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Last week, many Drupalists gathered in Seattle for DrupalCon North America, for what was the largest DrupalCon in history.

As a matter of tradition, I presented my State of Drupal keynote. You can watch a recording of my keynote (starting at 32 minutes) or download a copy of my slides (153 MB).

Making Drupal more diverse and inclusive

DrupalCon Seattle was not only the largest, but also had the most diverse speakers. Nearly 50% of the DrupalCon speakers were from underrepresented groups. This number has been growing year over year, and is something to be proud of.

I actually started my keynote by talking about how we can make Drupal more diverse and inclusive. As one of the largest and most thriving Open Source communities, I believe that Drupal has an obligation to set a positive example.

I talked about how Open Source communities often incorrectly believe that everyone can contribute. Unfortunately, not everyone has equal amounts of free time to contribute. In my keynote, I encouraged individuals and organizations in the Drupal community to strongly consider giving time to underrepresented groups.

Improving diversity is not only good for Drupal and its ecosystem, it's good for people, and it's the right thing to do. Because this topic is so important, I wrote a dedicated blog post about it.

Drupal 8 innovation update

I dedicated a significant portion of my keynote to Drupal 8. In the past year alone, there have been 35% more sites and 48% more stable modules in Drupal 8. Our pace of innovation is increasing, and we've seen important progress in several key areas.

With the release of Drupal 8.7, the Layout Builder will become stable. Drupal's new Layout Builder makes it much easier to build and change one-off page layouts, templated layouts and layout workflows. Best of all, the Layout Builder will be accessible.

Drupal 8.7 also brings a lot of improvements to the Media Library.

We also continue to innovate on headless or decoupled Drupal. The JSON:API module will ship with Drupal 8.7. I believe this not only advances Drupal's leadership in API-first, but sets Drupal up for long-term success.

These are just a few of the new capabilities that will ship with Drupal 8.7. For the complete list of new features, keep an eye out for the release announcement in a few weeks.

Drupal 7 end of life

If you're still on Drupal 7, there is no need to panic. The Drupal community will support Drupal 7 until November 2021 — two years and 10 months from today.

After the community support ends, there will be extended commercial support for a minimum of three additional years. This means that Drupal 7 will be supported for at least five more years, or until 2024.

Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8

Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 can be a lot of work, especially for large sites, but the benefits outweigh the challenges.

For my keynote, I featured stories from two end-users who upgraded large sites from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 — the State of Georgia and Pegasystems.

The keynote also featured quietone, one of the maintainers of the Migrate API. She talked about the readiness of Drupal 8 migration tools.

Preparing for Drupal 9

As announced a few months ago, Drupal 9 is targeted for June 2020. June 2020 is only 14 months away, so I dedicated a significant amount of my keynote to Drupal 9.

Making Drupal updates easier is a huge, ongoing priority for the community. Thanks to those efforts, the upgrade path to Drupal 9 will be radically easier than the upgrade path to Drupal 8.

In my keynote, I talked about how site owners, Drupal developers and Drupal module maintainers can start preparing for Drupal 9 today. I showed several tools that make Drupal 9 preparation easier. Check out my post on how to prepare for Drupal 9 for details.

Thank you

I'm grateful to be a part of a community that takes such pride in its work. At each DrupalCon, we get to see the tireless efforts of many volunteers that add up to one amazing event. It makes me proud to showcase the work of so many people and organizations in my presentations.

Thank you to all who have made this year's DrupalCon North America memorable. I look forward to celebrating our work and friendships at future events!

This is the transcription of a talk I did at an Indie Dev Workshop at the GamesBCN in Barcelona. It covers branding, communication and content strategy, how to find your community and how to build a Hub and work with your community to develop better games

Inspired by the recent conversations on game difficulty surrounding the release of Sekiro, designer Keith Burgun gives his take. Beyond exclusionary gatekeeping, is there any good reason not to have easier/more accessible gameplay modes in such games?

Every game has ways to monitor and add gameplay at the right times. Interested in how sandbox game events differ from traditional linear ones? PART 1 looks at the Event Gameloop.

When fun is not enough.

When fun is not enough.

When designing a game it can be easy to get distracted and lose sight of what games are all about - the players. This article looks at the relationship between games and people and why one cannot exist without the other.

