Author: Michael G

In 2024, technology has reached new heights, impacting our lives like never before. With AI becoming more common and exciting updates on the horizon, technology is shaping our world significantly.

Technology continues to redefine the way we live, work, and connect. New features, updates, and innovations emerge daily, shaping our world remarkably. At the heart of this transformation lies Drupal, the dynamic content management system that empowers individuals and businesses to navigate the digital realm easily and confidently. Drupal opens limitless possibilities in website development, offering a platform where creativity knows no bounds.

Drupal streamlines the process of creating and managing websites, putting the power of customization and control at our fingertips. With its intuitive interface and robust features, Drupal allows users to craft online experiences that are not just functional but truly exceptional.

Technology is advancing rapidly, and Drupal is here to make it accessible and beneficial for everyone. With its user-friendly features and adaptability, Drupal simplifies website creation and opens doors to endless possibilities.

Let’s review the latest news covered by The Drop Times (TDT) last week.

In an Interview with Alka Elizabeth, sub-editor, TDT, Irina Zaks, Co-Founder and CTO at Fibonacci Web Studio, discusses her transition from a background in physics to web development, emphasizing the importance of clear, simple solutions in complex projects. She highlights the Fibonacci sequence’s role in her design philosophy, advocating for harmony and simplicity in web development. Zaks also reflects on the unique challenges of academic websites and her efforts to promote open-source software within academia, particularly through her work at the Stanford Open Source Lab. The interview is a precursor to Stanford Web Camp. 

Head to the concluding part of our series, “Drupal Page Builders—Part 4: Distributions,” crafted by André Angelantoni, Senior Drupal Architect, HeroDevs. The article discusses the practicalities and considerations of using Drupal distributions for page building. It emphasizes that while distributions can simplify the setup process, especially for non-technical users, they often involve complex maintenance and may slow down upgrades due to dependency on the distribution maintainers. The piece advises conducting a proof-of-concept for the most complex page layouts to ensure the chosen solution can handle the requirements, highlighting that many teams opt for minimal module use to maintain flexibility and control.

Explore the articles curated by Kazima Abbas regarding the featured speakers who presented their sessions at EvolveDrupal Atlanta. The first part features Michael Herchel, Mary Blabaum, Allison Vorthmann, Andy Waldrop, and Jesse Dyck.  Topics range from an Inclusive Design Approach to Drupal 7’s End of Life on website security and from leveraging Drupal for scalable software products to insights on migrating to Drupal 10. The second part shifts to topics including The Fourth Decade of Website Deployments, the Crossroads of Website Evolution, and the updates from WCAG 2.1 to 2.2. John Cloys, Penny Kronz, and Steve Persch are featured in this segment. 

The upcoming Drupal Developer Days in Burgas, Bulgaria, from June 26-28, 2024, at Burgas Free University, has announced Suzanne Dergacheva and Frederik W. as keynote speakers. DrupalCamp Iberia 2024 has officially announced its schedule for the upcoming gathering on May 10 and 11 at PACT in Évora, marking a significant event in the Drupal community’s annual calendar. The Network of European Drupal Associations (NEDA) has scheduled a meeting on April 24, 2024, led by Esmeralda Tijhoff. This meeting aims to foster connections among Drupal Associations globally, sharing experiences and discussing support strategies.

DrupalCon Portland 2024 extends a special offer to students, recent graduates, and individuals with Drupal Training Certification obtained since 2022, providing an opportunity to purchase tickets for the event at a discounted rate of $50. The DropTimes has been announced as the official media partner for The LagoonCon Portland 2024. DrupalSouth has made their talks from DrupalSouth 2024 accessible online via their YouTube channel! Now, you can catch up on all the insightful discussions and presentations from the comfort of your home. A particularly engaging story narrated at the event is the talk by Dallas Ramsden, a story of human resilience. The Eclipse Foundation has initiated a collaborative effort to establish common cybersecurity standards in response to the upcoming European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act. This initiative involves multiple open-source organizations and aims to harmonize secure software development practices across the industry, addressing both regulatory requirements and the broader challenge of securing open-source software. The Greek Drupal Community celebrated a resurgence with the Greece Spring Sprint 2024, where experienced developers across Athens, Thessaloniki, and Patras collaborated to address numerous issues. We have received pictures via Georgios Andreadis of the event, take a look here.

