fidzu : Drupal

The second major version of the Markdown Easy Drupal contrib module was released on August 17, 2025 and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. The release has some new features, a simplified configuration, and a single minor bug fix. The original goal of the Markdown Easy module was to provide an easy-to-use, easy-to-maintain, and secure-by-default Markdown processor that is easily added to Drupal sites as a standard text filter. Version 1.0.0 of the module was released on September 2, 2023 and since then the module has had a single maintenance release and small, but loyal group of users. Major-est feature Version 2.0.0 of the module was initially driven by one major feature - the addition of a new Markdown flavor - this is our way of saying a preconfigured set of Markdown processor features . Version 1.0.0 shipped with Standard Markdown and GitHub-flavored Markdown . Version 2.0.0 introduces a new flavor: Markdown Smörgåsbord . Markdown Smörgåsbord includes everything available in

22 Aug 2025 1:15pm GMT

Enterprise B2B hydraulics distributor migrated 250,000+ products from Drupal 7 to 10 with zero downtime, achieving ~200ms page loads while preserving Parker Hannifin certifications and Solr-powered search.

22 Aug 2025 1:09pm GMT

21 Aug 2025 10:49am GMT

Nowadays, NGOs and nonprofits need as much exposure as they can get. The days of local advertisements are beginning to wane. We are now in the digital age. The era of online and the Internet.

21 Aug 2025 8:04am GMT

Drupal continues to grow in popularity every day. Many users opt to adopt a Drupal distribution: a full copy of Drupal along with additional software. In general, you will see two types of Drupal distributions. Complete solutions, otherwise known as full-featured distributions, and quick-start tools.

21 Aug 2025 8:04am GMT

The role of marketers has evolved beyond simply managing and coordinating online advertising campaigns to drive traffic to their respective websites; successful marketers must transform themselves to become storytellers.

Storytelling is an essential skill to master the art of crafting a digital experience for your digital business would-be customers and users.

Therefore, as a digital business, you must be strategic when it comes to choosing the appropriate platform for your digital experience.

21 Aug 2025 8:04am GMT

Editor's Note -- This article was formerly listed as the Top 10 Websites Built with Drupal, and based on TopDrops.org. That site has since stopped updating, so we decided to pivot towards a new kind of value for our readers: the most surprising examples of Drupal-run sites.

Some of the world's most influential businesses and organizations run their websites using Drupal: General Electric, eBay, The Economist, etc.

21 Aug 2025 8:04am GMT

Despite all the disruption and technological advances that occurred over the past few years, the structure of higher education institutions and the state of academic curriculums are closer to what would be the case during the early stages of industrialization.

21 Aug 2025 8:04am GMT

At Vardot, handling responsive images effectively has been one of the main challenges we faced when building Drupal websites using Varbase. Traditional methods like CSS, image styles, or even the modern Responsive Image modules often involve time-consuming, repetitive tasks, and a lot of manual adjustments to configure the responsiveness of images across the whole website.

21 Aug 2025 8:04am GMT

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) might not be the first thing you think of when designing a new website, but building an optimized framework from the start will help you drive traffic to your site and keep it there.

With our Drupal SEO checklist in hand, you can build an excellent website that draws customers in as soon as you launch. To give you a quick summary before we go into detail, here's a bullet list of what to check before the launch day.

• Check that all web pages have unique titles using the Page Title module

21 Aug 2025 8:04am GMT

If you're using Varbase, you're already benefiting from a powerful and feature-rich Drupal distribution. Varbase is designed to streamline your Drupal projects, making it easier to build websites and web applications with all the essential tools and modules preconfigured. However, one of the most exciting aspects of Varbase is the flexibility it offers when it comes to theming.

21 Aug 2025 8:04am GMT

Component-based design (CBD) is a cornerstone in building scalable, maintainable, and efficient modern websites. It's a transformative methodology that aligns with Drupal's modular architecture and positions Drupal theming philosophy amongst the most recent best practices in architecting user interfaces.

21 Aug 2025 8:04am GMT

When you're looking for a Drupal Commerce developer, what exactly are you looking for? A lot hangs on this question. We've encountered some, let us say, "creative" implementations that painted the business into a corner or wasted a lot of time and money.

E-commerce websites are often mission-critical, and Drupal Commerce reliably powers $100s of millions in revenue per year, but an inexperienced developer can inadvertently introduce unnecessary risk. A mission-critical website needs experienced hands. Someone who can navigate the intersection of technical architecture and business logic that defines successful ecommerce implementations.