Drupal and TYPO3

Depending on your needs, you can choose a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress. However, when it comes to businesses and enterprises, a CMS like wordpress won’t cut it. This leaves us with two popular open source options, TYPO3 and Drupal. Both are priding themselves to be the go to CMS for enterprises. In this article, I’m going to make a comparison of both TYPO3 and Drupal.

First things first. TYPO3 is an open source content management system that is written in PHP. Its author, Kasper Skårhøj, has released it in 1998. Drupal is also written in PHP, its author Dries Buytaert, first released it in the year 2000, making TYPO3 the older CMS between them both.

Drupal and Typo3 are the only CMS in the top 10 most used platforms that are aimed at Enterprise organizations.

Market Share

By the end of 2018 TYPO3 had a market share of 1.5%, making it the 8th most used CMS at this time. This means that out of all websites in the world, 1.5% of them were built using TYPO3. Drupal on the other hand, had a market share of 4.6%, making it the third most popular CMS to date. Despite the fact that Drupal is slightly younger, it still managed to capture a larger audience compared to TYPO3. But why is that?

Open Source CMS

Drupal and TYPO3 are both open source. What this means is that the code is available to the general public. This results in developers being able to add different pieces of code by themselves, constantly improving the software. Both have dedicated communities which aim to further improve the performance of the CMS’s.

Performance

When it comes to the performance, both of these platforms have a wide range of modules and extensions. The modules and extensions are basically improvements on the core of both. Thus resulting in a high performance and flexibility on both sides. When it comes to extensions, TYPO3 has 60.000+ of them available, making sure that there is something specific to fulfill any users needs. Drupal also boasts a wide variety of modules, which gives the CMS the ability to cater to the needs of every user. Unlike Drupal, TYPO3 also runs an internal language called TypoScript. Users can leverage it to build additional elements including dynamic content.

Drupal allows the creation and management of different types of content such as text, blogs, videos, podcasts, images etc.

TYPO3 is also able to handle forms, tables, images and different pieces of multimedia. It also allows a lot of control over the layout of the page.

Language support

TYPO3 is famed for its massive availability in over 50 languages. However, Drupal is available in over 100 languages. This makes it even more impressive when it comes to the high degree at which Drupal is able to help with the needs of its users.

Scalability

Scalability is defined by the desirable property of a website to be able to handle a growing amount of work in a timely and elegant manner. Both were engineered to be able to handle large amounts of data and traffic. This makes them both desirable for large enterprise websites.

Security

Security is one of the areas that both systems are putting a lot of effort in. Given the fact that they have to protect the costly data of large universities, enterprises and businesses, both are taking this matter seriously. Drupal and TYPO3 both have security teams that are constantly searching for vulnerabilities to report to the communities, while also working on fixing the issues. These are the reasons why both Drupal and TYPO3 are both trusted by enterprises and business when it comes to security issues.

Cost Of Implementation

Compared to CMS that are not Enterprise-grade, Drupal and TYPO3 are both more difficult to be installed and be properly customized. Both systems are offering plenty of options for developers to be able to specifically customize the website to meet the user specific needs. This comes at a price however. The price to be paid for such high customizability comes in the form of a steep learning curve. This makes it hard for beginners to fully maximize the potential of both CMS’s. On top of that, learning TYPO3 seems to be more complicated than to learn Drupal. Because of the simple fact that TYPO3 uses also TypoScript. It is the internal language of the system which has to be learned in order to master the CMS.  

One advantage with Drupal is that you can install our visual page editor module and provide a state-of-the-art design and editing experience to your client or your communication department

Conclusion

In conclusion, both CMS’s are legit options when it comes to developing huge scale websites for businesses or enterprises. However, choosing one of them rests entirely on each user’s specific needs. Also, Drupal still has a larger market than TYPO3. Even though it is the younger of them both. This means that Drupal is able to better cater to the specific needs of its users, compared to its competition.

The Obvious: Distraction

I know a few (probably more than a few) GMs who don’t want or allow technology at their table. That’s their call, and I urge players to respect it. This is because devices, especially those with online capability, can lead to distractions in the form of text messages, phone calls, social media, web browsing, and watching funny cat videos. I get it. I really do.

