Composer is a widely used dependency manager that modern Drupal uses to rely on various third party components. Unfortunately it is not very straightforward to use and was definitely a departure from Drupal 7's self-contained package that had the few dependencies directly shipped. As we realized that Composer itself is a big barrier to make Drupal easier to use, we started to chip away at use cases where Drupal sites would rely on it.

We still keep improving the ecosystem readiness and tooling with each new major Drupal core version. Drupal 11 is to be released in a few weeks on the week of July 29 (so probably the first days of August) and already almost half of the top 200 modules are ready. But we need to keep thinking ahead.

The Project Update Bot (originally built by Ted Bowman at Acquia and since then very actively owned and improved by Björn Brala at SWIS) posted into more than 7600 project issue queues on Drupal.org with merge request suggestions to improve and in many cases solve compatibility with the upcoming major version. 

The bot is a clever combination of Upgrade Status and drupal-rector with some custom decision logic. So humans can also run those tools! But what if we automate it even more? What if we help pre-empt forwards incompatible code getting into modules in the first place? 

I presented my first ever Drupal 11 deep dive session at DrupalCon Portland 2024 last week. It turned out to not just be about Drupal 11 but also about Starshot and even about Drupal 12 thanks to the coolest future-proofing technology I announced in this talk. Unfortunately not all of the attendees fit in, that wanted to attend, as the room was standing space only and many turned around and left. But here we go!

I strongly believe in open content. I came to open source from open content 24 or so years ago. So in good tradition, I built this slide deck on slides.com in way that is easy to share and fork. You can create your own or present directly from my deck with my speaker notes. The content is licensed with a Creative Commons license. I'll keep updating this slideshow, but under different URLs, so people can catch the latest edition of this presentation at Drupal Devdays Burgas next month for example. See some of you there!

If you can't make it there or plan to present this at your organization or meetup in the meantime, check out the open source slides.

The recording from DrupalCon Portland is below. Unfortunately I was not well prepared with a subtitling set up. I am exploring good tools and will do better next time! The conference tech crew tried to help in the middle of the session, but unfortunately they could not make it work either. At least managed to discuss some current Starshot questions while that was attempted. I promised a video with subtitles, which turns out Youtube nicely delivered, so I will not create a separate recording now. Hope this helps!

Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert just unveiled the Drupal Starshot Initiative and I couldn't be more excited! Starshot is all about putting users first. Enhancing Drupal core with additional components tailored to everyday users of the interface. Technically, it builds on Drupal core's robust foundation, utilizing Automatic Updates/Package Manager for seamless installation and maintenance, Recipes for the base system and on-demand additions, and Project Browser to help with recipe and extension discovery.

As I was talking to people about Starshot at DrupalCon Portland I realized it is easy to overlook how fundamental the changes proposed are in terms of how Drupal will innovate and the benefits end users will enjoy. At the same time those that did not have time to watch the whole keynote had understandable misconceptions about its nature. Some were concerned the fundamental changes are happening in the architecture, or a fork / parallel project is being set up. That is not where/how Starshot revolutionizes Drupal though. To address those misconceptions, I already worked on answers to frequently asked questions and published on the Starshot page.

This blog post will focus on the benefits that I see. I had the chance to participate in two hours of Starshot BoFs and then an hour long Q&A session at DrupalCon Portland. I also covered more technical details of Starshot's architecture in my Drupal 11 talk (including the most popular question on what the Launch button might lead to). Finally I had countless conversations with people at the event. Maybe confirmation bias, but there were only a couple people I talked to that were entirely skeptical. On the other hand I got very different viewpoints on what will the benefits be depending on who I talked to.

I think all of those are great, so I compiled them. Let's see 15 different reasons why I am super excited about Starshot and how it is very different from previous initiatives.

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

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

DrupalCon Portland 2024 is coming up next month! The event provides good opportunities to get help with three major transitions of Drupal in 2024. Drupal 7's end of life is near, while Drupal 11 is released this year. Finally, DrupalCI testing is superceeded by much improved GitLab CI pipelines shortly after DrupalCon. Here are some highlights of related events to not miss at DrupalCon!

Today I made a new 4.1.0 feature release of Upgrade Status available. Thanks to these 23 contributors: DrupalDope, Grimreaper, MacSim, PapaGrande, Shubham Rathore, abramm, akshay.singh, apaderno, arti_parmar, gorkagr, joelpittet, lamp5, leymannx, lostcarpark, marvil07, mrinalini9, nsavitsky, prudloff, randallquesadaa, rishabjasrotia, samir_shukla, thakurnishant_06 and wells. 

The new release adds Drush 12 support, fixes PHP 8.2 and 8.3 compatibility and adds Drupal 11 environment readiness checking. Various additional bugs have been fixed related to CSS deprecation checking, info file handling and so on. This is also the first tagged release that relies on GitLab CI entirely for testing in three PHP and core version combinations.

The Drupal community and Drupal Association has been working with Kuoni Tumlare Congress since 2019 to make DrupalCon Europe happen. I have the privilege to be deeply involved with the event originally to "help keep the Drupal spirit". But Kuoni has been really wonderful in integrating with the Drupal community and now knows not just the event but the Drupal community inside and out, so it is a really great and fun collaboration.

Last November the Drupal project announced that Drupal 10 will receive long term support until mid-late 2026. That is when Drupal 12 will be released, so this long term support does not mean that Drupal 11 will not be released as well in the meantime. And by meantime, I mean Drupal 11 will be released this year, in 2024, in June or July or December.