r/drupal

Hey, let's say I initiated new Drupal project locally using official ddev instructions. Smooth and clean experience, all good. Now, what to do next? I would like to start develop - turn off twig and any other caching, enable debugging, ensure that .gitignore is prepare for a composer-managed project, configure config_sync_directory so i can store entire site configuration in a git.

Nothing special I would say - just a normal way of working on a stuff as a developer, while keeping the best practices.

And the question is: Where I can find some official docs so I do not have to use a tribal knowledge or guess whether I configured my gitignore, settings and services files correctly? Where i can read such an infos like why there is a dot in third line of .gitignore, after /vendor.?

Did I missed something or this part is not well documented?

Recently I audited a Drupal codebase containing a lot of custom form code and the author relied upon front-end validation way too often. You always want to validate form submissions server-side as well. I'm posting this because I sense that this change in Drupal 12 may prove impactful for many sites. Check your form validation code!

Hi, I really would appreciate advice on a Drupal challenge I face. I'm managing the Drupal website of my orchestra, it started on version 10 and was recently upgrade to 11 by the DirectAdmin maintenance of the provider. Since the upgrade the site is unstable - running composer yields many pages of patches/upgrades after which the site breaks down completely.

As a solution I now setup a fresh v11 site that works fine.

The only small workload left is to export/import the content from the old site to the new one.

This is my first experience with a CMS platform - but have 20 years experience with self-built dynamic websites. For these, contents and platform are nicely separated and can be exported/import with little hassle.

I suppose Drupal also stores the contents (pages/articles) separated from the platform and that export/import should be breeze. However, I failed to find the protocol for this. Am I too naive ? Which tables have the contents ? Which cross-references should be updated after import ?

Thanks in advance for your advice and suggestions

I wrote a blog post about why AI agents struggle with loose APIs (magic strings, untyped hooks, unvalidated configuration) more than humans do.

The post uses Drupal and WordPress as examples, but the argument applies to any framework on the strict-to-loose spectrum.

https://dri.es/ai-rewards-strict-apis

Learn about my new AI Schema.org JSON-LD module, which generates structured data to "feed the machines"

Has anyone successfully managed to use cloud storage with flysystem and S3 or Google Cloud Storage without the performance trade-off when generating image styles? My experience was terrible, even with image styles warmer module. The application heavily uses images and multiple image styles in addition to responsive images, which generate multiple resolutions per image.

A while ago someone on this sub posted about an AI exclusively for building Drupal sites that could do anything like modules, bug fixes, full builds, the whole site build. It stuck with me, as Drupal is pitched as a way for non-tech people to build websites with but getting to that point requires tech skills to lay the foundation.

Can see my previous posts about my progress so far (basically able to get a custom Drupal site running in ddev just from prompts) but wanted to pause and get some feedback from people who'd actually use this:

- Is chat the right interface, or would you rather have something more structured (wizards, forms, config-driven)?

- Where's your "doing this myself" line drawn? Content modeling? Custom entities? Views? Theming?

- If generic LLMs + your own workflow already cover 80% of this, what would the remaining 20% need to look like?

Just want to know if this is worth finishing or if most of you have already solved this with Cursor/Claude Code and I'm building a solution to a shrinking problem.

Just a quick reminder to show some love for your Drupal instances and your servers.

Be kind with them, love your MySQL instance, install memcached and use it, they'll love it... and your customers too :)

https://preview.redd.it/a1buibp384xg1.png?width=897&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2e0b93eb2b72b834256fee318c5f3fd5c5c611a

I have always created my own themes. This time, I am thinking of using the Mercury theme that comes with Drupal CMS. I am not sure how the theme updates are handled later with the themes that come with site templates. If I use Mercury and make changes, should I be worried if the updates can break my changes later? Should I create a sub-theme, or can I use Mercury directly without worrying about updates?