Jesus Manuel Olivas, Co-Founder and CEO at Octahedroid, announced the initial release of two significant Drupal modules—Visual Editor and Decoupled Preview Iframe. A recent update from Drupal.org saw Gábor Hojtsy outlining the forthcoming release plans for Drupal 11, noting significant dependency updates and two potential release windows later this year. Obviously, this has created discussions in the community. Paul Johnson, a long-time participant and photographer at Drupal events, has announced an initiative by the Promote Drupal team to create the first official Promote Drupal Image Library. The team calls for submissions from photographers within the Drupal community who are willing to contribute their work under a Creative Commons license. 

While there are undoubtedly more stories to share, our current constraints may necessitate a temporary pause in our coverage.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Also, join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you,
Sincerely
Kazima Abbas
Sub-editor, The Drop Times

We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v0.10.

Two major milestones were reached in the previous week. Catch them here if you missed it!

All weekend, I’ve been mulling over a recent blog post by Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller, which he wrote and published on behalf of the Fedora Council. Fedora (the KDE version) is my distribution of choice, I love using it, and I consider it the best distribution for desktop use, and not by a close margin either. As such, reading a blog post in which Fedora is announcing plans to make extensive use of “AI” was bound to make me a feel a little uneasy. Miller states – correctly – that the “AI” space as it stands right now is dominated so much by hyperbole and over-the-top nonsense that it’s hard to judge the various technologies underpinning “AI” on merit alone. He continues that he believes that stripped of all the hyperbole and techbro bullshit, there’s “something significant, powerful”, and he wants to make “Fedora Linux the best community platform for AI”. So, what exactly does that look like? In addition to the big showy LLM-based tools for chat and code generation, these advances have brought big jumps for more tailored tasks: for translation, file search, home automation, and especially for accessibility (already a key part of our strategy). For example, open source speech synthesis has long lagged behind proprietary options. Now, what we have in Fedora is not even close to the realism, nuance, and flexibility of AI-generated speech. ↫ Matthew Miller Some of these are things we can all agree are important and worthwhile, but lacking on the Linux desktop. If we can make use of technologies labelled as “AI” to improve, say, text-to-speech on Linux for those who require it for accessibility reasons, that’s universally a great thing. Translation, too, is, at its core, a form of accessibility, and if we can improve machine translations so that people who, for instance, don’t speak English gain more access to English content, or if we can make the vast libraries of knowledge locked into foreign languages accessible to more people, that’s all good news. However, Fedora aims to take its use of “AI” even further, and wants to start using it in the process of developing, making, and distributing Fedora. This is where more and more red flags are starting to pop up for me, because I don’t feel like the processes and tasks they want to inject “AI” into are the kinds of processes and tasks where you want humans taken out of the equation. We can use AI/ML as part of making the Fedora Linux OS. New tools could help with package automation and bug triage. They could note anomalies in test results and logs, maybe even help identify potential security issues. We can also create infrastructure-level features for our users. For example, package update descriptions aren’t usually very meaningful. We could automatically generate concise summaries of what’s new in each system update — not just for each package, but highlighting what’s important in the whole set, including upstream change information as well. ↫ Matthew Miller Even the tools built atop billions and billions of euros of investments by Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Facebook, and similar juggernauts are not exactly good at what they’re supposed to do, and suck at even the most basic of tasks of providing answers to simple questions. They lie, they make stuff up, they bug out and produce nonsense, they’re racist, and so on. I don’t want any of that garbage near the process of making and updating the operating system I rely on every day. Miller laments how “AI” is currently a closed-source, black box affair, which obviously doesn’t align with Fedora’s values and goals. He doesn’t actually explain how Fedora’s use of “AI” is going to address this. They’re going to have to find ethical, open source models that are also of high quality, and that’s a lot easier said than done. Sourcing doesn’t even get a single mention in this blog post, even though I’m fairly sure that’s one of the two major issues many of us have with the current crop of “AI” tools. The blog post also completely neglects to mention the environmental cost of training these “AI” tools. It costs an insane amount of electricity to train these new tools, and with climate change ever accelerating and the destruction of our environment visible all around us, not mentioning this problem when you’re leading a project like Fedora seems disingenuous at best, and malicious at worst. While using “AI” to improve accessibility tools in Fedora and the wider Linux world is laudable, some of the other intended targets seem more worrisome, especially when you take into account that the blog post makes no mention of the two single biggest problems with “AI”: sourcing, and its environmental impact. If Fedora truly intends to fully embrace “AI”, it’s going to have to address these two problems first, because otherwise they’re just trying to latch onto the hype without really understanding the cost. And that’s not something I want to hear from the leaders of my Linux distribution.