Today is the twenty-first day of our Advent calendar, and it also happens to be the winter solstice – a moment defined by time, cycles, and transitions. It seemed a good time to revisit a talk by Martin Anderson-Clutz of Acquia, which he gave at DrupalCon Nara.
Martin discussed the Drupal recipe system, starting with what recipes are, and why they are needed. Drupal recipes were introduced to solve long-standing problems with Drupal distributions and install profiles, which were difficult to maintain, not composable, and often discovered too late in a project. Recipes are lightweight, code-free packages that install and configure modules to provide specific functionality. They are applied rather than installed, can be mixed and matched, and don’t lock site builders into a single approach. This makes them especially helpful for newcomers, who can benefit from best-practice solutions without having to navigate Drupal’s vast module ecosystem on their own.
Drupal CMS builds on this idea by offering a more compelling out-of-the-box experience. It is essentially an opinionated collection of recipes that can be selected during installation or added later. The talk showed how Drupal CMS and standalone Drupal sites can quickly gain robust event-management features, such as date and time widgets, geolocation, recurring events, calendars, and registrations, simply by applying recipes.
Martin then brought the topic back to time, discussing recipes specifically relating to time and events. Starting with the Events recipe and moving on to others. He showed how Drupal CMS and standalone Drupal sites can quickly gain robust event-management features, such as date and time widgets, geolocation, recurring events, calendars, and registrations, simply by applying recipes.
Overall, recipes represent a shift toward reusable, community-driven building blocks in Drupal, enabling faster development, better consistency, and more flexible ways to manage complex features like dates, times, and events.
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