Rachel Olivero, courtesy of National Federation of the Blind

Earlier this month we saw the passing of Rachel Olivero. Rachel touched a lot of people in both the Drupal and accessibility communities. She worked at the National Federation of the Blind, as the Director of Organizational Technology. I am not sure that this is where she was first exposed to Drupal, but she became involved in the community after attending DrupalCon in her hometown of Baltimore in 2017. It was there where she participated in her first code sprint and contributed her first bug report.

After attending the first-ever Nonprofit Summit at DrupalCon Baltimore, Rachel stepped up to lead an accessibility breakout at DrupalCon Nashville. She was always willing to share her knowledge and never got annoyed no matter how many times she was asked her whether the <aside> element was ever useful to a screen reader. Fortunately, about 20 minutes of the accessibility roundtable was recorded. She engaged with a few folks throughout the week, many remember her from Drupal Trivia Night.

As a technical user who was blind, her opinion was sought often in the Slack Channel. She also engaged with the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion team.  Rachel was active in Twitter and other social media platforms too, where she engaged with other members of the Drupal community. As a person who was blind, transgender, and a lesbian, Rachel understood a lot about the importance of diversity.

Rachel became involved in the NTEN Drupal Community of Practice calls a few years ago, when she came on a monthly call to share some accessibility knowledge. Subsequently, she became a more regular attendee of these calls. Johanna Bates and Rachel were slated to co-present a session on accessible content entry for content editors at the upcoming NTEN 19NTC in Portland. This would have been her first ever NTEN NTC.

Rachel also served on the NTEN NTC’s first-ever accessibility committee, contributing her knowledge to making conferences more accessible. This is a perfect example of how willing Rachel was to share her expertise and experience with others. She was generous with her knowledge, kind, collaborative, and extremely funny. The loss of her warmth, humor, and brilliance in the Drupal community, the nonprofit tech community, and in the a11y community is a massive and sad loss.

This fall Rachel contributed an article to the latest 24 accessibility series, Not Your Father’s Navigation Strategy: There’s More Than Just the TAB Key. She argued for developers to invest in proper semantic markup so that screen reader users can make full use of their assistive technology. This annual series of articles really draws on a Who's Who of accessibility.

Rachel was also the president of the NFB’s Amateur Radio Division. As a modern HAM enthusiast, she was active on GitHub working to create a Software-defined radio (SDR) scanner that could continuously record a set of frequencies for on-demand playback. She was interested in public safety.

Rachel had been working on NFB.org’s new Drupal 8 site for a long time. She was so excited to see it launch at the end of January. Rachel had recently been promoted at the NFB to Director of Technology.  This launch was a huge piece of her work, and the site looks amazing. It is terrific to see how she was able to modernize the NFB’s website and leverage Drupal to help her create a modern responsive website.

As Rachel said in an NFB Facebook campaign:

“I’m lucky, and thankful, that blindness hasn’t caused a lot of resistance in my life. From the support of family during my early years to the encouragement of friends, to the emergency management director who I never saw blink an eye when I said, “I want to take the CERT class. You can teach me to get people out from under a collapsed wall too, right?” to all those who supported my gender transition. I’ve generally never felt that I couldn’t do something as a blind person. However, it’s the love, hope, and determination of my family in the National Federation of the Blind, that has given me the extra strength and answered the, ‘but how do I…” And that is #WhyImAFederationist”

Rachel was also quoted in a very recent Vox.com article by s.e. smith, Websites need to be more accessible for disabled people.  Rachel clearly identified that “Accessibility is still a sidebar when it comes to web development.”

A few community members shared memories of Rachel:

What I admired most about Rachel was her willingness to help at any level necessary and the kindness with which she acted.  She was enthusiastic about building community and eager to contribute. She regularly gave time, experience, resources (like her server space, and other infrastructure) and energy to connecting people and working for a future in which technology would be accessible to all.  Her unique perspective brought insight, empathy and patience to her work, and I’m sad that the world has lost such a passionate champion for inclusion. 

- Nikki Stevens (drnikki)

Rachel was the kind of person who immediately made you feel at ease when you were spending time with her, even if you had just met. She was great about making sure that nobody got left out, and was quick to invite new or shy people at events who might have eaten alone to come sit with her and her friends instead.

She was generous with her time whenever I asked to bounce an idea off of her to see if what I was considering suggesting would actually be helpful for the blind community or not, and she never made me feel like a bother when I asked for her thoughts. To the contrary, she always seemed happy to help. She was encouraging when I was right, and gracious when I was wrong; she never made me feel stupid about an idea if I was off-base, and instead provided valuable insight that I apply to my work to this day.

Rachel was an awesome woman, and I wish that we had gotten to spend more time together. The Drupal community (and the world at large) will definitely be feeling her loss. I hope that we can all put what she has given to each of us to good use to carry forward what was always her mission - to make the world better for people. 

- Helena McCabe (helenasue)

Rachel Olivero was really an adventurous spirit. I remember a NFB conference several years ago when Rachel mused "I've always wanted to ride a mechanical bull - y'know do as Texans do in Texas".  After fighting the management of the establishment, who were not inclined to let her ride, she got to ride - for a full 30 seconds:-). Everyone at Deque will miss her. Rachel is an inspiration to all those who strive to be true to themselves and the cause of digital equality.

- Preety Kumar

In 2007, Rachel was one of the first accessibility experts I worked with after I joined Deque and I was always impressed with her technical strength and her ability to keep people at the center of any discussion. I remember the demonstration she made to Wal-Mart’s checkout team, that the shopping cart was inaccessible. Their response was getting off-track into technical mumbo-jumbo when Rachel loudly interrupted, “excuse me...excuse me. The point is that I want to put money in your pocket but since the shopping cart won’t work for me, I can’t do that. Do you want me to put my money in Target’s pocket instead?!?!”  I always enjoyed working with her on any project and will miss her.

