely affected and their constantly increasing business requirements were hard to accomplish.

Content migration reduced from 3 days to 3-4 Hrs

Number of DB tables shrunk from 226 to 4

Quick API response time of 0.5-0.6s

Date: 2021-November-30Description: 

As of November 17, 2021, the Drupal core version 8 series has reached end-of-life. This means that all releases of Drupal 8 core (with 8.y.x version numbers) and Drupal contributed project releases that are compatible with only Drupal 8 will be marked unsupported as they no longer have security team support.

Drupal 8.0.0 was first released on November 9, 2015. The last version was released on November 17, 2021.

All Drupal 8 site owners must upgrade to Drupal 9 to receive security updates and bug fixes. The Drupal Association will also disable testing with unsupported versions of Drupal.

Security issues that only affect Drupal 8 (and not Drupal 9 or Drupal 7) will be made public and sites are at risk of having these issues exploited if they do not upgrade.

What about Drupal 7 and Drupal 9?

Contributed projects like themes and modules will still receive security advisories if they are compatible with either Drupal 7 or 9 and have opted in to security coverage.

Drupal 7's end-of-life is currently scheduled for November of 2022, and it will receive security updates until then. Drupal 9's end-of-life is scheduled for November of 2023. For more information on release schedules, see the core release cycle overview.

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.apqc.org/About

The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) is a member-based non-profit that has been in business for over 40 years. APCQ specializes in unbiased benchmarking and best practices research for process and knowledge management across 45 different industries.

Need

APQC’s value proposition is dependent on having a state-of-the-art web user experience for their digital platform is critical. APQC has more than 10,000 pieces of research content and data that can be searched by the worldwide network of over 150,000 members.

APQC has been using Drupal with self-hosted Solr for their website and content production for several years. When upgrading from Drupal 6, APQC decided to look for a new search solution to replace their self-hosted Solr implementation.

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.nashville.gov/Need

Nashville launched a website redesign project to make it easier for citizens to find the information and services they need. One of the key takeaways that emerged from the redesign project was the need to improve site search. This led the team to seek a site search solution to complement their new service-centric Drupal website.

When Nashville was looking for a site search solution to go along with the website redesign project, Net Tango recommended using the recently released SearchStudio solution from SearchStax. After receiving a product demo, the Nashville team realized that SearchStudio would more than meet their needs, and it came with the ideal combination of features, affordability and track record.

Situation

The City of Nashville’s previous Nashville.gov website was outdated and was not meeting the needs of an increasingly digital population. In addition, the technologies supporting the website were out-of-date and no longer supported.

In 2018, the City embarked on a multi-year website redesign project. Nashville turned to Net Tango, a digital strategy and web development firm, to create the new website. They started with a user engagement project to gather feedback and identify the key needs for the future website using a public survey and focus groups with various stakeholders. The recommendations from the User Engagement Report became the foundation for the information architecture and content strategy for the Nashville.gov redesign.

The results of the survey identified that users were extremely unhappy with the current site search experience. In fact, some citizens would conduct a Google search to find what they were seeking instead of using the search on the Nashville.gov website. Plus, the Nashville team had limited insights into what visitors were searching for or what content was most valuable to them.

Solution

While the website implementation on Drupal began in 2019, the SearchStudio part of the project was not started until near the end of the project in May 2021. 

During implementation, the Nashville team was able to take advantage of the SearchStax Drupal Module which accelerated the integration of search with Drupal. The implementation team was going to design their own search page, but discovered that they could save weeks of development time by using the SearchStax UX Accelerator to quickly deliver a search page that leverages the out-of-the-box features of SearchStudio.

The implemented search solution is complex because it searches and crawls five different websites in addition to the Drupal website including, the legislation portal and archive, property assessment records, the city’s COVID information website and the customer service portal. The SearchStax team designed a comprehensive solution to crawl and bring all of the disparate data into site search.

Results

The new website launched in August 2021 and features fast and flexible site search incorporating results from Nashville.gov, hubNashville, the COVID information website, the new Legislation Portal, the existing legislation archive and the Property Assessor’s website. 

The search results can be filtered by content type, organization and website, and can be sorted by date or relevance. In order to improve the value of search results, Nashville has already implemented over 100 Promotions or keyword matches to improve the search results for top searches without having to involve IT. The Promotions allow the Nashville team to push  the most popular content to the top of the search results which improves the search experience for citizens.

