Drupal

Drupal, with the Events, Conditions, and Actions (ECA) module can build up sophisticated applications without a single line of custom code. You can build full applications using a handful of Drupal modules.

Event Calendars seem to be very common on the Drupal sites we build. One of the best ways of improving engagement on a site is to add content about the event after it happens. People who attended an event might come back for a recap, or to see pictures or notes from other participants, while people who did not attend can get a sense of what a future event might be like based on your past events.

The saying goes, there are two hard problems in computer science: caching, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. While Drupal certainly has not solved the naming things, it has made a valiant attempt at a decent caching strategy. And for the most part it works great, allowing millions of lines of code to load up quickly the vast majority of the time.

This is more a tip about our favorite automation tool, the Events, Conditions, and Actions (ECA) module, and how it can get you out of a bind when Drupal caching goes too far.

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.

Another automation we did for Programming Librarian, a site for librarians to plan educational programs, involved events. They wanted to always feature 3 events on the home page, and the most important events were in the future. If their schedule is full, they wanted 2 future and 1 past event visible -- but they don't always have upcoming events, so there might be 0, 1 or 2 future events, and 3, 2, or 1 past events.

One of our clients is Programming Librarian, a site for librarians to plan educational programs. Programs, like many events, are often seasonal, oriented around holidays and seasonal activities.

How much do you spend on your website? I'm not asking how much it cost you to create/build -- I mean day to day, what does it cost to own and maintain your site?

And what happens if you stop paying that?

If you have a current Drupal site (built in Drupal 8 or later) you no longer need to entirely rebuild your site -- ever again. That doesn't mean it couldn't use a freshening up now and then.

Websites can do more than "just" present information. Do you have some sort of data management task that involves a lot of manual work?

Websites can do far more than just present information. Many business applications have moved onto the web, and with a CMS like Drupal in the back end, your website itself can be an integral part of your business.

It's great to boil down information into simple bite-sized chunks. But for so many kinds of information, it's just not that simple. Ecological systems. Policy decisions. Your body. Your website.

In April I gave a talk about Progressive Enhancements at the national DrupalCon 2022 conference in Portland. Here's a recording of the full session, which was targeted towards Drupal developers.