- Wes Dillon

Rachel Olivero will always be an an accessibility super hero to me. From the moment I met her, I knew she was wicked smart and a powerful force for good. She moved a11y forward through her technical work and leadership at NFB and Humana.

Every time I hung out with Rachel, I felt like I was on an a11y adventure. She could even make javascript and aria entertaining. I loved how she used quotes from “Green Eggs and Ham” to show how accessible a live chat module could be. She had the whole room laughing and learning. Her joy was contagious and inspiring.

Our friendship grew each time we were together...from AHG to NFB to CSUN, to Penn State Web Conf and more. I think some of my favorite memories are from the “accessibility slumber party” at the Margarita Inn with Rachel, Elle, Sharron and others. Elle had brought together a team of a11y experts to solve big problems...we worked night and day...because we care so deeply about equal access for all.

A world without Rachel seems impossible to me. And then I remember how with Rachel, nothing seemed impossible. So I guess we all have to find our way to keep Rachel’s positive energy moving forward. Now It is up to each of us to make Rachel’s a11y dreams become a reality.

So with that, I raise a glass of cherry coke (one of her favs) and toast “To Rachel! To A11Y & Beyond!”

- Glenda Sims

I enjoyed talking with Rachel at both of her DrupalCons. We mostly talked shop. I was very impressed with her knowledge and patience dealing with people interested in learning. I remember talking about getting organizations like the NFB to approach technology more as makers than consumers. We also talked about challenges with procurement and the work that she was doing to revise how technology was purchased. She seemed hopeful and focused. She was clearly a big thinker.

By being involved in the Drupal community, Rachel reminded a lot of us of the importance of building our tools to work for everyone.

We were all looking forward to working with her more. She will be missed.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that memorial donations be made to the National Federation of the Blind to support projects in which Rachel personally invested her time, treasure, and talent.

Contributions can be mailed to National Federation of the Blind, 200 East Wells Street, Baltimore, Maryland, 21230, or given online at https://nfb.org/donate.

Update: Since the publication of this blog Drupal 9 is closer than ever. To learn what you need to do to be ready for the upcoming release, please consult our pages on Preparing for Drupal 9.

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog. Unfortunately Dries' blog does not allow for comments at the moment, feel free to post them here.

At Drupal Europe, I announced that Drupal 9 will be released in 2020. Although I explained why we plan to release in 2020, I wasn't very specific about when we plan to release Drupal 9 in 2020. Given that 2020 is less than thirteen months away (gasp!), it's time to be more specific.

Shifting Drupal's six month release cycle

We shifted Drupal 8's minor release windows so we can adopt Symfony's releases faster.

Before I talk about the Drupal 9 release date, I want to explain another change we made, which has a minor impact on the Drupal 9 release date.

As announced over two years ago, Drupal 8 adopted a 6-month release cycle (two releases a year). Symfony, a PHP framework which Drupal depends on, uses a similar release schedule. Unfortunately the timing of Drupal's releases has historically occurred 1-2 months before Symfony's releases, which forces us to wait six months to adopt the latest Symfony release. To be able to adopt the latest Symfony releases faster, we are moving Drupal's minor releases to June and December. This will allow us to adopt the latest Symfony releases within one month. For example, Drupal 8.8.0 is now scheduled for December 2019.

We hope to release Drupal 9 on June 3, 2020

Drupal 8's biggest dependency is Symfony 3, which has an end-of-life date in November 2021. This means that after November 2021, security bugs in Symfony 3 will not get fixed. Therefore, we have to end-of-life Drupal 8 no later than November 2021. Or put differently, by November 2021, everyone should be on Drupal 9.

Working backwards from November 2021, we'd like to give site owners at least one year to upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. While we could release Drupal 9 in December 2020, we decided it was better to try to release Drupal 9 on June 3, 2020. This gives site owners 18 months to upgrade. Plus, it also gives the Drupal core contributors an extra buffer in case we can't finish Drupal 9 in time for a summer release.

Planned Drupal 8 and 9 minor release dates.

We are building Drupal 9 in Drupal 8

Instead of working on Drupal 9 in a separate codebase, we are building Drupal 9 in Drupal 8. This means that we are adding new functionality as backwards-compatible code and experimental features. Once the code becomes stable, we deprecate any old functionality.

Let's look at an example. As mentioned, Drupal 8 currently depends on Symfony 3. Our plan is to release Drupal 9 with Symfony 4 or 5. Symfony 5's release is less than one year away, while Symfony 4 was released a year ago. Ideally Drupal 9 would ship with Symfony 5, both for the latest Symfony improvements and for longer support. However, Symfony 5 hasn't been released yet, so we don't know the scope of its changes, and we will have limited time to try to adopt it before Symfony 3's end-of-life.

We are currently working on making it possible to run Drupal 8 with Symfony 4 (without requiring it). Supporting Symfony 4 is a valuable stepping stone to Symfony 5 as it brings new capabilities for sites that choose to use it, and it eases the amount of Symfony 5 upgrade work to do for Drupal core developers. In the end, our goal is for Drupal 8 to work with Symfony 3, 4 or 5 so we can identify and fix any issues before we start requiring Symfony 4 or 5 in Drupal 9.

Another example is our support for reusable media. Drupal 8.0.0 launched without a media library. We are currently working on adding a media library to Drupal 8 so content authors can select pre-existing media from a library and easily embed them in their posts. Once the media library becomes stable, we can deprecate the use of the old file upload functionality and make the new media library the default experience.

The upgrade to Drupal 9 will be easy

Because we are building Drupal 9 in Drupal 8, the technology in Drupal 9 will have been battle-tested in Drupal 8.

