In the past couple days I've gotten two different questions regarding building functionality out in WordPress. This seems a bit...weird with timing, given that Drupal CMS just launched three days ago!

Happy New Year!

This month we're doing a deep dive into privacy. Privacy for website owners, privacy for you, privacy for the world. To cap it all off, we have a special Privacy Tune-up offer to make sure your privacy policy is accurate and covering your assets...

And if that's not enough, it's a big week for Drupal -- see below for why!

We've reached the last day of the calendar, and it's time for Santa's visit! Santa has been visiting some famous places all month. With the Geocoder module, Leaflet, a Geofield, and an Address field, you can automatically put each address Santa has visited on the map!

You do need to configure a geocoder source. We're using OpenStreetmap, from the geocoder-php/nominatim-provider.

When you allow the general Internet to post comments, or any other kind of content, you're inviting spam and abuse. We see far more spam comments than anything relevant or useful -- but when there is something relevant or useful, we want to hear it!

With the AI module and the Events, Conditions, and Actions module, you can set up automatic comment moderation.

Like any use of AI, setting an appropriate prompt is crucial to getting a decent result. Here's the one we're trying out:

We've had several clients working with memberships, who have a single name field with the full name of a person. And then they ask us to build a directory that is sorted by last name. This is a bit hard to do if there's a first name in front of it!

Names don't follow rules very well. Some have apostrophes in them, some have multiple words -- you can't just take the last word of a name and assume that's the last name, because often it just isn't.

The ECA Helper module provides an action to make an arbitrary HTTP post to any URL. That's all that's necessary to post to Mastodon from Drupal, if you have a Mastodon account. I've been using this functionality to automatically post these advent calendar posts for the past week.

Drupal has long had a variety of access control modules, to make it so you can easily control who can view or edit particular pages. There are actually several different layers of APIs to control this in Drupal core -- the modules generally provide a user interface to let you control access by content type, by tagging content with particular terms, through their position on a menu, or through a group. The Field Permissions module lets you control access to particular fields on an entity.

One of our clients has a custom surveying application built with a Drupal back end, and a VueJS/headless front end. They use this application to record observations in various buildings and sites that don't meet accessibility requirements.

They give their clients access to the front end. This application organizes observations into particular sites, in particular projects, grouped by the requirement. Each observation can have photos attached, along with notes and recommended solutions.

Hot off the presses! A brand new module, AI Image Alt Text, uses your configured AI engine to write Alt text for your images, based on AI vision models. When you turn this on, you get a "Generate with AI" button next to image fields, where you can easily get AI to analyze your image and come up with alternative text.

With some quick tests, I'm finding it's describing the image better than I typically do.

One of our clients is an art gallery that has a daily light show with limited seating. Reservations are free, but the show is popular enough that you need to reserve a month out.

Each day, they print a list of reservations for the staff to use when admitting guests.

Today, another automation using the Drupal #AI module -- automatically tag your articles.

With the AI module, its AI Automators submodule, and a provider configured, you can add an automation to any field. With a Tag field on your content, you can edit the field definition and "Enable AI Automator". Give it a reasonable prompt, and it will tag your content for you.

Like most of the AI integrations, the great thing is you can easily edit the tags later if you want to highlight something specific, or if it comes up with something inappropriate.