Planet Drupal

Today we are talking about Test Driven Development, ebooks, and Drupal with guest Oliver Davies. We'll also cover Juicer Social Feed as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/557

Topics

• What Is Test Driven Drupal
• Why Automated Tests Matter
• How TDD Works
• AI and Test Quality
• Balancing Test Coverage
• When to Write Tests
• Why Write the Book
• Why Write an Ebook
• From Email Course to Ebook
• Ebook vs Print Tradeoffs
• Who the Book Helps
• What You Will Learn
• Keeping Content Updated
• Publishing Tools Workflow
• Lessons and Drupal Changes
• Podcast and Future Books
• Mob Programming Explained
• Free Ebook and Wrap Up

Resources

• Juicer io
• Drupal 11: The Upgrade Experience I've Been Waiting For
• codethatships
• Test-Driven Drupal
• Sculpin

Guests

Oliver Davies - oliverdavies.uk opdavies

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Europe’s digital sovereignty debate did not begin with AI or cloud procurement. It developed through surveillance disclosures, privacy law, cybersecurity regulation, platform rules, data governance, and sovereign cloud policy. For open-source platforms such as Drupal, the result is a more demanding environment shaped by hosting choices, supplier dependence, interoperability, compliance, and long-term control.

Europe’s open source conversation has shifted from principle to infrastructure. The EU Open Source Strategy situates open technologies within a wider digital sovereignty agenda, with a practical question at its centre: whether Europe can reduce its dependence on closed systems while building software that public institutions can reuse, maintain, and trust.

The useful part is also the uncomfortable part. The European Commission identifies familiar weaknesses in the open source ecosystem, including limited long-term funding, difficulty scaling projects, fragmented visibility, limited access to public procurement, and the risk that value created by European contributors is captured elsewhere. That diagnosis moves the discussion beyond code availability and into maintenance, governance, procurement, and business models.

The editorial test is practical rather than rhetorical. Open source becomes strategic only when institutions fund maintainers, accept open-source bids fairly, publish reusable public assets, map dependency risk, and contribute back to the projects they rely on. Without that, sovereignty remains a policy label attached to the same dependency patterns.

Euro-Office shows why the test is hard. The project has reached a first stable release as a web-based office suite, with integrations planned through platforms such as Nextcloud, IONOS Managed Nextcloud, and XWiki. Its practical weight will depend on partner rollouts, production use, format compatibility, governance, and the unresolved licensing dispute with ONLYOFFICE.

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Both WordPress and Drupal, with Canvas, let you build pages from blocks and components instead of using just a text area. But the way they go about it is very different.

The two editors look similar, but they work in opposite ways. The easiest way to see the difference is to build the same thing in both. In the video, we build a hero component twice: first as a custom Gutenberg block, then as a Drupal Single Directory Component (SDC).

First we look at the main difference between the two editors. Then we build the hero as a Gutenberg block. Then we build the same hero as a Drupal SDC.

The DropTimes will hold its June 2026 Open Town Hall on 18 June at 20:30 IST. The online session continues TDT’s monthly planning format for editorial updates, contributor coordination, and community feedback.

Against Inevitability John Locke Fri, 06/12/2026 - 08:00 What Freelock is for, and what we're against Sustainable/Open Business

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Drupal and EmDash point to different assumptions about how publishing systems should be built and operated. The comparison places Drupal’s established governance, workflow, and extension model against EmDash’s beta-preview, Astro-based approach to serverless publishing and programmatic content operations. The issue is less about which CMS has more features and more about which operating model fits an organisation’s infrastructure, editorial control, development workflow, and tolerance for newer technology.

What is an error? Goal: diagnose Verifying Axioms Divide and Conquer (Bisecting the problem) Reading and Understanding the Error Effective Debugging Searching the internet AI Chatbot Rubber Duck Technique Turn it off and on again Asking for help What if it doesn’t get solved? Plan B Conclusion If you work as a programmer, you’ll have found yourself many times in a situation where something isn’t working and you don’t know what’s going on. But the real problem comes when you don’t know how...

