Preston So

Collaboration is key to content management workflows, whether from the editor, marketer, or developer perspective. Nonetheless, one of the remaining unexplored areas for effective content collaboration on the web are content management systems (CMS). Because of technical limitations, CMSs have long been hamstrung in their ability to provide the sort of rich collaboration workflows other applications like Google Docs enable out of the box. Fortunately, collaborative editing in storied CMSs like WordPress and Drupal may...

Preston So

As another decade comes to a close in Drupal’s long and storied history, one important trend has the potential to present amazing — or unsettling, depending on how you look at it — opportunities and shifts in the Drupal ecosystem. That trend is decoupled Drupal.

Preston So

Introducing the new administration theme for Drupal 8

Drupal has been around for a long time, and its content editing interface has undergone several refreshes over the years, most notably during the Drupal 7 development cycle with the Seven theme. Another administration theme is rapidly changing the game for Drupal site builders and content editors, and it's part of a Drupal core strategic initiative—one of the Drupal community's utmost priorities and innovation streams—to modernize the front end of Drupal for a variety of...

Preston So

Over the last five years, decoupled Drupal has grown from a fringe topic among front-end enthusiasts in the Drupal community to something of a phenomenon when it comes to coverage in blog posts, tutorials, conference sessions, and marketing collateral. There is now even a well-received book by this author and a yearly conference dedicated to the topic. For many Drupal developers working today, not a day goes by without some mention of decoupled architectures that...

Preston So

The previous blog post in this multi-part series about Yjs, the real-time collaboration framework, dealt with awareness therein, and how encoding deletions in the Yjs way can yield substantial performance dividends. Recently, during its assessment of a variety of tools for collaborative editing, Tag1 Consulting opted for Yjs and ProseMirror for an ambitious shared editing project at a well-known Fortune 50 company.

Preston So

Content collaboration has long been table stakes for content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, but what about real-time peer-to-peer collaboration between editors who need direct interaction to work on their content? The WordPress Gutenberg team has been working with Tag1 Consulting and the community of Yjs, an open-source real-time collaboration framework, to enable collaborative editing on the Gutenberg editor. Currently an experimental feature that is available in a Gutenberg pull request, shared editing in...

Preston So

Drush 10 & the Future of Drupal CLI

In the first part of our two-part blog series on Drush 10, we covered the fascinating history of Drush and how it came to become one of the most successful projects in the Drupal ecosystem. After all, many of us know many of the most common Drush commands by heart, and it’s difficult to imagine a world without Drush when it comes to Drupal’s developer experience. Coming on the heels of Drupal 8.8, Drush 10...

Preston So

Introducing the new & improved

One of the challenges of securing any Drupal site is the often wide range of modules to track, security advisories to follow, and updates to implement. When it comes to Drupal security, particularly older versions of Drupal such as Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, even a slight delay in patching security vulnerabilities can jeopardize mission-critical sites. Now that Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 are fast approaching their end of life (EOL) in November 2021 (Drupal...

Preston So

In part 3 learn more about Yjs and the specific features that make it shine in the realm of real-time collaboration: namely awareness, offline editing, and versioning. In the next two installments of this blog series, we cover all three of these essential topics.

Preston So

An effective administrative interface is table stakes for any content management system that wishes to make a mark with users. Claro is a new administration theme now available in Drupal 8 core thanks to the Admin UI Modernization initiative. Intended to serve as a logical next step for Drupal's administration interface and the Seven theme, Claro was developed with a keen eye for modern design patterns, accessibility best practices, and careful analysis of usability studies...