For Drupal core contributors, this means that we have a limited set of tasks to do in Drupal 9 itself before we can release it. Releasing Drupal 9 will only depend on removing deprecated functionality and upgrading Drupal's dependencies, such as Symfony. This will make the release timing more predictable and the release quality more robust.

For contributed module authors, it means they already have the new technology at their service, so they can work on Drupal 9 compatibility earlier (e.g. they can start updating their media modules to use the new media library before Drupal 9 is released). Finally, their Drupal 8 know-how will remain highly relevant in Drupal 9, as there will not be a dramatic change in how Drupal is built.

But most importantly, for Drupal site owners, this means that it should be much easier to upgrade to Drupal 9 than it was to upgrade to Drupal 8. Drupal 9 will simply be the last version of Drupal 8, with its deprecations removed. This means we will not introduce new, backwards-compatibility breaking APIs or features in Drupal 9 except for our dependency updates. As long as modules and themes stay up-to-date with the latest Drupal 8 APIs, the upgrade to Drupal 9 should be easy. Therefore, we believe that a 12- to 18-month upgrade period should suffice.

So what is the big deal about Drupal 9, then?

The big deal about Drupal 9 is … that it should not be a big deal. The best way to be ready for Drupal 9 is to keep up with Drupal 8 updates. Make sure you are not using deprecated modules and APIs, and where possible, use the latest versions of dependencies. If you do that, your upgrade experience will be smooth, and that is a big deal for us.

Special thanks to Gábor Hojtsy (Acquia), Angie Byron (Acquia), xjm(Acquia), and catch for their input in this blog post.

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog. Please leave your comments on the original post.

Last week, WordPress Tavern picked up my blog post about Drupal 8's upcoming Layout Builder.

While I'm grateful that WordPress Tavern covered Drupal's Layout Builder, it is not surprising that the majority of WordPress Tavern's blog post alludes to the potential challenges with accessibility. After all, Gutenberg's lack of accessibility has been a big topic of debate, and a point of frustration in the WordPress community.

I understand why organizations might be tempted to de-prioritize accessibility. Making a complex web application accessible can be a lot of work, and the pressure to ship early can be high.

In the past, I've been tempted to skip accessibility features myself. I believed that because accessibility features benefited a small group of people only, they could come in a follow-up release.

Today, I've come to believe that accessibility is not something you do for a small group of people. Accessibility is about promoting inclusion. When the product you use daily is accessible, it means that we all get to work with a greater number and a greater variety of colleagues. Accessibility benefits everyone.

As you can see in Drupal's Values and Principles, we are committed to building software that everyone can use. Accessibility should always be a priority. Making capabilities like the Layout Builder accessible is core to Drupal's DNA.

Drupal's Values and Principles translate into our development process, as what we call an accessibility gate, where we set a clearly defined "must-have bar." Prioritizing accessibility also means that we commit to trying to iteratively improve accessibility beyond that minimum over time.

Together with the accessibility maintainers, we jointly agreed that:

1. Our first priority is WCAG 2.0 AA conformance. This means that in order to be released as a stable system, the Layout Builder must reach Level AA conformance with WCAG. Without WCAG 2.0 AA conformance, we won't release a stable version of Layout Builder.
2. Our next priority is WCAG 2.1 AA conformance. We're thrilled at the greater inclusion provided by these new guidelines, and will strive to achieve as much of it as we can before release. Because these guidelines are still new (formally approved in June 2018), we won't hold up releasing the stable version of Layout Builder on them, but are committed to implementing them as quickly as we're able to, even if some of the items are after initial release.
3. While WCAG AAA conformance is not something currently being pursued, there are aspects of AAA that we are discussing adopting in the future. For example, the new 2.1 AAA "Animations from Interactions", which can be framed as an achievable design constraint: anywhere an animation is used, we must ensure designs are understandable/operable for those who cannot or choose not to use animations.

Drupal's commitment to accessibility is one of the things that makes Drupal's upcoming Layout Builder special: it will not only bring tremendous and new capabilities to Drupal, it will also do so without excluding a large portion of current and potential users. We all benefit from that!

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.oncorps.io

OnCorps designs analytics and adaptive decisions platforms for business collaboration. Using platform engineering and some of the most powerful open-source frameworks, OnCorps deliver customized solutions to guide decisions making in enterprise operations: sales, pricing, finance, and risk behaviours.

Key Highlights

• Complex project involving Drupal, AngularJS, and Big Data
• Built to scale up
• Continuously improving approach
• Product engineering using agile and lean approach—first prototype built in two months

Initial Contact

The OnCorps team had evaluated and decided upon Drupal to build the product, and were looking for a Drupal agency to implement the project. They were looking or an agency that could function like their own engineering team, dedicatedly on the project. The company also wanted to keep their product development costs under control. And hence needed a Drupal development agency that could develop and deliver using the agile methodology.

They were referred to Srijan by Acquia. Srijan’s open approach, contribution to product from the business perspective, and consistent delivery earned the trust of the OnCorps team.

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog. Please leave your comments on the original post.

© Yes Moon

Last week, I shared my State of Drupal presentation at Drupalcon Nashville. In addition to sharing my slides, I wanted to provide more information on how you can participate in the various initiatives presented in my keynote, such as growing Drupal adoption or evolving our community values and principles.

Drupal 8 update

During the first portion of my presentation, I provided an overview of Drupal 8 updates. Last month, the Drupal community celebrated an important milestone with the successful release of Drupal 8.5, which ships with improved features for content creators, site builders, and developers.

Drupal 8 continues to gain momentum, as the number of Drupal 8 sites has grown 51 percent year-over-year:

This graph depicts the number of Drupal 8 sites built since April 2015. Last year there were 159,000 sites and this year there are 241,000 sites, representing a 51% increase year-over-year.

