Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

PostgreSQL 13 will officially reach End-of-Life (EOL) on November 13, 2025. After this date, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group will stop releasing security patches and bug fixes for this version. That means if you’re still running PostgreSQL 13, you’ll soon be on your own with no updates, no community support, and growing security risks. Why […]

In a recent post, The Quirks of Index Maintenance in Open Source Databases, I compared the IO load generated by open source databases while inserting rows in a table with many secondary indexes. Because of its change buffer, InnoDB was the most efficient solution. However, that’s not the end of the story. Evolution of the […]

Today we are talking about AI, New Drupal Features, and the future of AI in Drupal with guest Jamie Abrahams. We’ll also cover Orchestration as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/527

Topics

• Exciting Announcement: Object-Oriented Hooks in Themes
• The Drupal AI Initiative
• Canvas AI and Migration Challenges
• AI Powered Features and Future Directions
• AI’s Role in Drupal vs. Other Platforms
• Human in the Loop AI in Drupal
• Canvas AI and Human Control
• Challenges with Customizability and AI Integration
• Transparency and Ethics in AI
• Modernizing Drupal’s Core for AI
• Future of AI in Drupal
• Community Engagement and Events

Resources

• Flowdrop
  • https://www.drupal.org/project/flowdrop
  • https://flowdrop.xyz/
• Dries blog
  • Rethinking drupal in the world of AI
• Tool
• Paris event
  • API days
• Pune Event – 29th – 30th November
• Tracking
• Action API issue

Guests

Jamie Abrahams – freelygive.io yautja_cetanu

Hosts

Nic Laflin – nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi – epam.com johnpicozzi Maya Schaeffer – evolvingweb.com mayalena

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz – mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to expose Drupal’s capabilities to external automation platforms? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Orchestration
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Aug 2025 by Jürgen Haas of LakeDrops, in collaboration with Dries, who some of our listeners may be familiar with
  • Versions available: 1.0.0, which supports Drupal 11.2 or newer
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Documentation site
  • Number of open issues: 11 open issues, none of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • 3 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the Orchestration module installed, external systems can trigger Drupal workflows, call AI agents, and execute business logic through a unified API
  • The modules functions as a bi-directional bridge, so Drupal events like content updates, user registrations, or form submissions can also trigger external processing
  • Using the Orchestration module with the Activepieces automation platform in particular was featured at about the one hour mark in the most recent Driesnote, from DrupalCon Vienna, and we’ll include a link to watch that in the show notes. The complex example Dries shows is pulling content from a WordPress site, using AI to evaluate whether or not each post met certain criteria, and then conditionally calling one of a couple of ECA functions, in addition to using AI to rewrite the incoming content to change WordPress terminology into Drupalisms
  • Under the hood Orchestration provides an endpoint that will return a JSON list of services, including the properties that are needed for each service. The external service also needs to provide the username and password for a Drupal account, so you can control what services will be available based on permissions for the Drupal user that will be used
  • Already Orchestration works with ECA, AI Agents, Tool API, and AI function calls
  • There is also work underway for integrations using webhooks, for integration platforms that aren’t ready to directly support Drupal’s orchestration services
  • In his presentation Dries mentioned that they are looking for feedback. Specifically, they would like feedback on what platforms should have integrations available

This blog post explains how to configure and use MinIO as S3-compatible storage for managing PostgreSQL backups, and how to perform data restoration and recovery in both standalone (local) and Kubernetes environments.

Data masking lets you hide sensitive fields (emails, credit-card numbers, job titles, etc.) while keeping data realistic for reporting, support, or testing. It is particularly useful when you collaborate with external entities and need to share your data for development reasons. You also need to protect your data and keep your customers’ privacy safe. Last […]

Today we are talking about AI News,Drupal Hooks, and Drupal 11. We’ll also cover Webform Scheduled Tasks as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/526

Topics

• AI in News Anchoring
• Drupal Hooks and Themes
• Adoption of Object-Oriented Modules
• Challenges with Theme Hook Orders
• Understanding Hook Ordering in Modules
• Simplifying Hook Ordering with Drupal 11.2
• Updating to Drupal 11: Considerations and Plans
• Exciting Features in Drupal 11
• Drupal Orchestration and Integration
• New England Drupal Camp Announcement
• State of Drupal Work and Future Prospects

Resources

• AI News Cast
• Drupal Hooks
• Driesnote DrupalCon Vienna 2025 Orchestration
• Activepieces

Hosts

Nic Laflin – nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi – epam.com johnpicozzi