The team is still getting used to the available search analytics, but they now have insights to the top searches, searches with no results and the most clicked content. The search analytics dashboard also provides graphs with the average click position, click-through rates and searches with clicks. With over 3,000 searches conducted and over 1,000 content items viewed each day , the team is compiling a rich trove of data from which they will derive insights to identify gaps in content and further optimize the search experience.

Read the complete case study.

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.freesat.co.uk

Freesat: delivering the very best in TV and on-demand content to over two million UK homes via set-top TV boxes.

Freesat, a joint venture between the BBC and ITV, sold their TV boxes via high-street shops. But they knew they could reach more people, if only they could sell to customers directly. Oh, and did they mention that they needed a platform to allow those customers to manage their TV watchlists and recordings, too?

A business transformation of this scale was going to be a tough challenge, so they made sure to partner with a team that would work seamlessly alongside them and understand their needs. A team that could deliver an all-singing, all-dancing platform to ensure they met their goals. That’s us!

What neither of us knew was that a global pandemic was about to hit. Numerous lockdowns shut highstreet shops for months. This made direct sales not just an additional stream of revenue for Freesat, but the main stream of revenue for set-top boxes.

Find out how we created a fully integrated system that not only coped with the sudden increase in demand, but streamlined operations so that it did so with ease.

Happy customers, happy clients…happy developers.

What’s new in Drupal 9.2.0?

The second feature release of Drupal 9 helps keep your site even more secure, and comes with increased visitor privacy protection, improved migration tools from Drupal 7, enhancements to the Olivero frontend theme and early support for the WebP image format.

Download Drupal 9.2.0

Security and privacy improvements

Critical security advisories and public service announcements will now be displayed on the status report page and certain administration pages for the site's administrators. This helps prepare site owners to apply security fixes in a timely manner. For increased privacy protection of your site visitors, Drupal 9.2.0 now blocks Google Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) cookie-less user tracking by default.

Better building blocks out of the box

The Olivero theme, soon to be Drupal's new default frontend theme, has dozens of major improvements in this release, including a new form design and various accessibility fixes. The built-in Umami demo is now also more flexible with a built-in editor role and more versatile Layout Builder demonstration.

On the way to Drupal 10

In preparation for Drupal 10, all Symfony 5 and and several Symfony 6 compatibility issues have been resolved. As part of modernizing the frontend of Drupal 9, core's Tour feature now uses ShepherdJS instead of jQuery Joyride. This significantly improves accessibility of tours and removes one more reliance on jQuery.

Other improvements

The already stable migration path from Drupal 7 is now expanded with migrations for user settings, node/user reference fields and other previously missing pieces.

Drupal's GD toolkit integration, and, therefore image styles, can now manage WebP images. There is more to do for complete WebP support. Stay tuned for improvements in future releases.

Sneak peek at future core features

The upcoming core CKEditor 5 upgrade is being worked on in a contributed project. Progress has been made on various aspects of the roadmap, and the project is near to completing all issues identified as requirements for tagging a beta release. Core inclusion is expected in Drupal 9.3.0, but contributed projects are requested to build compatibility ahead of that.

The Automated Updates Initiative has been very active in the repositories under https://github.com/php-tuf building a PHP implementation of The Update Framework (TUF) with Typo3 and Joomla developers to provide signing and verification for secure PHP application updates. Results will be included with later Drupal releases.

Check out the initiative keynotes from DrupalCon North America 2021 on what else is in the works.

What does this mean for me? Drupal 9 site owners

Drupal 9.0.x is now out of security coverage. Update at least to 9.1.x to continue to receive security support.

Drupal 8 site owners

Update to at least 8.9.x to continue receiving bug fixes until Drupal 8's end of life in November 2021. The next bug-fix release (8.9.17) is scheduled for July 7, 2021. (See the release schedule overview for more information.) Versions of Drupal 8 before 8.9.x no longer receive security coverage.

With only five months left until the end of life of Drupal 8, we suggest that you upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 as soon as possible. Upgrading is supported directly from 8.8.x and 8.9.x. Of the top 1000 most used drupal.org projects, 94% are updated for Drupal 9, so the modules and themes you rely on are most likely compatible.

Drupal 7 site owners

Drupal 7 is supported until November 28, 2022, and will continue to receive bug and security fixes throughout this time. From November 2022 until at least November 2025, the Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support program will be offered by vendors.

