Spokane Drupal User Group - *Spokane Valley Library* on July 19

What we talked about today:

• Assessing moving a site from Drupal 7 to either Drupal 8 or Backdrop:
  - Can the content be migrated? Probably yes to both, unless the site is multilingual.
  - Are the modules you need available in Backdrop or Drupal 8? (Have to check all of them, considering that you may not need all of them) You can check the main Backdrop and Drupal sites to see if modules are available. Also, check the Github for Backdrop modules at https://github.com/backdrop-contrib to see if they are in development.
  - Is Drupal 8 or Backdrop a better fit?
  - How much work will it be to migrate to either one?
• Why would you want to jump out of Drupal 7 now?
  - If you're redesigning your site anyway, it might be a good time
  - Eventually Drupal 7 will be unsupported (probably anyway)
  - PHP 5.6 will be unsupported after December 2018. It is not clear whether or not Drupal 7 and all its modules will run on PHP 7. Probably, but you'd want to test it. See also https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/system-requirements/drupal-7-php-requirements
  - See this blog post from one of the Drupal Core maintainers for thoughts about how long Drupal 7 might be supported: https://www.thirdandgrove.com/long-road-drupal-9 -- maybe around 2020 or 2021
  - Also note that Drupal 7 might get long-term support after it is not officially supported, for a price (this happened with Drupal 6).
• Security report process:
  - Someone emails the security team to confidentially report a security problem with Drupal Core or a module.
  - The security team contacts the maintainer.
  - If the maintainer doesn't respond, the module is marked Unsupported and an announcement is made.
  - If the maintainer does respond, they work with the security team to fix the problem, a new release is made, and an announcement is made.
  See https://www.drupal.org/drupal-security-team for more information.
• Getting help with Drupal and getting your questions answered:
  - There are official forums on drupal.org but they are pretty much dead.
  - Instead, https://drupal.stackexchange.com/ is more active (you have to register from an account)
  - For instant chat support, people used to use IRC, but that is kind of dead too
  - Everyone is now on Slack for chats -- https://drupal.slack.com/ -- to get an account, visit https://www.drupal.org/slack and follow the directions
  - Search (with Google or whatever search engine) and that will find forum posts, stack exchange, blog posts, etc.
• Images in Drupal
  - At the most basic level, all images get into web pages by being put in an <img> HTML tag. The image file must be on a server somewhere to do that.
  - There are modules that work with HTML editors that will allow you to upload image files, keep them in a media "library", and embed those images into your pages. This is very flexible, as the images can be within your text.
  - Another option is to put image fields on your content types, and this will allow you to embed images in specific locations on the page, via your theme (kind of a page template). But it is less flexible, more controlled.
  - You can have variations on the template approach by using views to grab images from other content items to display in blocks, etc. Or based on taxonomy. Etc.
  - If you use Views, you can grab not only an image, but maybe some related information, like captions, descriptions, annotations, etc.
  - Images can be manipulated with Image Styles: resized, turned black-and-white, watermarks added, etc. when they are displayed, if you use image fields or views. Basic styling (crop and scale) is in Core in Drupal 7-8. There are add-on modules that do watermarks, etc.
• Embedding a view within a view -- try the Views Field View module https://www.drupal.org/project/views_field_view -- looks like it would work, but we haven't actually tried it -- good luck!

I was going to schedule a meeting for August, but I found I had something on my calendar already for the 3rd Thursday (the 16th) at our usual time, and the Spokane Valley library room we've used for the last two meetings is already booked for the 2nd Thursday (the 9th).

Maybe the 4th Thursday (August 23rd)? Or should we just have a month of summer vacation, and resume in September? We had low attendance today... not sure how much interest there is for August anyway?