MOTW Correspondent

Avi Schwab – froboy.org froboy

• Brief description:
  • Have you (or your client) ever wanted to get fewer webform submission emails? Do you like getting emails on a predictable schedule and not any time a user decides to fill out your form?
  • If so, you might want to check out Webform Scheduled Tasks
• Module name/project names
  • Webform Scheduled Tasks
• Brief history
  • Created by mattgill on 22 November 2017
  • It has a 3.0-rc1 release available with Drupal 10 compatibility and is awaiting review of it’s automated D11 fixes.
• Maintainership
  • Its last release was in November 2023, but just a month ago I helped get Sean Dietrich approved as a new maintainer, so I’m hoping for a new release in the near future.
  • It has security coverage.
  • Tests exist to test the full functionality of the module and they are passing.
  • There is no standalone documentation, although a README is RTBC’ed. That said, the module page has a straightforward description of what the module does and how to use it, and getting it up and running is very straightforward.
  • Number of open issues: 24 open issues, only 1 of which is a bug against the current branch. I’ll also note there are 8 issues that are RTBC, so we should be seeing some fixes forthcoming.
• Usage stats:
  • 817 sites
• Module features and usage
  • Once you enable the module, Webforms will have an additional “Scheduled tasks” configuration screen.
  • You can create a task to email all results or just the results since the last export.
  • Once you enable a scheduled task, you can set a number of options:
  • its next scheduled run and the run interval (in hours, days, weeks, etc)
  • where to email the results, in what format (JSON or CSV), whether to delete submissions after they’re sent
  • There’s also a RTBC patch to allow you to configure file names to include date-time of export, which can help the recipients keep track of the exports.
  • After that, you just sit and wait for cron to do its thing.

PostgreSQL logical replication adoption is becoming more popular as significant advances continue to expand its range of capabilities.  While quite a few blogs have described features, there seems to be a lack of simple and straightforward advice on restoring stalled replication. This blog demonstrates an extremely powerful approach to resolving replication problems using the Log […]

On some occasions, we realize the necessity of throttling the number of requests that MongoDB tries to execute per second, be it due to resource saturation remediation, machine change planning, or performance tests. The most direct way of doing this is by tuning the WiredTiger transaction ticket parameters. Applying this throttle provides more controlled and […]

Today we are talking about Drupal for Designers, site builder certifications, and getting more designers in Drupal with guests Dave Pickett & Kelly Smith. We’ll also cover Sitewide Alert as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/525

Topics

• Designing for Drupal: Challenges and Insights
• Site Builder Certification Journey
• Starting the Journey: Taking the Course and Exams
• Understanding Drupal: Post-Certification Insights
• Challenges and Complexities in Drupal
• Team Collaboration and Training Benefits
• Practical Applications and Personal Projects
• Preparing for the Certification Exam

Resources

• Talking Drupal #490 – Drupal Contrib First
• Book: Designing Content Authoring Experiences
  • Greg Dunlap
• Acquia Training: Drupal Site Building
• Design to Drupal: Bridging the Handoff

Guests

Kelly Smith – kesmith Dave Pickett – civicactions davidmpickett

Hosts

Nic Laflin – nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan Stephen Cross – stephencross.com stephencross

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz – mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to post and manage sitewide alerts on your Drupal website? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Sitewide Alert
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Oct 2019 by Chris Snyder (chrissnyder) of Phase2
  • Versions available: 2.2.1 and 3.0.1 versions available, the latter of which works with Drupal 10.3 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Number of open issues: 25 open issues, 9 of which are bugs against the 3.x branch
• Usage stats:
  • 4,866 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the module installed, you can create Sitewide Alerts as a new entity type
  • By default, alerts are displayed at the top of the page sitewide regardless of theme, but there is an option to exclude admin pages and an optional submodule will render the alerts in a block that you can place in a specific place that might meet your site’s needs better. There is also an option to specify that an alert should only be shown on specific pages, and can be configured to be shown and hidden at specific times
  • It’s worth mentioning that alerts are dynamically inserted into the pages by front end code that checks a custom endpoint on a configurable schedule, so new alerts can be displayed without waiting for a new page to load. And this also means that changes to the alerts won’t invalidate the cached versions of your site pages
  • You can also configure a set of styles, effectively CSS classes, that can be applied to your alerts. Sitewide Alerts are also fieldable and themable, so you have virtually unlimited ability to tailor them to the specific needs of your site
  • A while back I made my own module for implementing alerts, called Alerts, but it lacks a number of important features available in this module, particularly dynamically loading alerts as they’re published or changed
  • I also thought that Sitewide Alerts would be interesting to talk about today because one of our guests, Dave Pickett, published his own companion project called USWDS Alert that aligns the display of the alerts with the USWDS design system. So Dave, thank you for contributing this, and what can you tell us about your experience using Sitewide Alerts?

A critical security vulnerability has been identified in the following software that Percona has made available and that you may be using:  PMM 3.x installations (that is, 3.0 and forward). The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifier for this issue is on request from mitre.org. Vulnerability details We were notified via an external report that […]