On the other hand, the migration path for Drupal 7 sites to Drupal 9 is stable. Read more about the migration to Drupal 9.

Translation, module, and theme contributors

Minor releases like Drupal 9.2.0 include backwards-compatible API additions for developers as well as new features.

Since minor releases are backwards-compatible, modules, themes, and translations that supported Drupal 9.1.x and earlier will be compatible with 9.2.x as well. However, the new version does include some changes to strings, user interfaces, internal APIs and API deprecations. This means that some small updates may be required for your translations, modules, and themes. Read the 9.2.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your modules and themes.

This release has further advanced the Drupal project and represents the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and contributors from various organizations. Thank you to everyone who contributed to Drupal 9.2.0!

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/

Team CCF wanted to migrate to Drupal to build a centralized, scalable & unified web platform for hassle-free microsite management while improving website performance significantly

Founded in 1967, Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation is a volunteer-driven non-profit organization that strives to find cures for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the most common forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). They aim to improve the quality of life of those affected by the disease. 

The foundation empowers more than 1.2 million patients and their caregivers annually through their education, support, and advocacy programs.

This year’s DrupalCon North America 2021 keynotes highlight the power of the global Drupal community to make a difference in some of the most crucial issues of our time and the future of digital experiences. Register today.

The Drupal Association is planning a blockbuster event for DrupalCon North America, the most widely attended Drupal event, 12-16 April from 11:00 - 15:00 EDT daily. This year’s all-virtual event brings together Drupal experts, enthusiasts, end users, and the broader open source software community to connect, collaborate, and contribute to advancing Drupal - the world’s leading open source digital experience platform (DXP).

Heather Rocker, executive director of the Drupal Association states, “Our global community of developers, marketers, and business leaders come to DrupalCon to connect, learn about the experiences of their peers, and share their own expertise. DrupalCon participants also benefit from the opportunity to learn from our keynote and featured speakers. This year, those topics include the role of open source in schools to close the digital divide, the importance of allyship in developing diversity and inclusion, building successful mentorship for people of color in tech, and understanding digital rights as human rights.”

Featured keynotes will highlight inclusion, closing the digital divide, and the Drupal platform’s future.

Sheree Atcheson, Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Leader
Allyship—the key to unlocking the power of diversity
Monday, 12 April 12:10-12:40 EDT
Atcheson, an industry-leading voice on diversity and inclusion in tech, will talk about the importance of intersectional allyship in creating inclusive environments and technology. She’ll offer tips on how everyone in any role can actively consider, champion, and advocate for others in their work and be more inclusive in their day-to-day lives.

Atcheson has been named one of the UK’s Most Influential Women in Tech and has received multiple international awards for her work to advance diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.

Dries Buytaert, Founder, Drupal
Driesnote
Wednesday, 14 April 12:30-13:50 EDT
A much-anticipated highlight of DrupalCon, Buytaert, Drupal’s founder, will deliver his annual talk celebrating Drupal successes over the past year, outlining the state of the Drupal project now, and offering his thoughts on what’s next.

Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for Drupal, an open source platform used around the world to build websites and digital experiences, as well as co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed technology company.

Stuart Keroff, Social Studies and Technology Teacher, Aspen Academy
School needs open source, now more than ever
Friday, 16 April 14:20-14:50 EDT
Technology educator Stuart Keroff, founder of the first two middle school Linux clubs in Minnesota, has spent the last 10 years guiding middle school students to use open source as a tool to close the digital divide in education. He and his students will share how they used open source software to recycle computers for their fellow students during COVID-19 school closures.

To date, he and his students have provided over 600 Linux computers, helping students learn while also saving money for their schools.

New this year - participants can attend keynote sessions dedicated to strategic Drupal Initiatives:

Decoupled Menus
Tuesday, 13 April
This initiative is focused on developing an easy-to-integrate solution for JavaScript front ends to consume configurable menus managed in Drupal—a key enhancement for developers. This is the first step in standardizing best practices for Decoupled Drupal.

Easy Out of the Box
Wednesday, 14 April
This initiative is designed to refine improvements introduced in the Drupal 9 release and enable new features that can make Drupal even easier to use.

Automated Updates
Thursday 15 April
This initiative is all about implementing a secure system for automatically deploying safe, secure updates for Drupal sites—a crucial enhancement for Drupal service providers and end users.