However, there is a place and time for technology at the table. If you, as a player, have a GM that doesn’t want technology at the table, build a case for streamlined play, quick rule lookups, online tools/utilities, electronic character builders/sheets, and easy-to-reach references. If they still don’t relent, respect their desires and move on.

Having said all that, let’s assume technology is allowed at the table and explore its extensive capabilities and uses.

Technology and Limitations

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to use the word “technology” quite a bit. What I’m referring to here are the portable electronic devices most of us carry everyday. This will include laptops, tablets, smart phones, and the like. I’m mainly going to focus on using a tablet, though.

This is because I find smart phones too clunky for smooth use at the table when information is needed on-demand. Character sheets are too small (or require massive pinch-zooming and swipe-scrolling) to effectively make use of. PDFs can be read on smart phones, but when you’re reading half a paragraph per screen, it’s not that speedy. Also, taking notes on a smart phone just isn’t efficient. I have a hard time composing a tweet in any reasonable amount of time on my phone, let alone trying to capture the rapid-fire events of what’s going on at the table. Of course, you may be a world-class typist on your phone, so give it a whirl.

On the flip-side, laptops tend to be too large and consume tons of table space, especially if someone lugs out their massive 17-inch gaming laptop. They can’t easily be set aside and then pulled back out for quick reference. They’re great for note taking because of the keyboard, but doing dynamic notes (like maps) on a laptop is still problematic unless you have a touchscreen variant.

In the middle-ground between smart phones and laptops exist, of course, tablets. They’re great. They lie flat on the table, don’t take up tons of room on the table, and can be set aside or propped against a chair leg when space is needed. Tablets also have the same advantage of laptops with a larger screen allowing for easy reading of rulebook PDFs, interacting with electronic character sheets, and taking notes in a document, especially if you have a stylus or other writing device that works with your table.

Specifications

For the remainder of this article, I’m going to dive into details about how I use a tablet and stylus at the table. I currently have a an 11-inch iPad Pro and use an Apple Pencil. The screenshots I’m going to throw your way come from an app called GoodNotes 5. I also use an app called GoodReader for viewing, bookmarking, and annotating PDFs. With these bits of technology and just these two apps, I can do everything I need at the table as a player or GM. I still keep a small notepad and pencil nearby for passing notes when appropriate. Oh. Dice. Yeah. Lots and lots of dice are part of my kit, but that’s not the point of this article.

For you Android/Microsoft users, I apologize for focusing on Apple products here. I don’t like recommending or pointing people to apps or hardware that I have no experience with in case I lead them astray. I’m certain there are options out there for Android and Microsoft tablets, styluses, and applications that can perform in a similar fashion to what I do here. A search along the lines of “GoodReader for Android table” or “GoodNotes for Microsoft Surface” might lead you in the right direction.

GoodReader

When I can, I buy the PDFs of rulebooks. This is because my days of carrying 150+ pounds (no exaggeration) of books with me to the FLGS are over. I’m tired of doing that, and my back isn’t getting any younger. Where I can’t find legal PDFs, I suck it up and lug the books, but this article is about electronics, not calisthenics with a bag o’ books.

GoodReader is my application of choice for reading and marking up PDFs. It’s fast to load even the largest books. In my current campaign, I’m a player in a game of Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea. The PDF is 68 megabytes in size. Not small, but I’ve seen bigger. If I don’t have the PDF open, it takes about 5 seconds to load. Once loaded, page transitions and scrolling through the document is rapid-fire fast. It can also have multiple PDFs open at once in tabbed layout like in your web browser. That’s super handy for leaping between multiple source materials.

There is also a bookmark feature where you can save links to pages that are frequently referenced, and if the bookmark is properly outlined with an electronic table of contents, then the outline feature comes in very handy.

Here are some screenshots with captions about what the various functions do:

GoodReader Toolbar

GoodReader Outline View

GoodReader Bookmark View

GoodReader Search Feature

GoodNotes 5

For my handwritten notes, I use GoodNotes 5. Version 4 was great, but the upgrade to version 5 is a whole new world of note taking! I use it at the table, during classes, at conferences, and anywhere else I need to scribble something down for later review or sharing.