Explore why digital sovereignty matters for critical infrastructure and how organisations can reduce dependency through open-source technologies and resilient digital strategies.

Test, Replay, Debug: Closing the Feedback Loop Jürgen Haas Wed 10 Jun 2026 - 16:20

Building workflows blind - configure, deploy, hope, check logs - was the reality for years. ECA's integrated test, replay, and debug features close the feedback loop. Put the modeler in listening mode, trigger events, see execution results immediately with token values at each step. A small widget appears on any page where ECA processed events - click it, modeler opens in overlay with recorded execution data, replay what just happened right there in context. Recording is expensive (despite 70% CPU and 85% storage optimizations), so use temporarily when debugging. Production event replay lets you step through failures with actual data from when they occurred. Conditional recording triggers and JSON export across environments are coming. No other workflow tool in any CMS - not WordPress, Joomla, n8n, or Zapier - offers step-through replay with production recordings at this level. This is what existing ECA users requested most: visibility into workflow execution. Infrastructure-level work that required sustained investment but compounds over years. Workflow Modeler exclusive feature, not available in BPMN.iO.

CKEditor5 Markdown is a new Drupal contrib module that adds CKEditor5 toolbar plugin into the toolbar for converting Markdown to HTML on demand.

What the CKEditor5 Markdown module does

The module adds a new toolbar button to Drupal's CKEditor5 editor. Click it, paste or type Markdown into the dialog that appears, confirm, and the content is inserted as formatted HTML at the cursor position.

The conversion uses the marked library (version 9, MIT licence) with GitHub-Flavored Markdown support enabled. The library is bundled into the compiled asset via Webpack, so no additional frontend build step is required.

The module requires Drupal 10.3 or higher, or Drupal 11, with the core ckeditor5 module enabled. 

CKEditor5 markdown example

Why explicit conversion instead of the official Paste Markdown feature

CKEditor5 includes a built-in Paste Markdown feature that detects…

Creating tests for Drupal module Update Hooks lostcarpark_admin Wed, 06/10/2026 - 10:53 Image Body What is an Update Hook

When working on contributed Drupal modules, you sometimes need to make changes to schema or data structures.

This will generally need an update hook to make necessary changes to existing stored data on sites that installed the module before the change.

The update hook itself is generally simple enough. Here’s an example from the Smart Trim module, to update “read more” link settings on each display type:

/**
 * Update Smart Trim more settings.
 *
 * Iterate through entity view displays and for any with Smart Trim as formatter
 * type, move top level more link settings into...

Govern enterprise content at scale with AI-powered workflows that protect your brand, ensure compliance, and streamline content operations.

Implications

This post has broader implications for software development beyond the Drupal community, but I feel fortunate to be part of an open source community that can lead the way in addressing the widening productivity gap among its contributors and maintainers.

The title of this post is meant to draw you in by highlighting a problem, but my goal is to get us thinking about a solution. I realize the term "not-so-great" may sound negative when describing a developer, but this comparison bluntly highlights a major problem developers and communities face when working with AI. The truth is, I have never met a "not-so-great" developer in the Drupal community because people are engaged and curious about the software we build.

Realization

My realization is that "AI is making great programmers even greater and not-so-great programmers, well, not-so-great."

For me, a "not-so-great" programmer is someone who writes code like a factory worker. The difference between a "not-so-great" programmer and a beginner is curiosity. Curiosity is the secret to being successful with AI. A curious beginner can easily accelerate their learning experience with AI. Anyone with curiosity can move from beginner to novice in a matter of hours with AI.

Everyone agrees that AI can be a force/capability multiplier, ranging from 2x to more than 10x. The reality is that some people are simply unable to leverage AI and have a 1x multiplier. Very experienced developers report they can now accomplish tasks that would have taken months in days or even hours. Observations suggest that the more capable someone is, the more effectively they can leverage AI.