Drupal 10 Readiness
Friday, 16 April
This initiative is our effort to update and enhance the platform to enable a smooth, secure transition to Drupal 10, which launches in 2022.

Invest in your career, register today
The global pandemic has increased pressures around work-life integration, so DrupalCon 2021 is built with flexibility in mind. Each day is streamlined with 4 hours of live content, and the virtual setting allows easy participation in the featured keynotes, small group discussions, and interactive skill-building sessions most relevant to you.

Tickets are $245 per attendee and include access to all DrupalCon events, premiere access to the session recordings, as well as admission into the industry summits of your choice (higher education, healthcare, nonprofit, and government) held throughout April. Registration details, as well as additional speaker and session information, are available at https://events.drupal.org/northamerica2021

DrupalCon is brought to you by the Drupal Association in collaboration with a team of dedicated contributors and sponsors, including Diamond Sponsors Acquia, Pantheon, and Platform.sh.

File attachments:  DC NA 2021 Global Community (2).png

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.tomford.com

The client, a prestige cosmetics and fragrances brand with a consumer base in over 40 countries around the world had an in-store application that let buyers browse through the range of products and pricing. They wanted to build upon this, and create an exceptional in-store experience for their customers, and increase the time spent in-store. The idea was also to support the store team to cater to more customers. The prestigious beauty retailer decided to introduce an immersive virtual try-on for the stores to deliver a frictionless and delightful customer experience. YouCam, a leading solution providing augmented reality and artificial intelligence technology was chosen for this.

Srijan was instrumental in integrating the virtual try-on solution with the existing in-store application, along with a custom scalable backend that gives the clients full control over the content interface. 

On November 18th, 2020, the Drupal security team released security advisory SA-CORE-2020-012, a critical remote code execution vulnerability being patched in Drupal 7, 8, and 9. If you haven't read up on this issue, or the contrib advisories from the same day, I suggest you pause here and go take a look (and of course update your site(s)).

As always, the Drupal Security Team demonstrated their commitment and professionalism in helping all of us keep our Drupal sites more secure. But this post is not just to praise the security team, but also to report back on our first trial activation of the Drupal Steward program with a real security vulnerability.

As a reminder, the Drupal Steward program is operated jointly by the Drupal Association and the Drupal Security team, to offer protection for highly critical and mass exploitable vulnerabilities in the form of a web application firewall. This protection is offered directly by the Drupal Association to end-users, and also through our Founding Platform Partners: Acquia and Pantheon.

Drupal Steward doesn't change the site owner's responsibility to update their site. It does, however, provide a greater safety window and more flexibility for their team when scheduling the update.

In coordination with the Drupal Security Team, as well as our partners, we decided to use SA-CORE-2020-012 as our first live case for implementing this protection. This core issue was neither 'highly-critical' nor 'mass-exploitable' as the program is generally designed to protect, but because it was still a critical issue, it made a good test case.

We made a deliberate choice not to pre-advertise the protection for this first activation, because we wanted to thoroughly vet the process from end-to-end, before telling Steward customers to breathe easy when scheduling their update.

For future activations we will include a section in the PSA or SA published on Drupal.org, marked by the Drupal Steward logo, which indicates whether an upcoming security release will have this Drupal Steward coverage - giving all Drupal Steward customers the warning they need so they can responsibly schedule their site updates.

We're very pleased to say that this first program activation went very smoothly. Our coordination with Founding Partners, and our implementation of the firewall rules for the community tier went quickly and easily - and despite the short turn-around time, we were able to have protection coordinated in time for the disclosure of the issue.

What about SA-CORE-2020-013?

If you follow Drupal security issues closely, you'll know that another Drupal security release occurred only about a week later. SA-CORE-2020-013 was released to mitigate a vulnerability in a third-party dependency of Drupal. This issue was not eligible for Drupal Steward coverage because it was a zero-day, that is, the vulnerability was already public and so there was no time to implement a preventative mitigation strategy.

Ready to sign up?

You can learn more about Drupal Steward here and you can ask questions or set up a consultation here. Cost is usage-based, and we've tried to subsidize the cost as much as possible for our community site owners. For most small to medium-sized sites, coverage costs less than $200/year. Proceeds are allocated to support Drupal Association and Drupal Security Team programs. 

