All about Drupal and javascript.
Much like my last update things are going well. I am able to spend 2 full days every week on contribution and my commit activity has increased quite a lot. Many thanks to my sponsors: Palantir.net , OPTASY , and new ones who joined in the past few weeks: Vardot , OpenSense Labs , and Liip.ch . Now some numbers, since the last update I committed 82 issues (worth 820 weighted issue credits), that’s…
Back in March I started to look at sponsors for the time I’m spending working on the Drupal core issue queue. It’s been a few months and I wanted to go back on all the sponsored commits I made as a Frontend Framework Manager, to show how the sponsorships helped Drupal for the past few months. The sponsorship offer is simple: you send me a fixed monthly fee of 2500€, and I share the issue credit of…
Drupal is pretty expensive to host and maintain. There is already work well under way to address this with automatic updates and project browser. It’s great, and it’s not enough. What if we could ship drupal with a production-ready webserver that can handle real-time features? What if we could make HTTPS certificate management easier? What if we could significantly improve the performance of…
CSS has been on a roll for a few years and we keep getting great things to use. In the process of removing jQuery from Drupal core , we’re running into the problem of replacing jQuery .parents() method by something else. In certain conditions it is very easy to use CSS selectors to replace this method. Given the following HTML: <html> <body> <main> <article id= "article-19" ></article> </main>…
For a few years now I’ve been quite unhappy with the atmosphere of discussions regarding Drupal credit system. It turns very ugly, very fast. As an example, what’s being discussed on the DA blog lately is not healthy to me. Talking about “high” and “low” value contribution is looking at the problem from the wrong end. The main reason we’re having those discussions is because the Drupal marketplace…
Over the years we’ve heard of massive Drupal websites, site factories, traffic spikes, etc. Which is impressive that it’s possible to do with Drupal, although with enough time, money, and hardware that’s to be expected to some extend. On the other side of the scale (pun intended), when you have little time, money, and hardware I would have a hard time recommending Drupal, even if it was the best…
I wrote this post from scratch about 7 times over the last few months, and I’m not getting anywhere so I’ll write up something, it’s not perfect, I took a few shortcuts but having a discussion going is more important than a perfect post. Situation JavaScript development went from widget-based add-ons for functional HTML pages to being responsible for HTML page assembly and even basic browser…
Much like web components, progressive web apps ( PWA ) refers to a set of browser features designed to allow websites to behave more like native applications on mobile devices. As far as features are concerned we’re talking about: Offline , OS integration , push notifications , and background synchronization . To control those features the relatively new serviceworker API is provided, with which…
Word is that Drupal is getting a frontend framework. From the multiple options it seems EmberJS is currently a little ahead of Angular and React. As said in Dries original post as well as in the drupal core issue created, nothing is final and everyone interested is asked to check that the set of library in the comparison is sufficient and more importantly that the criteria used for evaluation are…
Drupal 8 just got out and many people are looking at it to power their decoupled website. There is a lot of noise about Angular, Ember, and React. Somewhere along the way, we started to forget what mobile first meant. All of this makes right now the perfect time to take a bad decision. After my Frontend Thunderdome session at DrupalCamp Vienna I wanted to contribute to the discussion and highlight…
Recently I’ve been digging up data about smartphone use worldwide for a presentation and found out a few things that surprised me, let me share them. The data comes from several sources: TomiAhonen Almanac , IDC , Gartner , Statista . Exact references can be found at the end. Quantitative data From 2010–2014 the data comes from measurements, 2015—2019 is forecast data. Shipment data is the most…
Since FrontendUnited 2012 Amsterdam, I’ve been saying Drupal core should significantly cut it’s jQuery use. Until now it was without much data to back it up. What follows is a visualization of jQuery modules use in Drupal 8 code, it’s fancy so feel free to click everywhere. There is additional information in titles, be sure to check those out. Took long enough to make, sorry mobile users.…
DrupalCon Austin just wrapped up and if you want to discuss Drupal future in Amsterdam, it’s time to submit your core conversation session proposal. The topic for core conversations is Achieving sustainability . There are great proposals already but not enough to fill the whole track. To expand a little on the topic of sustainability, Drupal is still the star of the show but the context in which…
Those past few months have been very busy as you can see from my lack of blogging since January. Three months ago I gave my notice to leave my job as an Acquia technical consultant (3 months is the usual amount of time for people with my kind of job in france). It was not easy to decide, Acquia’s professional services team is incredible and I’ll miss working with them (the team chat room is…
Here are the main problems with Drupal javascript: no testing , no visible documentation . Testing This one is a maintainer nightmare. We refactor away and break eveything in the process. Thankfully we can’t break the overlay anymore, but we have Views UI to break now! As well as various surprising components all over the place. Long story short, we need front-end testing. There was a core…
In fixing contrib javascript I mentioned that as a contrib maintainer or developer you could do a bit more than just run JSHint. This is because Drupal 8 will not support IE8, meaning that core and contrib are free to go crazy! The incredibly useful caniuse.com website holds extensive compatibility tables for the fancy new HTML/JS/SVG features in the works. But talking about ES5 specifically, the…
In my previous post about javascript maintainership , I stated that If core JS doesn’t get in your way, as far as I’m concerned, I did my job . While true, it’s pretty much Level 0 of my ambition. I do have an overreaching Evil plan 1 2 and first I want to talk about where it comes from. Backstory I started contributing to Drupal in 2011, I’d been using it for a couple of years but didn’t really…
Back in Drupal 7 dev cycle, there was no single person that took ownership of Drupal JS as a whole, which lead to many inconsistencies in the code base or straight up syntax errors in point releases. It is not that nobody cared, it’s that nobody cared enough to take ownership. We’ve been using JS for more than 8 years, there is a lot to do. Do what exactly? Let’s look at the list of…
It took a little while but I’m really happy to be able to say that there is a set of very good JS people around in the core issue queue. I know there are some out there in contrib but unfortunately very few show up in the core issue queue. We’re nice and we have cookies, don’t be afraid! The short story is that back in february 2012, after writing JavaScript clean-up patches for a few months,…
Let’s see how long I last this time.