Drupal Forge

Automatic Updates is a module included in Drupal CMS that keeps code up to date. To do that, it copies just the files required for an update to a temporary directory and runs the update there. If there are no problems, it copies the update back to the Drupal site. The problem we ran into on Drupal Forge was that Automatic Updates did not copy patches we applied to improve the user experience. During automatic updates, our patches were not applied.

This week I updated the Drupal CMS demo on Drupal Forge. Normally, a GitHub workflow takes care of this. We have a special script for Drupal CMS that preinstalls required recipes. We still show all the install steps to the user, but the preinstalled recipes make installation run faster. Our pre-install script failed because Drupal 11.3 stops installation with a warning if URL rewriting is not enabled.

Drupal Forge is a non-profit project of the Drupal community. Our mission is to support vendors that devote a portion of their revenue to sustaining the software and infrastructure Drupal needs to be a great product. Our product launch buttons are part of a business model to sustain contribution. This makes them different from launch buttons that hosting vendors offer on their own.

Due to concerns that the launch button would funnel business to one vendor at the expense of others, Starshot leadership announced that the launch button would use WebAssembly to run site trials in a user’s browser without external hosting. This approach has the advantages of being able to run Drupal off line and not needing anyone to pay for hosting. However, it is technically challenging and will not work for everyone. Sites running in WebAssembly cannot be visited by others and are not persistent.

Dries Buytaert introduced the Starshot initiative at Drupalcon Portland 2024. The idea was to create a product for less technical users, one that could be installed and updated without using the command line, that would have the best content creation tools pre-installed and configured, and that could be customized without writing code.

At DrupalCon Portland 2022 people were talking about makers and takers. The fear was that companies that just take and use free software would outcompete companies that help to make it.