Drupal 8's module ecosystem is also maturing quickly, as 81 percent more Drupal 8 modules have become stable in the past year:

This graph depicts the number of modules now stable since January 2016. This time last year there were 1,028 stable projects and this year there are 1,860 stable projects, representing an 81% increase year-over-year.

As you can see from the Drupal 8 roadmap, improving the ease of use for content creators remains our top priority:

This roadmap depicts Drupal 8.5, 8.6, and 8.7+, along with a column for "wishlist" items that are not yet formally slotted. The contents of this roadmap can be found at https://www.drupal.org/core/roadmap.

Four ways to grow Drupal adoption

Drupal 8 was released at the end of 2015, which means our community has had over two years of real-world experience with Drupal 8. It was time to take a step back and assess additional growth initiatives based on what we have learned so far.

In an effort to better understand the biggest hurdles facing Drupal adoption, we interviewed over 150 individuals around the world that hold different roles within the community. We talked to Drupal front-end and back-end developers, contributors, trainers, agency owners, vendors that sell Drupal to customers, end users, and more. Based on their feedback, we established four goals to help accelerate Drupal adoption.

Goal 1: Improve the technical evaluation process

Matthew Grasmick recently completed an exercise in which he assessed the technical evaluator experience of four different PHP frameworks, and discovered that Drupal required the most steps to install. Having a good technical evaluator experience is critical, as it has a direct impact on adoption rates.

To improve the Drupal evaluation process, we've proposed the following initiatives:

Initiative Issue link Stakeholders Initiative coordinator Status Better discovery experience on Drupal.org Drupal.org roadmap Drupal Association hestenet Under active development Better "getting started" documentation #2956879 Documentation Working Group grasmash In planning More modern administration experience #2957457 Core contributors ckrina and yoroy Under active development

To become involved with one of these initiatives, click on its "Issue link" in the table above. This will take you to Drupal.org, where you can contribute by sharing your ideas or lending your expertise to move an initiative forward.

Goal 2: Improve the content creator experience

Throughout the interview process, it became clear that ease of use is a feature now expected of all technology. For Drupal, this means improving the content creator experience through a modern administration user interface, drag-and-drop media management and page building, and improved site preview functionality.

The good news is that all of these features are already under development through the Media, Workflow, Layout and JavaScript Modernization initiatives.

Most of these initiative teams meet weekly on Drupal Slack (see the meetings calendar), which gives community members an opportunity to meet team members, receive information on current goals and priorities, and volunteer to contribute code, testing, design, communications, and more.

Goal 3: Improve the site builder experience

Our research also showed that to improve the site builder experience, we should focus on improving the three following areas:

• The configuration management capabilities in core need to support more common use cases out-of-the-box.
• Composer and Drupal core should be better integrated to empower site builders to manage dependencies and keep Drupal sites up-to-date.
• We should provide a longer grace period between required core updates so development teams have more time to prepare, test, and upgrade their Drupal sites after each new minor Drupal release.

We plan to make all of these aspects easier for site builders through the following initiatives:

Initiative Issue link Stakeholders Initiative coordinator Status Composer & Core #2958021 Core contributors + Drupal Association Coordinator needed! Proposed Config Management 2.0 #2957423 Core contributors Coordinator needed! Proposed Security LTS 2909665 Core committers + Drupal Security Team + Drupal Association Core committers and Security team Proposed, under discussion Goal 4: Promote Drupal to non-technical decision makers

The fourth initiative is unique as it will help our community to better communicate the value of Drupal to the non-technical decision makers. Today, marketing executives and content creators often influence the decision behind what CMS an organization will use. However, many of these individuals are not familiar with Drupal or are discouraged by the misconception that Drupal is primarily for developers.

With these challenges in mind, the Drupal Association has launched the Promote Drupal Initiative. This initiative will include building stronger marketing and branding, demos, events, and public relations resources that digital agencies and local associations can use to promote Drupal. The Drupal Association has set a goal of fundraising $100,000 to support this initiative, including the hiring of a marketing coordinator.

Megan Sanicki and her team have already raised $54,000 from over 30 agencies and 5 individual sponsors in only 4 days. Clearly this initiative resonates with Drupal agencies. Please consider how you or your organization can contribute.

Fostering community with values and principles

This year at DrupalCon Nashville, over 3,000 people traveled to the Music City to collaborate, learn, and connect with one another. It's at events like DrupalCon where the impact of our community becomes tangible for many. It also serves as an important reminder that while Drupal has grown a great deal since the early days, the work needed to scale our community is never done.

Prompted by feedback from our community, I have spent the past five months trying to better establish the Drupal community's principles and values. I have shared an "alpha" version of Drupal's values and principles at https://www.drupal.org/about/values-and-principles. As a next step, I will be drafting a charter for a new working group that will be responsible for maintaining and improving our values and principles. In the meantime, I invite every community member to provide feedback in the issue queue of the Drupal governance project.

An overview of Drupal's values with supporting principles.

I believe that taking time to highlight community members that exemplify each principle can make the proposed framework more accessible. That is why it was very meaningful for me to spotlight three Drupal community members that demonstrate these principles.

Principle 1: Optimize for Impact - Rebecca Pilcher

Rebecca shares a remarkable story about Drupal's impact on her Type 1 diabetes diagnosis:

Principle 5: Everyone has something to contribute - Mike Lamb

Mike explains why Pfizer contributes millions to Drupal:

Principle 6: Choose to Lead - Mark Conroy

Mark tells the story of his own Drupal journey, and how his experience inspired him to help other community members:

Watch the keynote or download my slides

In addition to the community spotlights, you can also watch a recording of my keynote (starting at 19:25), or you can download a copy of my slides (164 MB).

Chances are if you've attended any of the Drupal camps in North America you've run into Kevin Thull. He's the fellow that is dashing from room to room before the first session begins to set up the AV equipment and checking in with presenters making sure they all "push the red button". Because of him, we are all able attend the sessions we miss while busy elsewhere. He is personally responsible for recording over 800 sessions and donating countless hours of his time.

