DEV Community: Dharizza Espinach

What's new in D9?

Dharizza Espinach — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 14:19:42 +0000

The official launch of Drupal 9 was this past Wednesday June 3rd, with it, a new step in the evolution of this CMS was made. This new version doesn't bring new features, but the updates it has are really visible for Drupal developers because now it offers a more secure system with updated dependencies and an API easier to work with

The end of D7

With Drupal 9 here, it is impossible not to talk about those sites which are still using Drupal 7, now we're two versions ahead of it and, for a couple of months, it has been well known that the end of life of it will be in december 2021, that means 18 months from now approximately. During this time, Drupal 7 will still receive security and bug fixes support, though the recommendation in general is to use this time for migrating to Drupal 8 or 9.

The migration from Drupal 7 to 8 or 9 is considered to be the last big jump that should be made, it is like this because when Drupal changed from 7 to 8 a complete rebuild was made, that means, a whole new branch was created for Drupal 8 and it was developed over there, completely independent from Drupal 7.

To execute the Drupal migration from 7 to 8 or 9, it is recommended to use Upgrade Status, Drupal Module Upgrader and Migrate Suite:

Upgrade status: this is a module that allows us to know the state of our contrib modules and themes, it helps us know if there are already compatible version with D8/9 or if there is any module that may replace the respective functionality.
Drupal module upgrader: it is a module that generates changes in our custom modules to make them D8 and D9 compatible.
Migrate suite: this is part of Drupal core and it lets us execute the content migrations.

Innovation in Drupal

The migration processes from a major Drupal version to another are usually large, expensive and complex, the change from Drupal 7 to 8 doesn't escape from this, though, from now and on these kind of changes will not be like that, because a new innovation process that eliminates a big part of that complexity has been put in place, and that's the main feature of this Drupal 9 launch.

Image taken from @gaborhojtsy slides

As previously stated, the change from Drupal 7 to 8 was a complete rebuild so a new branch was created and D8 was developed there. Starting with D9 that's different because now every new version will be built on top of the previous one, so it will deliver the same features with new stuff, it will be build over preexisting stuff.

This new innovation process in Drupal is made thanks to three points:

semantic versioning: it allows to differentiate the launch of new features from those in which there are only bug fixes, this makes it easy to add new features and improvements to the API keeping backwards compatibility,
scheduled launches: the launch cycle from Drupal has changed, now new features are going to be released every six months, with this new value is delivered to users and feedback is received quicker,
experimental projects: they allow users to access unfinished features in advance, this is in order for them to provide feedback quickly and to adjust the direction taken in each project.

Why Drupal 9?

You may ask, if this is the current state and the first release of D9 doesn't have any different feature than Drupal 8.9.0, then why to launch D9? Well, this is basically because D9 comes with all its dependencies updated, so it includes Symfony 4, Twig 2, CKEditor 4 and the use of JQuery UI is completely remove from the API. Another of the changes that includes the D9 launch is that all deprecated code from D8 has been removed.

Image taken from @gaborhojtsy slides

If this is not a good enough reason to migrate, we have the Drupal 8 end of life date being the same as the one for D7, that means december 2021, which is when Symfony 3 ends its life too, that's why from now and until then D8 will just have security and bug fixing support.
How do we move to D9 if we're already on D8?

Dries Buytaert mentions "The big deal about Drupal 9 is… that it should not be a big deal", that means that D9 shouldn't actually be a big problem, the migration shouldn't be as complex as with previous updates and also should be smooth and pretty straightforward, only stuff needed is to:

make sure our environment is D9 compatible, that means to confirm we have PHP 7.3, Drush 10 and MySql 5.7.8,
have D8 core completely updated,
update our contrib themes and modules to their D9 compatible versions,
delete from our custom code the use of API deprecated functions, and
finally, update Drupal core to version 9.

Before, I mentioned the Upgrade Status module as a tool to get prepared for the migration from D7 to 8/9, but on its D8 version it also allows us to see the state of our modules and know if they are D9 compatible. Another useful tool in the D8 to 9 transition is the module drupal rector, this automates the creation of D9 compatible code. Finally, another recommendation is that once we have all our code updated and D9 compatible, we should run our automated tests against D9.

Projects state

In previous updates, one of the biggest worries of the users has been when are the modules going to be available for the new version, so for the launch of D9 the community started working on this with months of anticipation, in fact this year there were a couple of massive events in which users gathered to work together porting modules, the first of these events was held on april 28 and the second was on may 22 and 23. As a result of these efforts, in the launch day there were already 95% of the top 100 projects were completely D9 compatible.

Image taken from Acquia Deprecation Status page

The future

New features are going to be released each six months, for example the Olivero theme will be released in december and work on Claro as an administration theme is being made. More information about Drupal 9 can be found here.

I highly recommend taking a look at the slides from @gaborhojtsy for more information, they are pretty clear and have lots of links to other related resources, also, they were used by the community in multiple D9 launch celebrations around the world this week.

Thanks for reading!

Open Data with Drupal: DKAN 2

Dharizza Espinach — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 02:31:11 +0000

I've talked at conferences before, but this time it was a bit different. This thursday may 28th was my first time presenting at a local Drupal Meetup. I've been wanting to do it for a couple of years now but wasn't able to do it until then, in a virtual event. I want to thank all the people working hard to keep this community alive and for giving all of us the chance to keep learning even when we're away.

In this presentation, I talked about open data in drupal and how DKAN is helping grow the open data efforts across the world. Here, I'm going to do a quick written version of my talk, so read on!

What is open data?

Basically, open data is all data that users can use and redistribute freely. In order to consider data as "open" it should be available for anyone, it should be accessible, reusable, interoperable and open to the public in general.

