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In early April, 2025, I was a guest on the Talking Drupal podcast discussing Back-to-Basics, an idea I had to get more beginner-level presentations at Drupal events as a way to better support (and retain) our newer community members. As I am currently a bit overcommitted, this, regretfully, is not something that I have the bandwidth to lead. I do feel that the idea, and getting it up and running as soon as possible, is a good one that can contribute greatly as one solution to the declining pool of Drupal developers that will sustain us into the future. So

Organizations can now be rewarded with Drupal contribution credits (among other enticements) for hiring new, inexperienced (IXP) Drupal developers. After many months (years?) of planning, the Drupal IXP program is open and accepting applications for hiring organizations. From now forward, any participating organization that hires a new Drupal developer (with less than 3 months of paid experience) can earn 250 contribution credits upon successful program completion. I'm super proud to have been working with Carlos and Anilu ( A Drupal couple) and a number of other volunteers on this effort and am really happy to see it launched. Why? The

As part of weekly office hours for DrupalEasy students and alumni , I am often asked to suggest sessions at upcoming Drupal events that I think are worthwhile. During one our our most recent DrupalEasy Office Hours, I was again asked to run down the list of my picks from all the sessions at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 , and afterward I thought that it might make a fun blog post. Of course, I can't in good conscience suggest that my picks are the best for anyone else to attend among the ginormous volume of sessions available. I can share only

With Drupal Starshot on the horizon, the possibilities of expanding the market share for Drupal through Drupal CMS and building further on the power of Drupal Core creates a new vision, new opportunities and hopefully a renewed path of growth for our beloved community. So, while we all look to fully understand the Starshot initiative and its implications for our businesses and the way we market Drupal, it seems like a good time to also reflect, and perhaps begin to really address, the dwindling Drupal talent pool as well as lack of available Drupal jobs. We need to take a

I was fortunate enough to attend two very different European Drupal events recently, and wanted to take a few minutes to share my experience as well as thank the organizers for their dedication to the Drupal community. The events couldn't have been more different - one being a first-time event in a town I've never heard of and the other celebrating their 20th anniversary in a city that can be considered the crossroads of the Netherlands. DrupalCamp Cemaes First off - it is pronounced KEM-ice (I didn't learn this until I actually arrived). Cemaes is a small village at the

a second official version of Drupal - Dries Buytaert, in his blog post announcing Drupal Starshot If you're a Drupal developer of any caliber and pay any attention to the goings-on in the Drupal community, then you no doubt have heard about Starshot, recently announced by Dries Buytaert at DrupalCon Portland 2024. In this post, I'll do my best to not repeat everything that was announced, but rather to summarize, ask a question or two and offer an opinion or two… The basics Starshot will be a new download available on drupal.org that includes contributed modules and configuration to provide

Image used with permission from Michael Richardson from Ironstar.io . I took a lot away from DrupalCon Portland 2024, and while one of my lasting memories from the main keynote (the Driesnote) will be the introduction of Starshot, something that has occupied a good amount of space in my brain is what happened just prior to Dries’ Starshot announcement. At the start of his presentation ( the 21:15 mark of this video,) Dries asks everyone with at least one year of Drupal experience to stand up. He then asked everyone with less than three years of experience with Drupal to

One of the signature events of every Drupalcon (IMHO) is contribution day, when community members from around the world gather to work together in the same physical space to advance various aspects of the project - from strategic and community initiatives to contributed modules and themes as well as non-code contributions like Promote Drupal and, of course, core contributions. As part of this, space is always set aside for new contributors, with community volunteers helping to organize, train, and mentor community members new to project contribution. This space strives to be a welcoming environment to those of all skills and

Markdown is a text processing library that takes readable text and converts it into HTML. Started over 20 years ago, it is now a widely-used library that makes it easy for people to write text documents that can be easily and predictably converted into HTML. Quick example - the Markdown syntax "this is **important**" converts to "this is important" after passing through a Markdown converter. There are many "flavors" of Markdown today - most include the basic syntax and many include their version of "extended Markdown". Examples include Github-flavored Markdown and CommonMark. Predictably, there have been Markdown-related Drupal contrib modules

If you’ve been on vacation or heads-down on summer projects and have been meaning to ramp up your module development skills, there is still time to register for the Lite version of the Summer 2023 session of Professional Module Development , DrupalEasy's newest long-form, best-practice focused, professional Drupal development course. James Shields , who completed the Winter session earlier this year describes the PMD as “A fantastic course covering some really advanced stuff. If you understand the principles of Drupal, but want to move forward to deal with advanced development topics, this is a good place to start.” The deadline

It’s been an interesting path to finding professional and personal fulfillment for the decidedly bold and curious Cindy Garcia . She graduated with a degree in biomedical engineering from Florida International University in 2012, landed a job as a Quality Assurance Engineer in the medical device industry shortly thereafter, and then realized she was more interested in, and really well suited for IT; specifically web development. This time of transition was not just one of wrestling with her professional journey, as she was also starting to pivot her athletic interests, explaining, “I started participating in an adult wrestling class because

The Drupal Smart Trim module is used by more than 65,000 sites, including over ⅔ on modern Drupal (8+) sites. It has proven to be a valuable tool to improve Drupal's core functionality to trim long text fields in an intelligent manner. Late in 2022, we released a major update ( 2.0.0) to the module. Among other improvements, we delivered Drupal 10 compatibility and much improved automated tests. Since then, a 2.1.0 release (completed during the DrupalCon Pittsburgh community contribution day) has brought even more automated tests and functionality. During DrupalCon Pittsburgh, Mark Casias ( markie) and I discussed the

After 20 years of swinging a gavel as a licensed auctioneer, Jacqui Young bravely picked up her laptop and filled out the application for Drupal Career Online so she could transform her lifestyle and pursue a passion. This began her official bid to become a full-on contributing member of the Drupal Community, which she had become acquainted with, and intrigued by, for several years as she accompanied her partner to Drupal events. Tagging along to various Camps and Cons, Jacqui became drawn to the mobile lifestyle that a career in web development has to offer. She also felt connected to

Join us at 10:00 am ET on July 14, 2023 for a Closer Look at Professional Module Development , a new no-cost mini-webinar that provides an overview of what the two versions of our Professional Module Development course covers and insight into all of the benefits and resources that come with it. The Full version of the Summer 2023 session begins August 8, with the Lite version starting August 22nd. The 30-minute Closer Look webinar includes a curriculum overview, including the topics and modules that you will build during both the 90-hour full version and the 60-hour Lite version of

Unless you've been living underneath a Druplicon-shaped rock, you're probably aware that DrupalPalooza Pittsburgh took place June 5-8. If so, I'm guessing that your Drupal newsfeed is full of wrap-up articles and summaries that may feel a bit redundant (I know that mine is and that they do). It is in the spirit of hopefully spicing up your Drupal news consumption that this will not be one of those blog posts. Rather, in my somewhat still high-school-aged mind, I'm rolling back the clock to present the DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023 Superlatives 🎉 Best session (that I attended): Drupal Distributions & Recipes