Not only does he record sessions at camps, he also helps organize Midwest Drupal Camp. For this next year he has been charged as their fearless leader. He will be working on their web team, arranging catering, organizing the venue, as well as doing all the audio visual.

This year at DrupalCon Nashville the Drupal Community awarded Kevin the Aaron Winborn award. The Aaron Winborn award is presented annually to an individual who demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community. Kevin's commitment to capturing knowledge to share with the whole community is truly inspirational. He has provided a platform that helps tie local Drupal Communities together.

The Drupal Community Spotlight Committee's AmyJune Hineline (volkswagenchick on drupal.org) sat with Kevin before Nashville and asked him some questions about contributing to the Drupal Community.

Ironically, AmyJune had chosen to write this spotlight on Kevin a few weeks before DrupalCon. AmyJune had asked him if he was coming to Nashville and he relayed that he had a prior commitment to attend another conference for his job. Unbeknownst to us, during the interview Kevin knew he had been awarded the honor and managed to keep it a secret. While he did mention that the marketing conference only ran through Wednesday, AmyJune was pleasantly surprised to see him take the stage.

Well, not too surprised, after all he truly deserves the honor.

How long have you been involved in the Drupal community?

I’m not involved with Drupal through my employer, I work in Marketing, but I got into Drupal through freelance.

My first meet up was when the Using Drupal 6 book first came out. I would say that is when I first started getting involved in the community. So, that's close to 10 years now.

I started recording Drupal Camps back in 2013. The official Chicago Camp was having issues and so we as a far western Suburban group decided to have our own camp. I thought I could do some of the logistics and session recordings since that's what I do for work. I had the same setup with video cameras in the back of the room and I spent countless hours rebuilding these presentations. It's a similar process, but it's a very a different presentation between a marketer and someone from the Drupal community giving a presentation on diversity. A marketer might have 20 slides, but a Drupal talk may have 104.

Everybody at the time was telling me I was insane for doing this, but my response was, "Nope, it's important."

In 2014 was the first MIDCamp and we were able to get the DA recording kits. But that was not great either. There was a lot of setup, they were expensive to ship them back and forth, they didn't work terribly well, so that's when Avi Schwab ( https://www.drupal.org/u/froboy) and I started collaborating. He did all the setup for the laptops and I did all the running around from room to room and post production. We brainstormed and I started doing research. The next Suburban Camp is when I had my first test kit for what I am using today.

I saw that you recorded Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit remotely this year? Can you share that experience with us?

That's a funny story. It was the same weekend as Jersey Camp and I tend to favor camps I have already recorded. They had committed before Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit and when Amber Matz saw me at BADCAmp, I explained the conflict. I told her I had started working on the next step and would be shipping the kits to camps. I sat with her and showed her how the kit worked and she said it didn't seem too difficult, and we said "Let's do this".

I got a new case, sent 5 kits to them. It's funny how talking with the organizers of camps helps all of this come together. Because later at New England Camp, I was explaining to one of their organizers how I was shipping kits and he suggested labeling the cables. I thought that was brilliant so I got a label maker and labeled all the cables. I wrote out more a detailed instruction guide, and all these things were things I had been meaning to do.

I sent 5 kits, insured FedEx for around $50, whereas the DA sends this giant pelican case that must cost hundreds of dollars. That was part of the plan originally; we wanted something lightweight and easy to use. I heard they had an 84% capture rate which is a great start. The issue is that non-Macs recordings have no sound and so I have to lay up the backup recording into the video. A lot of times that back up recorder gets turned off or stopped for some reason.

While I was in Florida I started working on pinpointing why non-Mac machines don't have audio. Later, I had mixed success at MIDCamp, I captured a couple, some didn't work, one being an Ubuntu build. At lunch I worked with that presenter to test various setups and we found a setup that worked. Once I can crack that nut, then shipping with even more instructions will increase the capture rates.

Now that you're capturing some camps remote, how does that cut into how much you like to travel?

I do like to travel, but there are a couple of issues. A) I can't be everywhere. B) I am potentially doing 13 or 14 camps this year. Which is cool now, but it may not be cool in couple of years. And C) I don't do Drupal at work and when I first starting doing this I was using all my PTO. I don’t do any Drupal at work, but I brought back all kinds of information and my boss recognized that. She said I could count those as remote days, but of course there's a limit.

There is a balance to be found between visiting the camps and sending the kits remotely.

What are some of your favorite camps?

Everybody asks me that, that question is not fair. I like them all. It's generally the places I know the most people and/or I go ahead of time to play before camp starts. I am not a solo traveller, so if I know a lot of people at the camp I tend to like those: Badcamp, Twin Cities, St. Louis, Texas (cuz of Austin), and Montreal.

What are the things you like to do before a camp that makes it more fun?

HaHaHa, eat and drink all the things. Bar Crawls, Food Crawls, you name it.

Have you given any thought to helping with camps outside the States?

I would like to, but it’s a time and cost issue. The camps now reimburse my travel expenses. To fly to a European camp - I don’t know if that would be in their budget.

It’s interesting, Mauricio Dinarte tailed me for a few camps and he wanted, and he did, get some kits to start recording Nicaragua. One day he tweeted that he saw my kits at Drupal Camp Antwerp. It’s cool to see how these things grow organically. There’s not a camp that goes by where someone from the community doesn’t ask me about how everything works.

Congratulations Kevin!

Kevin’s not just the guy who reminds us all to push the red button. He is the guy who loans out his phone when a presenter is doing a live demo and needs an internet hotspot. He is the guy spending hours during and after Drupal Camps piecing together audio and video for maximum quality. The Drupal Community has so much to thank him for, the Aaron Winborn award couldn’t have been awarded to anyone more deserving.

