Welcome back to the ninth day of Drupal Advent Calendar, and behind today’s door we find the Media track of Drupal Starshot. Media Management is an area where Drupal has traditionally not been strong compared to other content management systems, yet it has a lot of very powerful features that Drupal CMS will hopefully refine to make it one of the best media management platforms on the web.
Advent Calendar
Today we are looking at another aspect of Drupal Starshot that may not generate a lot of excitement, but will make it a lot easier for the average marketer or Drupal site builder to make their site perform well and be easy to find.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has often been treated as something of a dark art. Any number of self-proclaimed masters of this art will promise to take your site to new levels, their ability to deliver varies greatly.
Today we are looking at one of the central elements of Starshot, but also one of the easiest to overlook.
Drupal CMS will come preinstalled with a set of base modules and themes, as the basis on which other recipes will be built. The base theme track is responsible for this. Not only does this provide essential functionality to make a new Drupal site much more usable, it also provides an important baseline for the other tracks to build upon.
With the launch of Drupal CMS will be a new trial experience, making it easier than ever for non-technical evaluators to try Drupal, without needing to set up a local environment or any special tools.
I spoke with Matt Glaman, who was leading the Live Preview track in the initial development stage.
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 There even used to be a dedicated blog module in Drupal, but it was largely superseded by Drupal’s core functionality.
Today Tim Lehnen from the Drupal Association joins us to talk about some of the changes taking place on the Drupal.org website as part of Starshot.
Today we’re looking at a fairly simple addition to Starshot, but one that can add a lot of power to a site.
While the default Drupal install provides a contact form, it does it through the rather basic “contact” module, that is built into Drupal Core. This has a lot of limitations, and many people prefer to use the more powerful “Webform” module.
It’s day 2 of the Drupal Advent calendar and today we’re taking a look at the first step to any new website built with Drupal CMS, the site installer.
The previous Drupal installer wasn’t terrible, but it required a lot of steps, and typically needed a lot more work, finding and installing modules, when the initial install was complete.
The new installer has tried to simplify the process as much as possible, and offers a friendlier interface.
The primary question it asks is what are the main goals of your site:
Today we are looking at the Analytics Track of Drupal Starshot.
The current Analytics recipe uses the Google Tag module to set up tags to be tracked by Google’s Tag Manager application, to provide comprehensive site analytics for marketers. It can also integrate with Google Analytics.
It also ties in with the privacy track, covered on day 10, using Klaro to verify user consent before tracking the user.
Today we open our sixteenth door, and rather than another track of the Starshot initiative, we have some succulent little treats. Three things that are essential to make Drupal CMS a reality. While the Starshot initiative only officially started last April, it has made incredible progress to get to a release candidate this month, and is on track for a first formal release in January 2025. But today we are talking about some initiatives to Drupal that have been underway for several years.