For data to be really open, it should be presented in structured formats that allow and make it easy for people to compare it, exchange it, traze it and reuse it effectively, all of this encourages transparency and accountability in the public institutions.

Having open data allows people to take well informed decisions based on data, it allows users to tell the story of their communities and it strengthens citizen participation.

What is DKAN and how does Drupal fit into this?

Well, Drupal help us manage that data, that's what DKAN does. Basically, DKAN is an open source, open data platform based on Drupal. It allows organizations to upload and publish their data, while at the same time, users can use it to search and download that data.

But, it is not enough just to open the data, it is really important for the users to be able to find it, understand it, compare it to other data they are looking at so it is interoperable, and, of course, to download it. All of this is possible thanks to the catalogs.

Open data catalogs are more than just the data itself, it is also who collected the data, when it was collected, what format is it in, and all of this is important because it helps the users to understand what they are looking at and makes it easy to compare it.

How does DKAN work?

DKAN was first created as a distribution for Drupal 7, it was kind of a monolithic structure where Drupal was in charge of managing everything: data, metadata, stories, visualizations, the users, the publishing workflow and the look and feel of the application.

Image by Janette Day

It has been working like that for some years now, it has an active community and there is a lot of sites out in the world that are opening their data through it.

The structure of DKAN for Drupal 7 poses some scalability challenges, also the entry barrier for starting to use it is a bit high; these are some of the reasons why DKAN was rebuilt for Drupal 8.

DKAN v2

The rebuilt of DKAN was made thinking in a componentized architecture, so it is a Drupal 8 module where the frontend and backend are decoupled, it is considered to be schema driven and API first.

Image by Janette Day

With this new architecture, Drupal is in charge of managing just users, files, metadata and the search index, while the frontend is all managed through a decoupled React frontend and we can add as many other pieces/microservices that we want.

The main components for managing a site in DKAN v2 are:

the module DKAN
the decoupled frontend, which is based on:
- data-catalog-frontend: it is the starter kit for managing the frontend, here you can define any new components you need and you can update colors and the whole look and feel of your application.
- data-catalog-components: this is a package where we have all the react components for showing all the data pieces.
DKAN Tools: it is a CLI tool created for helping manage DKAN sites.

One of the big changes between DKAN classic and v2 is that in DKAN v2 we are using just one content type called "Data" and it has one single field for "Json Metadata".

This allows us to provide a higher level of scalability, because we can support multiple schemas without the need of changing a lot of components in our Drupal site, instead, we just need to update the schema and that way we'll be able to support more or less fields, some of the most common schemas right now are:

Even though having just one field may seem hard for the users, DKAN is actually showing all the fields from the schema using a React form:

Another way for getting data into the platform is through the Harvest component, this is a tool that allows users to collect data from an endpoint and making all the data and metadata available in the DKAN portal.

So, publishers can easily update the data and metadata as they need in a user friendly way and then general users can search and find the data easily.

Another pretty cool feature from DKAN v2 is that it is API first, so you can do everything just with URLs, you can play with DKAN v2 directly in https://demo.getdkan.com/ and if you go to the "API" section, you'll be able to test the API there.

DKAN v2 is being actively developed and there is a lot more coming soon, so I encourage you to use it, play with it and keep an eye on it in general.

This talk was part of a Drupal meetup in Costa Rica, the whole event was transmitted here so take a look at it, we talked about open data but also Ronald Aguilar talked about the Drupal community and Alain Martinez talked about his journey as an entrepreneur using Drupal.

Escalating the Drupal mountain using Chirripo toolset

Dharizza Espinach — Wed, 27 May 2020 03:31:04 +0000

We are happy to announce the launch of Chirripo 1.0.0!

Starting a Drupal project can be challenging, there is a lot we need to add and configure to have a working environment in which we can successfully run our projects. Sometimes, the process takes a long time and some issues may arise. There are a lot of tools out in the market that we can use and they make our life easier, but most of them are really opinionated and it takes a lot of effort to be able to customize them accordingly to our needs, sometimes they already have a lot of overload and we may not need all of that.

It is because of this that Chirripo was born, it was created as our solution to have a highly customizable and easy to use development environment that people can add to their existing projects in a really easy way, something that people can customize just by defining some environment variables without the need of knowing it all since the beginning.

When we are working with Drupal there are a lot of tools we may need, for example: caching systems, email testing tools, search servers, environments for automated testing, profiling and debugging tools and more. The journey for configuring them all so we can start working may be as challenging as escalating a mountain. Precisely, the highest mountain in Costa Rica is called Chirripo, so we named this toolset after it to remember that even when a journey is really challenging, we can complete it successfully using the right tools.

The Chirripo toolset is a composer package that makes it possible to add a cool docker container setup to any existing PHP project. This docker container setup works like a lego set in which you can define what parts of it do you want and which are not going to be used. It is made of four main components:

chirripo/chirripo: this is where all the fun happens, it contains the docker compose setup where we can customize which containers we need and want to use. It also provides a set of commands that makes it easy to develop and control our project.
chirripo/chirripo-proxy: this is not a mandatory component, but if you want to access your local sites using domain names, you should definitely use this.
chirripo/chirripo-launcher: also, not mandatory, but it will allow you to use Chirripo commands just by typing "chirripo" in your console.
Chirripo Docker images: we created some custom images for PHP and CLI containers.

Chirripo is brought to you by Kevin Porras and me as an open source project. We encourage you to look at it, use it, share it and contribute to it if you like it. You can see some contribution guidelines here and all the information about what it is and how to use can be found in our website and our documentation page.