Link to Kevin Thull Youtube acceptance

On Kevin, from the community:

“It has become a no-brainer to invite Kevin to Florida DrupalCamp and have him record and post all of our sessions online. He makes it easy for us to share our great content with a world-wide audience by coming prepared, making it easy for presenters, and uploading the video almost immediately. He’s a true asset to the community.”  - Mike Anello (Florida Camp)

"His never-ending abundance of energy and positive contributions in the form of Drupal Camp video services in the US is unmatched. At the camps where I’ve spoken or helped organize he has been a great person to work with through the whole process - helpful and organized across the board." - Aimee Degnan Hannaford (BADCamp)

“We appreciated Kevin’s willingness to send recording equipment and documentation to our event so that we could record sessions, even though he couldn’t be there. He was encouraging and helpful all along the way.” Amber Matz (PNWDS Portland)

Thank you Kevin for your contribution to community, for sharing your story with us, and for being a most excellent secret keeper! And thank you to the hundreds of volunteers that make Drupal Camps, Cons, meetups and picnics a success every year. And thank you AmyJune Hineline (volkswagenchick on drupal.org) for this most excellent Drupal Community Spotlight article!

Top image credit: Image by Jordana F

Project: Drupal coreDate: 2018-April-18Security risk: Moderately critical 12∕25 AC:Complex/A:User/CI:Some/II:Some/E:Theoretical/TD:DefaultVulnerability: Cross Site ScriptingCVE IDs: CVE-2018-9861Description: 

CKEditor, a third-party JavaScript library included in Drupal core, has fixed a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. The vulnerability stemmed from the fact that it was possible to execute XSS inside CKEditor when using the image2 plugin (which Drupal 8 core also uses).

We would like to thank the CKEditor team for patching the vulnerability and coordinating the fix and release process, and matching the Drupal core security window.

Solution: 

• If you are using Drupal 8, update to Drupal 8.5.2 or Drupal 8.4.7.
• The Drupal 7.x CKEditor contributed module is not affected if you are running CKEditor module 7.x-1.18 and using CKEditor from the CDN, since it currently uses a version of the CKEditor library that is not vulnerable.
• If you installed CKEditor in Drupal 7 using another method (for example with the WYSIWYG module or the CKEditor module with CKEditor locally) and you’re using a version of CKEditor from 4.5.11 up to 4.9.1, update the third-party JavaScript library by downloading CKEditor 4.9.2 from CKEditor's site.

Reported By: 

• Kyaw Min Thein

Fixed By: 

• Marek Lewandowski of the CKEditor team
• Wiktor Walc of the CKEditor team
• Wim Leers
• xjm Of the Drupal Security Team
• Lee Rowlands of the Drupal Security Team
• Daniel Wehner
• Hai-Nam Nguyen
• Matthew Grill

The following blog was written by Drupal Association Signature Hosting Supporter, Acquia. 

More and more developers are choosing content-as-a-service solutions known as decoupled CMSes, and due to this trend, people are asking whether decoupled CMSes are challenging the market for traditional CMSes.

By nature, decoupled CMSes lack end-user front ends, provide few to no editorial tools for display and layout, and as such leave presentational concerns almost entirely up to the front-end developer. Luckily, Drupal has one crucial advantage that propels it beyond these concerns of emerging decoupled competitors.

Join Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal and CTO at Acquia, as he shares his knowledge on how Drupal has an advantage over competitors, and discusses his point-of-view on why, when, and how you should implement decoupled Drupal.

Dries will touch on:

• His thoughts on decoupled CMSes - where is the CMS market headed and when?
• His opinion on whether decoupled CMSes will replace traditional CMSes
• The advantages of decoupled Drupal vs. emerging decoupled competitors
• Considerations when determining if decoupled Drupal is right for your project

Click here to watch the webinar. Dries Buytaert

CHAIRMAN, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICERACQUIA, INC.

Dries Buytaert is an open source developer and technology executive. He is the original creator and project lead for Drupal, an open source platform for building websites and digital experiences. Buytaert is also co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed technology company. Acquia provides an open cloud platform to many large organizations, which helps them build, deliver and optimize digital experiences. A Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, he holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from Ghent University and a Licentiate Computer Science (MsC) from the University of Antwerp. He was named CTO of the Year by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, New England Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, and a Young Innovator by MIT Technology Review. He blogs frequently on Drupal, open source, startups, business, and the future at dri.es.

LinkedIn

Twitter

https://www.acquia.com/resources/webinars/dries-buytaert-shares-his-view-decoupled-drupal-when-why-and-how?cid=7010c000002ZXzYAAW&ct=online-advertising&ls=drupalpremiumbenefits-dries&lls=pro_ww_drupalassociationpremiumbenefits_2018

The following blog was written by Drupal Association Signature Hosting Supporter, Acquia. 

The rapid evolution of diverse end-user clients and applications has given rise to a dizzying array of digital channels to support.

Websites in the past were built from monolithic architectures utilizing web content management solutions that deliver content through a templating solution tightly “coupled” with the content management system on the back-end.

Agile organizations crave flexibility, and strive to manage structured content across different presentation layers consistently in a way that’s scalable.

Accomplishing this efficiently requires that teams have flexibility in the front-end frameworks that dominate the modern digital landscape. That’s why decoupled and headless CMS is taking off. That’s why you’re here. But now you need the right technology to support the next phase of the web and beyond.

Download this eBook on headless and decoupled CMS

Project: Drupal coreDate: 2018-March-28Security risk: Highly critical 24∕25 AC:None/A:None/CI:All/II:All/E:Exploit/TD:DefaultVulnerability: Remote Code Execution CVE IDs: CVE-2018-7600Description: 

A remote code execution vulnerability exists within multiple subsystems of Drupal 7.x and 8.x. This potentially allows attackers to exploit multiple attack vectors on a Drupal site, which could result in the site being completely compromised.