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EvolveDigital Montréal26 will bring digital practitioners to Montreal on 12 June 2026 for a bilingual summit on practical delivery across AI, accessibility, Drupal, WordPress, design, and strategy. Ahead of the event, John Doyle of Digital Polygon and Sébastien Lemieux of Evolving Web spoke with The DropTimes about governed AI workflows, platform change, CMS adoption, and the delivery choices that shape production systems.

AI coding agents do not necessarily evaluate software the way people do. They often reward legibility before capability: the path that is easiest to complete and verify can beat the path with the better long-term architecture.

Yesterday, I wrote about this pattern in "Friction, abstraction and verification". Today I wanted to see what it means for Drupal.

Drupal's strengths line up unusually well with what AI agents need from a CMS: structured content models, explicit relationships, granular permissions, workflows, configuration management, and clear APIs that expose how the system works. In "Why Drupal is built for the AI era", I explained why that matters.

In short, agents work best when they can inspect the system, reason about its state, and make changes with clear feedback. Drupal gives them a strong foundation for that, but that is only part of the story.

AI agents also have to get Drupal running, find the right documentation, choose modules, change configuration, write Drupal-specific code, recover from errors, and verify the result. Every unclear step costs time, tokens, and confidence.

To see how an AI agent looks at Drupal, I ran a small field test with Claude Code using Opus 4.7, a 1M context window, and thinking set to "high". I gave it a website scenario, asked it to rank the best technology choices for that scenario, and then asked it to explain where Drupal fit.

This is not an academic benchmark, and a single answer from a single agent should not be over-interpreted. But it is still a very useful signal.

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Drupal 12 is coming later this year. As with previous major releases, the contributed ecosystem will require updating for breaking changes . Thousands of modules and themes will need their deprecated API uses updated before they are ready. Doing that by hand, across all of contrib, would cost the community an enormous number of hours.

That is the job the Project Update Bot exists to do. We have refreshed it, and it now targets Drupal 12 readiness: it scans contributed projects automatically and opens issues with patches that fix deprecated API uses for you.

If you are a maintainer, you should already know the bot. For the Drupal 12 cycle, our rector rules grew to cover more than 80% of the deprecated API uses introduced in that release. Using our proven toolset: Gábor Hojtsy's Upgrade Status for the analysis, and Drupal Rector for the fixes, now maintained primarily by SWIS and the glue that puts it all together Project Analysis.

Two things improved this round. Rule coverage is more complete, some of that came from AI-generated rector rules based on Dries Buytaert's drupal-digests. And submodule dependencies are now resolved during analysis. In the earlier cycles we scanned submodules but not their dependencies, which caused failed scans and false errors. That is fixed now, so results are cleaner and considerably more accurate.

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This blog post summarizes the key insights from the CX Decoded podcast episode featuring Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and Executive Chairman of Acquia.

In the fast-moving world of digital experience, few names carry as much weight as Dries Buytaert. As the creator of Drupal, he has spent over two decades navigating the evolution of the web. But in his latest appearance on the CX Decoded podcast, Dries issued a candid warning: AI isn’t just another tool - it is a fundamental disruption that is stress-testing every business model in its path.

During the conversation, Dries broke down the "Stable Triangle" of open source and explored why the rise of AI is creating a period of both incredible excitement and existential fear.

The Disruption of the "Stable Triangle"

For 20 years, the Drupal ecosystem has relied on three balanced sides:

1. The Product: The Drupal software itself.
2. The Ecosystem: The digital agencies that build on the platform.
3. The Community: The contributors who maintain the code.

AI is currently hitting all three sides simultaneously. It is changing user expectations for what a CMS should do, challenging the hourly-billing model of agencies, and flooding the contributor community with "AI slop."

The Rise of "AI Slop" and the "Can-tribution"

One of the most provocative points Dries made was the distinction between a contribution and a can-tribution.

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Is your Drupal site slow? Render caching is often the performance fix nobody checks. Learn how it works, how to set it up in custom blocks, and how to debug it.

Today we are talking about Drush, Core Contributions, and Drupal's Past with guest Moshe Weitzman. We'll also cover Cache Metrics as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/556

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