fidzu : php

A Symfony application is full of strings that mean something: route names, service ids, template paths, translation keys, environment variables. But to most editors, they mean nothing. Write redirectToRoute('order_confirmaton') and nothing complains about…

17 Aug 2026 12:05pm GMT

If AI can generate an application from a description, is software still worth anything?

I have lived with a version of that question longer than most.

I released Drupal for free more than twenty-five years ago, and later co-founded Acquia, which has grown into a large enterprise software company built around Drupal.

Granted, Drupal is free in a different way than AI-generated applications are free, but I'm not sure that changes the basic question of how to build a successful business around either one.

Open Source made code abundant by giving people broad rights to use, modify, and redistribute it. AI is lowering the cost of producing code. One lets you copy the software; the other makes it cheaper to recreate software.

Free code changes what customers pay for

Because anyone could use Drupal for free, Acquia could never build a durable business around access to the code. From the start, we had to make money another way.

We built that business around helping enterprises build, run, and manage Drupal applications throughout their lifecycle. That includes hosting, but goes well beyond it: the tools and services needed to develop, deploy, secure, scale, monitor, and improve applications in production.

Proprietary SaaS typically bundles access to the application with the hosting and operations required to run it. With Open Source, organizations can run the software themselves or choose who hosts and operates it.

As AI makes applications cheaper to recreate, the traditional SaaS bundle of software and operations comes under pressure. Customers may become less willing to pay for access to application functionality without becoming any less willing to pay to run and manage applications in production. For Open Source businesses those economics are not new.

Dependability becomes the product

Software can be free, or nearly free, without becoming cheap to depend on. The more people and organizations depend on a system, the more of its value comes from operating it securely, reliably, and at scale.

Once people depend on an application, the cost of its failure has little to do with how much it cost to build. An application that costs $1,000 to build can still cause a $10 million failure.

As AI makes enterprise applications easier to create, adapt, and integrate, they still have to be deployed, secured, scaled, monitored, and run reliably over time. As software cost comes down, dependability becomes a differentiator.

Linux is abundant; dependable cloud infrastructure is a service worth paying for. Drupal is abundant; dependable digital experience infrastructure is a service worth paying for.

Acquia has lived with those economics for nearly 20 years. Drupal made the code abundant, so we built our business around helping organizations build, run, and improve what they created with it. As AI makes code cheaper to generate, that business model may start to look a lot less unusual.

Either way, more software companies will have to answer the same question: if the code is abundant, what are customers really paying you for?

17 Aug 2026 9:35am GMT

Drupal 11: Migrating From Jadu Into LocalGov Drupal: Part 2

This is the second article in a series of articles looking at migrating from Jadu into a LocalGov Drupal (LGD) site for Central Bedfordshire. In the first article we looked at the Jadu API and setting things up so that we could make calls to the API and parse the XML data using the migration systems available.

In the last article I mentioned something about the Jadu API that caused me a lot of headaches. The API contains most of the information for a page, but critically, the Jadu API contains no information about the path of a page. There is basically no way to get the URL of a page in Jadu from the XML API.

I'm quire sure that this makes creating anything useful in the API a real pain since referring back to the site needs to be done with manually placed links, but it's clearly like this by design. I couldn't find any documentation on why it is like this, but it almost feels like vendor lock-in. Please correct me if I'm wrong here.

If you migrate a page from one system to another then it is highly important that you maintain the URL structure of the site. If you change the URL of a page then you need to add in a step that adds a redirect from the old system to the new so that all of your search engine results, the existing links from other sites, and any user bookmarks that have been created work correctly. This is critical to get right for a public facing council site like this.

Since I was migrating into a LGD site, it made sense to use the Drupal path auto system and LGD path management plugins to manage the paths on the Drupal site. We therefore needed to know the existing Jadu URLs so that we could create these redirects.

To get the URLs during the migration caused quite a bit of experimentation, but I did solve the issue with a solution that had a high success rate.

philipnorton42 Sun, 08/16/2026 - 19:06

16 Aug 2026 6:06pm GMT

Webform is the most popular module for building forms in Drupal. You can use it for a simple contact form or for a long form with conditional logic, file uploads, and email alerts. Either way, you build the whole thing from the admin interface without writing code.

In the video above, you will learn how to build a form with Webform in Drupal CMS. You will create a Customer form, add conditional logic, send a confirmation email, split the form into pages, view submissions, and embed the form on a Drupal Canvas page.

16 Aug 2026 2:59pm GMT

This week, development activity for the upcoming Symfony 8.2 release was very intense: PropertyInfo made accessors and mutators configurable with attributes, HttpFoundation added targeted Cache-Control support conforming to RFC 9213, Console attributes can…

16 Aug 2026 7:01am GMT

When we announced the Symfony AI initiative in July 2025, the goal was to bring powerful, well-integrated AI capabilities to PHP applications and to build them in the open with the community. A little over a year later, Symfony AI has grown far beyond those…

13 Aug 2026 7:04am GMT

Last week I helped the folks at ezSystems debug some APC problems they were having. The problems ended up being a 64bit architecture problem (they have uber-fast Opterons) and the bug is now fixed in 2.0.3.

Today I received Python & XML from them (off my Amazon wishlist). Thanks guys!

On a side note, my wishlist seems borked. The list I get when I search on my email address or name is not the same one I can edit when I log into the site.

01 Apr 2004 6:53pm GMT

1st of April 2004 get's to it's end and I guess it's time, to summarize the recent April fools a bit. Not that I think anyone in the world believes in them, but some were quite funny:

1. Changes to case sensitivity in PHP.
Alan Knowles announced that PHP will change to the studlyCase API and therefor will get everything broken by changing established functions.

2. IBM takes over Zend.
Myself hacked a little article about IBM taking over Zend to make PHP a compete of Java.

3. The first PHP virus has been seen.
Wasn't there one last year, too?

4. PHP has been overtaken by Micro$oft.
Mhhh... a little bit unreliable, if they had been taken over by IBM this morning... Maybe one should first look, what others wrote...

5. And finally, PHP4 and 5 showed their real faces...
Take a look at a phpinfo() output!

I guess I missed some, so feel free to comment on this entry, if you found another!

01 Apr 2004 5:49pm GMT

Symantec have a report of the virus here. I've yet to see any of the PHP news sites picking up on it but, using a virtual host account, managed to deliberately expose some PHP scripts to it. From examining the infected scripts, what's disturbing is once infected, every tim...

01 Apr 2004 12:19pm GMT