So what makes a good Drupal Commerce developer? What should you look for and what should you expect?

Drupal Mastery

At its core, Drupal Commerce is simply an arrangement of Drupal's core building blocks-entities, fields, configuration objects, views, and forms. But "simply" doesn't mean "easy." A developer needs intermediate to advanced PHP skills and must understand Drupal's architectural patterns deeply enough to know which tool fits which job. They also need to be familiar with Drupal.org and the ecosystem of contributed modules so they don't go off half-cocked and decide to reinvent the wheel.

Why is this important? When a developer reads about creating a custom price calculation, they will learn about the system of price resolvers, which are services sorted by weight. A qualified developer immediately understands what a service is, how to define one, and how Drupal's dependency injection system will execute their code at the right moment. Without this foundational knowledge, they'll be copying and pasting code without understanding the underlying architecture. When bugs appear, they won't know where to look to solve them.

The developer should also master essential development disciplines:

Read more

20 Aug 2025 2:27pm GMT

The following code snippets should be compatible with Drupal 10+.

Challenges in detecting meaningful entity changes

One working with entities in Drupal answering of the following seemingly simple questions can pose a challange:

Has this entity meaningfully changed since its last revision? Has it changed meaningfully since it was last saved?

Drupal doesn't provide a built-in mechanism for this. That's intentional, because what counts as a change can vary greatly between use cases. While there are ways to hack around the problem-such as comparing $entity->toArray() with $entity->original->toArray()-these approaches fall short quickly.

• Timestamps, UUIDs, and metadata fields will almost always differ, even when the entity's "meaningful" data hasn't changed.
• Some values are normalized differently on save (for example, 0 stored as an integer versus false cast as a boolean).
• Rich text fields often come back from CKEditor with extra markup or formatting quirks, even when the human-readable content is the same.
• The moderation module forces the creation of new revisions even if there have been no changes since the last version of the entity.

This makes raw array comparisons noisy and unreliable.

Enter the Diff Module

Luckily, Drupal already has a well-established module for detecting meaningful changes between entity revisions: Diff.

The Diff module is designed to highlight what actually changed between two revisions of an entity. It provides a user-friendly UI for visualizing differences, but behind that UI is a powerful service that can be reused programmatically.

20 Aug 2025 11:53am GMT

After nearly two decades and over 1,600 blog posts written in raw HTML, I've made a change that feels long overdue: I've switched to Markdown.

Don't worry, I'm not moving away from Drupal. I'm just moving from a "HTML text format" to a "Markdown format". My last five posts have all been written in Markdown.

I've written in Markdown for years. I started with Bear for note-taking, and for the past four years Obsidian has been my go-to tool. Until recently, though, I've always published my blog posts in HTML.

For almost 20 years, I wrote every blog post in raw HTML, typing out every tag by hand. For longer posts, it could take me 45 minutes wrapping everything in <p> tags, adding links, and closing HTML tags like it was still 2001. It was tedious, but also a little meditative. I stuck with it, partly out of pride and partly out of habit.

Getting Markdown working in Drupal

So when I decided to make the switch, I had to figure out how to get Markdown working in Drupal. Drupal has multiple great Markdown modules to choose from but I picked Markdown Easy because it's lightweight, fully tested, and built on the popular CommonMark library.

I documented my installation and upgrade steps in a public note titled Installing and Configuring Markdown Easy for Drupal.

I ran into one problem: the module's security-first approach stripped all HTML tags from my posts. This was an issue because I like to mix Markdown and HTML. I want to write most of a post in Markdown but turn to HTML for custom styling or elements that Markdown doesn't support. One example is creating pull quotes with custom CSS classes:

After 20 years of writing in HTML, I switched to *Markdown*.

<p class="pullquote">HTML for 20 years. Markdown from now on.</p>

Now I can publish faster while still using [Drupal](https://drupal.org).

HTML in Markdown by design

Markdown was always meant to work hand in hand with HTML, and Markdown parsers are supposed to leave HTML tags untouched. John Gruber, the creator of Markdown, makes this clear in the original Markdown specification:

HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown's formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text. [...] For any markup that is not covered by Markdown's syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There is no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you're switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags.

In Markdown Easy 1.x, allowing HTML tags required writing a custom Drupal module with a specific "hook" implementation. This felt like too much work for something that should be a simple configuration option. I've never enjoyed writing and maintaining custom Drupal modules for cases like this.

I reached out to Mike Anello, the maintainer of Markdown Easy, to discuss a simpler way to mix HTML and Markdown.