GoodNotes comes with a wide variety of “backgrounds.” Of course, I go with the gridded background for all RPG notes even when I’m not mapping. It helps me align the notes and indentations and such as I go. For mapping, the obvious choice is the gridded background. Another fantastic feature is that you can use a PDF as a “background.” Just import the PDF and start writing on it. The “eraser” feature won’t delete the PDF text/lines because it’s the background. This allows me to import the PDF version of a game’s character sheet and just use my iPad for the character sheet as well. This importing of a PDF as a background also works great for your GM maps. This allows you to take notes on the maps and highlight areas without worrying about accidentally erasing or messing up the original map.

GoodNotes, like GoodReader, allows multiple files to be open at once in a tabbed interface. In addition to being able to track notes, maps, and character stats on the fly, I can export the files to PDF format and save it on a cloud drive for sharing with the rest of the group between sessions. This is a fantastic feature since I track the campaign notes, treasure gained, maps, and my character in GoodNotes.

The main features I like about GoodNotes is the different line widths and colors available for the pen. I can also highlight in different colors. The eraser tool is handy when my handwriting gets super messy or I misplace a door on the map and need to redraw it. There is also a lasso tool that allows you to select an area and then drag ‘n’ drop it or cut/copy/paste it to another page or elsewhere on the same page. If you’re into type-written notes, but still want the ability to draw lines between text boxes to link things together, you can do that too.

Here are some screenshots of files I’ve created in GoodNotes, so you can get a flavor of what they look like. I apologize for the horrid handwriting, but I want you to see the different pen colors, highlighter colors, and so on.

GoodNotes Toolbar

GoodNotes Notes

GoodNotes Map

GoodNotes Character Sheet

What Do You Use?

What technology do you use at your in-person games? Let us, and your fellow readers, know what you have in your hands!

How to add classes / attributes to Drupal 8 local tasks

Drupal 8 allows you to define custom tabs (a.k.a. local tasks) in your custom module.
For theming purposes, it might be necessary to add a class, ID, or other HTML attribute to the tab link.

Here is how this can be achieved when defining the local task in your [modulename].links.task.yml:

entity.node.custom: route_name: entity.node.custom base_route: entity.node.canonical title: 'Custom local task / tab' options: attributes: class: - 'my-custom-class'

If you want to add an attribute to a local task that is not defined in your custom module, you could use a preprocess function in your theme or module:

/** * Implements hook_preprocess_menu_local_task(). */ function MYTHEME_preprocess_menu_local_task(&$variables) { /** @var \Drupal\Core\Url $url */ $url = $variables['link']['#url']; if ($url instanceof \Drupal\Core\Url && $url->getRouteName() == 'entity.node.custom') { $variables['link']['#options']['attributes']['class'][] = 'my-custom-class'; } }

Replace the route name in the example above, with the route name of the tab you wish to change the HTML attributes for.

Sven Decabooter Mon, 04/15/2019 - 11:17

Integrates Drupal with Font Awesome
the web's most popular icon set and toolkit.

We need a hot tub on tax day.

Group extension module for commerce

A test Security issue

Please do not download in a production env

This week's roundup includes intriguing debuts from Falcon Age and Vacation Simulator, a historical tour of The Division's New York, the trickiness of marketing your weed tycoon game & more. ...

Features

• Adds a formatter for link fields that displays the current entity with another view mode inside the link.
• It can be configured to display the rendered fields as inline (CSS: display: inline)

Use case

This week's roundup includes intriguing debuts from Falcon Age and Vacation Simulator, a historical tour of The Division's New York, John Romero's finishing of the DOOM saga, the trickiness of marketing your weed tycoon game, & heaps more besides.

It may not ever really be a great idea, but sometimes you just need to host some static HTML content. For instance, you may have inherited a single-page app that works perfectly and all you want to do is put a branding wrapper around it. Or you might have something like an Adobe Captivate HTML5 export that you want to embed in your site.

This module only supports theme bootstrap 3 administration.
Before installing Bootstrap Shortcode layout editor, it must install shortcode fontawesome module
- Add a new format for content text admin/config/content/format
- enable the Shortcodes Bootstrap Editor option
- Activate some desired functions in the optional filter