Drupal Advent Calendar day 5 - Blog Recipe

By james, 5 December, 2024
Door 5 containing a parchment and quill

In the early days of Drupal, it was a popular blogging platform. Nowadays, while it is rare to use Drupal for a pure blog site, it is still quite common for Drupal sites to include a blog. There even used to be a dedicated blog module in Drupal, but it was largely superseded by Drupal’s core functionality.

The ‘Blog’ recipe for Drupal Starshot is designed to facilitate the creation and management of blog posts on a website. It will create the ‘Blog’ content type, equipped with the necessary fields and features that enable content creators to produce rich, informative, and engaging blog entries.

The proposed content type is based on the KISS-principle, acronymous for “Keep it simple, stupid!” – allowing the user to quickly and intuitively set up a blog for a website. The functionalities are kept to a minimum but still meet today’s standards. Of course, the Starshot UX will be applied.

Example blog post from the current Starshot preview
An example blog post from the current Starshot preview

In this phase of the project, we want to ensure an intuitive and straightforward experience for users. By focusing on simplicity, we provide a blog content type that includes only the default and essential features, making it easy to deploy and use right out of the box. This “less is more” approach allows users to quickly roll out the blog content type with minimal setup, ensuring a smooth and efficient start. Additionally, users always have the option to enhance and customise their blog with more complex features as needed, providing flexibility without overwhelming them at the outset.

In a later phase, additional features such as commenting, will be added as extension recipes. This will probably use Drupal’s built-in comment module initially, though it might be interesting to investigate supporting external options like Discourse. The mechanism for extension recipes is still being worked out, but may involve using documentation and the Tour module to guide users to suitable module, as well as smart filtering in project browser.

It is also planned to add a recipe for News in this track, which is similar to blog content, but has enough differences to warrant its own recipe.

Photo of LaurensPhoto of SvenThanks to Laurens Van Damme (l_vandamme) and Sven (thewaysofwyrd) for providing most of the text for this entry, as well as some helpful insights. Laurens is lead of the Blog Starshot Track, while Sven worked on the analysis.

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