The security team has written an FAQ about this issue.

Edited 2020, February 13 to fix links to patch files.

Solution: 

Upgrade to the most recent version of Drupal 7 or 8 core.

• If you are running 7.x, upgrade to Drupal 7.58. (If you are unable to update immediately, you can attempt to apply this patch to fix the vulnerability until such time as you are able to completely update.)
• If you are running 8.5.x, upgrade to Drupal 8.5.1. (If you are unable to update immediately, you can attempt to apply this patch to fix the vulnerability until such time as you are able to completely update.)

Drupal 8.3.x and 8.4.x are no longer supported and we don't normally provide security releases for unsupported minor releases. However, given the potential severity of this issue, we are providing 8.3.x and 8.4.x releases that includes the fix for sites which have not yet had a chance to update to 8.5.0.

Your site's update report page will recommend the 8.5.x release even if you are on 8.3.x or 8.4.x. Please take the time to update to a supported version after installing this security update.

• If you are running 8.3.x, upgrade to Drupal 8.3.9 or apply this patch.
• If you are running 8.4.x, upgrade to Drupal 8.4.6 or apply this patch.

This issue also affects Drupal 8.2.x and earlier, which are no longer supported. If you are running any of these versions of Drupal 8, update to a more recent release and then follow the instructions above.

This issue also affects Drupal 6. Drupal 6 is End of Life. For more information on Drupal 6 support please contact a D6LTS vendor.

Reported By: 

• Jasper Mattsson

Fixed By: 

• Jasper Mattsson
• Samuel Mortenson Provisional Drupal Security Team member
• David Rothstein of the Drupal Security Team
• Jess (xjm) of the Drupal Security Team
• Michael Hess of the Drupal Security Team
• Lee Rowlands of the Drupal Security Team
• Peter Wolanin of the Drupal Security Team
• Alex Pott of the Drupal Security Team
• David Snopek of the Drupal Security Team
• Pere Orga of the Drupal Security Team
• Neil Drumm of the Drupal Security Team
• Cash Williams of the Drupal Security Team
• Daniel Wehner
• Tim Plunkett

Contact and more information

The Drupal security team can be reached by email at security at drupal.org or via the contact form.

Learn more about the Drupal Security team and their policies, writing secure code for Drupal, and securing your site.

Thunder is proud sponsor of the Media and Publishing Summit ahead of the DrupalCon in Nashville. Meet us on 9th April and during the DrupalCon to learn more about Thunder and how it is used in professional publishing.

https://thunder.org/

Thunder is the Drupal 8 distribution for professional publishing. Thunder was designed by Hubert Burda Media and released as open-source software under the GNU General Public License in 2016. As members of the Thunder community, publishers, partners, and developers build custom extensions and share them with the community to further enhance Thunder.

Thunder consists of the current Drupal 8 functionality, lots of handpicked publisher-centric modules with custom enhancements (our own Thunder Admin Theme, the Paragraphs module, the Media Entity module, the Entity Browser module, and lots more), and an environment which makes it easy to install, deploy and add new functionality (e.g. the Thunder Updater).

To learn more about Thunder projects, read these case studies: German magazine Mein Schöner Garten (Gardening Magazine for Hubert Burda Media), US magazine American Heritage (American Heritage Magazine Migration – Drupal 8), and Serbian television and radio station PannonRTV (News portal for media house – PannonRTV).

About the idea:

We at the Thunder Core Team believe that publishers do not compete with each other through technology, but rather through content and brands. That is why the German publisher Hubert Burda Media established the Thunder community which aims to join forces among media companies by sharing code and innovation power. The goal is to innovate faster and spend less money overall by working together.

The Thunder community’s core product is the open-source content management system Thunder. Community members develop useful modules, use them for their own purposes and share them with the community by publishing them under the GNU General Public License. Neither Hubert Burda Media nor the other publishers in the community charge anyone for their contributions.

Any company publishing content professionally is welcome as a member of the Thunder community - both as user and as contributor. Anyone can join by contributing to the distribution. The usefulness and richness of Thunder’s functionality directly benefit from the number of contributors.

Why Drupal was chosen: 

For Burda, Drupal is the content management platform of choice. It is a free and open-source content-management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License.

The standard Drupal core already provides the essential features, e.g. user management, menu management, RSS feeds, taxonomy, page layout customization, and system administration. It is easily adaptable and extensible with thousands of modules provided by a global community of users and developers. In addition, developers at Hubert Burda Media have had previous good experiences with Drupal. Drupal is therefore a tried and tested basis and has become even better with Drupal 8.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Thunder started as a way to share innovation and synergies among the many different brands and products within the Burda Corporation to save costs and speed up the time to market. It did not take long until we realized that the model that worked within the very diverse Burda universe would be useful for almost all digital publishers. That was when we decided to open source the distribution.

Due to its open source basis on Drupal 8, all features and functionality within Thunder are available to anyone wishing to benefit from Burda’s industry experience. Individual brands can add modules to tailor the system to their specific needs. Many of those “specific” customizations will prove to be valuable to more than just the organizations they originated from. We therefore designed Thunder in a way that we can easily incorporate those add-ons into the main distribution and share the features among all brands.

Goals:

We aim at becoming the best open-source content management system for professional publishing. In this, we focus on the creation of content. We want to help editors to create articles, to add media, to build landing pages, in short, to share their stories with the world.
We want Thunder to be a CMS jointly developed by its users and are therefore working towards building a community of publishers, IT agencies, and anyone else who shares our ideas and contributes to Thunder.

Our aim in doing so is to stay very close to the Drupal community and the Drupal core instead of creating a Thunder fork. Whenever we want to implement a new functionality or solve a problem, we try to do this in Drupal core or in the modules Thunder uses instead of fixing things in the distribution.

