Ciao a tutti 👋

sto lavorando a un progetto chiamato MieApp, pensato per chi vuole imparare ad usare Drupal per costruire web app senza saper programmare, cioè come un site builder puro.

Non è un progetto commerciale, ma un contributo alla crescita di Drupal, che uso da anni per scopi personali e lavorativi.

Il sito offre gratuitamente e senza registrazione una serie di mini guide pratiche, che passo passo suggeriscono come tradurre una necessità in un progetto Drupal, utilizzando una app di esempio che il lettore può anche veder girare dal vivo.

👉 Per ora è solo un abbozzo e mi farebbe davvero piacere avere un feedback, suggerimenti e critiche per migliorarlo e completarlo.

MieApp è qui

https://mieapp.bottasini.eu

Grazie 🤝

In a previous post I shared how I used Claude to create a Drupal website just by prompting and tweaking via the Drupal admin pages. Wasn't a perfect or the "Drupal way" of a website but it worked. Was mainly just twig files with raw HTML in there so most edits require editing the twig files.

BUT I took this workflow and had Claude analyze my AI Drupal site builder codebase to see what it was missing, and oh was it missing a lot. It filled in gaps I didn't even know about and was a lot better than me hammering and hoping.

After adding the workflow and testing/tweaking I finally got it to create a fully customized and working Drupal site running in DDEV!!

Then the easy part of porting it over to my web server to finally update a website I built in 2020 and hadn't touched it since. The final (and very basic) Drupal website is at: webdevday.com and my AI Drupal website will eventually be at drupod.com

I’ve been messing around with the new Drupal Canvas AI sub-module, but honestly, the layout output was driving me crazy. It felt like it was just guessing where things should go and ignoring my design system.

I just stumbled on this step-by-step video that explains the "Context" side of things. It shows how to actually train the AI using a coding agent to generate knowledge guidelines so it respects your component props and grids.

If you’ve been struggling with messy AI-generated pages in Drupal, this workflow is a game-changer:

It’s a quick watch but the part about the AI Context module saved me hours of manual tweaking.

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Drupal's new marketplace is "certified partners only" during the pilot phase. The stated reason: ensure quality. The actual result: established agencies get first-mover advantage, small builders dont get invited to the ball.

Also, the marketplace seems like a gray area with the GPL. How are premium themes compatible, are the GPL parts contributed back to the community?

After 2 years of hard work we are confidently presenting the "new way to work" for (marketing) content creators in Drupal :)

We would love feedback from the community

Pantheon hosting is in its second day of having issues. I cannot access my dashboard. Curious if anyone has any insight into this.

TLDR;

Since I work on 3 Drupal environments (local, staging, prod) and each has a DB, every time I add a new block locally, then deploy to staging, it disappears. Of course, different DBs, different UUIDs, I get why this is happening. The block I have locally simply doesn't exist on staging, I need to go there and create it, add to the block layout, dump DB and do a config export from this DB, commit to the codebase and deploy again. Same with prod.

So around 10 steps and 4 deployments for adding a block to a Drupal website. How do you solve it? Simply ignoring block configs has obvious downsides.

More details

I add a new promo banner block locally → commit config → deploy to staging → block is gone because the UUID is different on staging. I then have to dump staging DB, re-export, merge the diff, redeploy. Then repeat the whole thing for prod. For a single block.

I know I could just throw `block.block.*` into config_ignore and call it a day, but that feels stupid - no git history, no rollback, one wrong click from me or teammates and the layout is broken on prod with no way to trace what happened.

My semi-idea

Ignore only the blocks that actually cause problems (views blocks, custom content blocks) but keep tracking structural ones like menus and branding.

Is this roughly what others do? Is there a cleaner solution I'm missing? Would love to hear how teams with a lot of blocks are handling this.

i was able to update and upgrade my sites with ai, before nobody could help....i spend several days on slack, messaging also dev of specific theme...no answer.....ai knew everything. I havent visited slack now for over a year. For like moderate tasks in drupal ai is winner....it knows aeverything about every little module and you save like 99 % of the time...it is just amazing..... it knows ddev, docker, upgrades....altering theme...you name it....this is a major thing, because people on slack ususally are not the most friendliest

I’m working on a Drupal project that requires building a simple document library page.

The idea is to have a single page that displays a few categories/buildings. When a user clicks a category, the category page opens and displays all PDFs related to it.

On the category page, I also need:

• search by file name only
• pagination, since each category can have a lot of PDFs

I mainly need help with how to start and structure this properly, since I only started working with Drupal last year and haven’t really built anything like this from scratch before.

Would you use content types + file fields, Media, taxonomy, Views, or some mix of these?

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If everyone's making Drupal headless all these years why haven't they just refactored/updated the UI of Drupal to incorporate a faster UI?

It seems like reinventing the wheel to completely refactor the UI on top of a framework that is designed to work in a more secure manner?

Maybe I'm confused as to why people do this?

Disclaimer: I used AI to polish the phrasing of this post, but the content and concerns are entirely my own. Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone,

I’m a software engineering intern based in Vietnam, currently working at a small boutique agency that specializes in Drupal. Our dev team is tiny: just me, one senior dev, and our boss. Recently, the senior dev resigned, and my boss approached me to ask about my long-term plans. He wants to know if I intend to stay after graduation and commit to Drupal, or if I’m planning to move on.

To be honest, I’m torn. When I first started, I hated Drupal. I couldn’t wrap my head around how it worked—the modules, the hooks, and the way it handled CSS felt so counter-intuitive. I remember writing over 4,000 lines of CSS just for a few pages! However, after some time, I’ve managed to "tame the beast." I can now confidently say I’m proficient in Drupal development (though I’m still a novice when it comes to DevOps or Networking).

But here’s my concern: compared to the hype and job volume of Node.js, Laravel, or Angular, Drupal feels very "restrictive." In Vietnam specifically, the job market for Drupal is incredibly small. This makes me wonder: can I actually build a strong career with Drupal as my primary strength, or should I just treat this as a phase to improve my general programming logic, UI, and UX?

My ultimate goal is to work for large corporations or international companies where the pay is high. I know Drupal is used by big players, but I’m worried that the "entry gate" for those roles might be too narrow. Am I betting on the wrong horse, or should I pivot to a more mainstream stack now before I get too deep?

I can always use AI to help bridge the technical gaps, but I know that choosing a career path is a decision no AI can make for me.

So, to the experienced devs out there: Should I double down on Drupal, master it, and hunt for those high-paying enterprise roles? Or is it wiser to start fresh with a more popular framework?

I would really appreciate any advice or perspectives you can share. Thank you!