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.boston.gov/

The City of Boston is known around the world for it’s winning sports team, New England food, prestigious universities and rich history. The City serves 4.8 million people in the Greater Boston area, and supports 23 neighborhoods. A pioneering city, Boston is famed for having the first public school, subway system, and public park.

The City of Boston set out to re-imagine the City’s digital front door — Boston.gov — with the goal of building a government website that is beautiful, welcoming, and highly useful. So it picked Acquia and digital agencies IDEO and Genuine Interactive to help set the standard for how governments can support their citizens with digital.

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.drupal.org

Drupal.org has been the home of the Drupal community for many years. Online since 2001, and fed by a global community of contributors, there is a tremendous amount of open source history recorded here.

It's critical that we safeguard that history for posterity, and of course all of our current activity so that we can maintain the momentum of the Drupal project.

PORTLAND, Ore.  June 3, 2020—Drupal, the most powerful enterprise open source content management system, is launching the latest—and most comprehensive—upgrade to its popular software today.

Drupal 9 comes with even more of the cutting-edge features that Drupal developers and users love. One out of every 30 websites in the world including Lufthansa, the CDC National Prevention Information Network, the European Commission, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, NASA, GRAMMYs/Recording Academy and Stanford University trust Drupal as the platform for their ambitious digital experiences.

Drupal 9 - Continuous innovation in technology and user experience

The updated version delivers powerful new features and an enhanced user experience. These features empower Drupal’s vision for the next generation of the web and include:  

• Dramatically easier tools— a new layout builder, WYSIWYG media management system and content workflow tools make Drupal much easier to use. It enables users to take advantage of Drupal's robust technical architecture more easily than ever before. 
• Continuous innovation—powerful new features delivered continuously, keeping Drupal at the cutting edge of the web. 
• Easiest upgrade in a decade—and Drupal’s commitment to easy upgrades in the future means never having to worry about a major replatforming to stay up to date. 

One of the key reasons Drupal has been successful is we have always made big, forward-looking changes,” says Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal. “As a result, Drupal is one of very few CMS platforms that has stayed relevant for 20 years." 

One of Drupal’s key users says they depend on Drupal’s easy-to-use interface to keep their content up-to-date—even when their developers aren’t immediately available. 
 

In a case study about how the ACLU uses Drupal, the ACLU team says, "With Drupal's new capabilities to create and administer content, including robust media support ...[and] full layout control, without the aid of developers, ... [Drupal] empowered the ACLU to be more dynamic and responsive to external events." 
 

While this new version makes it easier for non-developers to contribute to dynamic web platforms, it also continues to advance the underlying technology at the forefront of digital experiences—enabling developers to build the next generation of the web.

"Drupal's API-first architecture puts it years ahead of competitors as a decoupled or headless framework,” says Tim Lehnen, chief technology officer for the Drupal Association. “Drupal can serve as the content hub for rich experiences built with the latest technologies, including modern javascript frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue, or even with emerging channels like digital assistants and AR/VR applications." 
 

Buytaert says a key focus was making the process of upgrading as easy as possible for its users. 

"Drupal's innovation has only accelerated since the release of Drupal 8 four years ago,” says Buytaert. “Historically, major upgrades have been costly. With Drupal 9 we wanted to innovate quickly and provide an easy upgrade path from Drupal 8. We did exactly that! The upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is the easiest major upgrade in the last 10-plus years."

Powered by a global community

Drupal is a true open source project, leveraging the expertise of tens of thousands of developers around the world. Drupal has earned a reputation for security, performance, accessibility and scalability that is unparalleled in the CMS ecosystem. Drupal's core strength has always been its ability to manage structured data—written once, and reused anywhere—and the Drupal community has doubled down on this with Drupal 9. 

To upgrade or get started

If you’re ready to experience Drupal, discover how easy it is to build or integrate your digital portfolio by visiting drupal.org/9. 

Need some help onboarding with Drupal or building a digital experience from scratch? There are many agencies in the Drupal community that would be happy to help.

About Drupal and the Drupal Association

Drupal is the open source content management software used by millions of people and organizations around the world, made possible by a community of 100,000-plus contributors and enabling more than 1.3 million users on Drupal.org. The Drupal Association is the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the Drupal software project, fostering the community, and supporting its growth.

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For more information contact Heather Rocker,  heather@association.drupal.org