Time spent:

It’s difficult to measure the time spent on the development of Thunder, as this is an ongoing process. Currently, there are four developers employed by Hubert Burda Media working on the distribution full-time, plus several external developers. They focus on the advancement of Thunder as well as Drupal core and the contrib modules used in the distribution. A community manager is working on coordinating and growing the Thunder community of publishers, developers, and other partners.

Timeline and Milestones:

• 30th August 2015: Repository and first commits for Thunder
• September 2015: playboy.de – the first website running on Thunder
• November 2015: instyle.de – the second website running on Thunder as well as proof of concept of the sharing model
• 17th March 2016: Official press release about Thunder
• October 2016: produceretailer.com is the first professional non-Burda website running on Thunder
• 30th January 2017: Release of Thunder 1.0
• March 2016: One year after the official launch of the Thunder initiative, 15 websites (we know of) are running on Thunder.
• 1st June 2017: Release of Thunder 2.0
• 20th July 2017: Release of Thunder Admin Theme
• 20th November 2017: First community event, the Thunder Day in Hamburg

Results:

We released Thunder 1.0 in January 2017. One year later, at least 60 professional websites that we know of now run on Thunder. In the meantime, we have also released Thunder 2.0 and the Thunder Admin Theme.

Publishing houses grabbed the idea of working together. The Austrian publisher kurier.at, for example, contributed to the liveblog module used in Thunder and developed a new functionality to split text paragraphs.

In community matters, we talked to more than 300 companies worldwide. We established the “Certified Thunder Integrator” program to help publishers to find IT agencies as well as IT agencies to find customers. As of now, there are more than 20 companies certified or in the certification process.

We aim at bringing people together to share experiences. For this purpose, we introduced a Slack team for the Thunder community as well as several social media accounts. Furthermore, we organized the first community event – the Thunder Day – with around 120 participants in November 2017.

Challenges and how we resolved them:

Updating:

Distributions such as Thunder face the problem of losing control after the installation. How should a distribution actually deliver features and updates? We thought a lot about this problem and introduced the Thunder Updater, the “Thunder way to keep your site up to date”. Thunder checks if installed configurations have been changed – if not, they can be updated. Otherwise, you will get a message telling you there’s an update pending and what to do if you wish to have it. This functionality is currently an integral part of the distribution but we plan to detach it and publish it as a module on drupal.org soon so that everybody can use it.

Testing:

Writing an Admin Theme is very difficult because Drupal offers so many possibilities to adapt things: If you change something it can have unexpected effects in unexpected places. To avoid surprises, we developed Sharpeye, a visual regression tool. It takes screenshots and compares them in automated tests. This gives us a good overview. We open sourced the tool and you can download it here: github.com/BurdaMagazinOrg/sharpeye

Technical details, tips, and tricks: Tooling:

We invested a lot of time into automated testing but it was well worth the effort, not only for Thunder but also for Drupal core and the contrib modules we use since we discovered a lot of bugs there too.

Development process:

We don’t use a closed issue tracker but publish our tickets on drupal.org, thereby creating transparency. We use Github rather than drupal.org for the development because the developer experience is much better.

Organizations involved: 

Thunder

Modules/Themes/Distributions

Key modules/theme/distribution used: 

• Paragraphs
• Media entity
• Entity Browser
• Thunder Admin Theme

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:  Requirements / Key modules Storytelling

In professional publishing, it’s all about the story. It has to be easy to create a story, to extend it, to change its narrative strand, and to enrich it with multimedia content. We use the Paragraphs module for this. Instead of putting all their content in one WYSIWYG body field including images and videos, end-users can now choose on the fly between pre-defined Paragraph Types independent from one another. Paragraph Types can be anything you want from a simple text block or image to a complex and configurable slideshow. This allows editors to structure an article into sub-elements which can easily be created, edited, and reorganized.

Media Handling

Editors want to enrich their articles with pictures, videos, content from social media, and whatever else you might think of. Paragraphs are one part of this, the other is the combination of the Media Entity module and the Entity Browser module. With those modules, editors can easily upload new content but also find and reuse existing entities.

SEO

Search engine optimization plays a major role in every editor’s life. Thunder therefore gas a plethora of different adjusting screws, from several meta tags for Facebook, Twitter, and Open Graph up to the simple XML sitemap.

Scheduled Publishing

The editor’s daily life is a lot about planning. With Thunder, you can schedule articles, ensuring they will be published at a given date and time. Even more importantly, you can also schedule the time at which an article or a picture should not be shown on the website anymore, e.g. if the contract period for a photograph has ended or an event announcement isn’t useful anymore.

Improved Authoring Experience

Our primary focus is making the editors’ work with Thunder as easy as possible. In order to achieve this, we created the Thunder Admin Theme based on findings of user tests and a survey conducted with editors working with Thunder.

Detailed Module List

Find a detailed list of the modules we use in Thunder here: burdamagazinorg.github.io/thunder-documentation/modules

Community contributions: 

Since we get a lot from the Drupal community, we give our best to contribute back, e.g. by fixing the bugs we find through automated tests and by supporting Drupal events and code sprints with developer time, talks, and sponsoring. Christian Fritsch, a member of the Thunder Core Team, contributed a lot of his time to the media initiative. Ingo Rübe, the initiator of Thunder, is a member of the Drupal Association’s Board of Directors.

Project team: 

• Daniel Bosen - Lead Developer
• Christian Fritsch - Senior Developer
• Mladen Todorovic - Senior Developer
• Volker Killesreiter - Senior Developer
• Julia Pradel - Community Manager
• Ingo Rübe - Initiator of Thunder
• Collin Müller - Head of Strategic Development

Team members: 

• daniel.bosen
• chr.fritsch
• mtodor
• volkerk
• juliapradel