I suggested making it a configuration option and helped test and review the necessary changes. I was happy when that became part of the built-in settings in version 2.0. A few weeks later, Markdown Easy 2.0 was released, and this capability is now available out of the box.

Now that everything is working, I am considering converting my 1,600+ existing posts from HTML to Markdown. Part of me wants everything to be consistent, but another part hesitates to overwrite hundreds of hours of carefully crafted HTML. The obsessive in me debates the archivist. We'll see who wins.

The migration itself would be a fun technical challenge. Plenty of tools exist to convert HTML to Markdown so no need to reinvent the wheel. Maybe I'll test a few converters on some posts to see which handles my particular setup best.

Extending Markdown with tokens

Like Deane Barker, I often mix HTML and Markdown with custom "tokens". In my case, they aren't official web components, but they serve a similar purpose.

For example, here is a snippet that combines standard Markdown with a token that embeds an image:

Nothing beats starting the day with [coffee](https://dri.es/tag/coffee) and this view:

[​image beach-sunrise.jpg lazy=true schema=true caption=false]

These tokens get processed by my custom Drupal module and transformed into full HTML. That basic image token? It becomes a responsive picture element complete with lazy loading, alt-text from my database, Schema.org support, and optional caption. I use similar tokens for videos and other dynamic content.

The real power of tokens is future proofing. When responsive images became a web standard, I could update my image token processor once and instantly upgrade all my blog posts. No need to edit old content. Same when lazy loading became standard, or when new image formats arrive. One code change updates all 10,000 images or so that I've ever posted.

My tokens has evolved over 15 years and deserves its own blog post. Down the road, I might turn some of them into web components like Deane describes.

Closing thoughts

In the end, this was not a syntax decision: it was a workflow decision. I want less friction between an idea and publishing it. Five Markdown posts in, publishing is faster, cleaner, and more enjoyable, while still giving me the flexibility I need.

Those 45 minutes I used to spend on HTML tags? I now spend on things that matter more, or on writing another blog post.

20 Aug 2025 11:33am GMT

I recently installed Markdown Easy for Drupal and then upgraded from version 1.0 to 2.0.

I decided to document my steps in a public note in case they help others.

On my local machine, I run Drupal with DDEV. It sets up pre-configured Docker containers for the web server, database, and other required Drupal services. DDEV also installs Composer and Drush, which we will use in the steps below.

First, I installed version 2.0 of Markdown Easy using Composer:

ddev composer require drupal/markdown_easy

If you are upgrading from version 1.0, you will need to run the database updates so Drupal can apply any changes required by the new version. You can do this using Drush:

ddev drush updatedb

As explained in Switching to Markdown after 20 years of HTML,I want to use HTML and Markdown interchangeably. By default, Markdown Easy strips all HTML. This default approach is the safest option for most sites, but it also means you can't freely mix HTML tags and Markdown.

To change that behavior, I needed to adjust two configuration settings. These settings are not exposed anywhere in Drupal's admin interface, which is intentional. Markdown Easy keeps its configuration surface small to stay true to its "easy" name, and it leads with a secure-by-default philosophy. If you choose to relax those defaults, you can do so using Drush.

ddev drush config:set markdown_easy.settings skip_html_input_stripping 1

ddev drush config:set markdown_easy.settings skip_filter_enforcement 1

The skip_html_input_stripping setting turns off input stripping in the CommonMark Markdown parser, which means your HTML tags remain untouched while Markdown is processed.

The skip_filter_enforcement setting lets you turn off input stripping in Drupal itself. It allows you to disable the "Limit allowed HTML tags" filter without warnings from Markdown Easy.

You can enable just the first setting if you want Markdown to allow HTML but still let Drupal filter certain tags using the "Limit allowed HTML tags" filter. Or you can enable both if you want full control over your HTML with no stripping at either stage.

Just know that disabling HTML input stripping and disabling HTML filter enforcement can have security implications. Only disable these features if you trust your content creators and understand the risks.

Next, I verified my settings:

ddev drush config:get markdown_easy.settings

You should see:

skip_html_input_stripping: true
skip_filter_enforcement: true

Finally, clear the cache to apply the changes:

ddev drush cache-rebuild

Next, I updated my existing Markdown text format. I went to /admin/config/content/formats/ and made the following changes:

• I set the Markdown flavor to Smorgasbord
• Disabled the "Limit allowed HTML tags and correct faulty HTML" filter
• Disabled the "Convert line breaks into HTML" filter

That's it!

20 Aug 2025 7:29am GMT