Drupal 7

Update: The Drupal Association announced on 23 February 2022 that Drupal 7 end of life was extended by one year to 1 November 2023. It also announced the end-of-life date will be re-evaluated annually.

We at Evolving Web had plenty to write about in 2021. From technical tutorials about Drupal 9 to articles about accessibility and inclusion, we aimed to deliver relevant information and useful insights to the developers, content strategists, designers, marketers, and technologists who follow us.

If you missed some of it, we'll save you some time and walk you through Evolving Web's ten most-read articles from 2021, from #10 to #1!

If you develop for Drupal 9, you probably noticed that theming has improved a lot. And if you're upgrading your theme to D9, given Drupal 7's upcoming end of life in November 2022, you'll find the job considerably easier if you follow some basic but crucial steps.

Let's look at the main theming features on Drupal 9 and how to have your Drupal 7 theme ready for this latest version of Drupal.

As you may know, Drupal 8 is reaching end-of-life this year, and Drupal 7 will follow suit by November 2022. For this reason, Evolving Web and Pantheon will join forces for a free technical training called Best Practices for Higher Ed Drupal Migrations on September 2.

Our developers have written extensively about planning, executing, and optimizing Drupal migration projects over the years, and all that content is more relevant than ever. If you're planning to migrate your site to Drupal 9 in 2021, add this collection of expert guides to your bookmarks.

Learn how to migrate translated content from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. This tutorial is about migrating translations created with the Content Translation module.

⚠️ November 2020 update: We've written an updated version of this tutorial with new code samples. Read it here.

Since the release of Drupal 8 with a standardized way of managing translations, many sites running Drupal 7 are making a switch to Drupal 8. In Drupal 7 there are two ways to translate content:

If you are a web designer, chances are you have heard about Material Design.

Material Design is a popular "design language" developed by Google that came out in June 2014. Since then, it has kind of become the visual identity of most of Google's mobile applications for Android. Many mobile app developers are using it and the approval rate among web designers is also rising, mostly because of its simplicity and the influence of mobile apps on responsive design.

This week, our client came up with a seemingly simple request that turned out not so simple: When listing events, they want to show upcoming events before past ones. Not only that, they also want events nearest the current day to show up first. But with a bit of thinking and a custom views sort plugin, this turned out quite easy!

Drupal core is pretty well optimized. But after you've finished building your Drupal 7 or 8 site, you might find some pages are loading slower than you'd like. That's not surprising—you've probably enabled scores of contrib modules, written custom code, and are running over 100 SQL queries per uncached request.