The Core Problem – A Cascade of Risk
Drupal agencies often manage a complex web of third-party components – modules, themes, and libraries – supporting their clients’ websites.
Drupal
The enterprise OpenSource content management system which is available for free at https://www.drupal.org where you can find all the details and also references.
Drupal has a very active community with tens of thousands of developers all around the world and they also have a huge focus on standard compliance and on security.
Leveraging GitLab Templates for Proactive Module Testing
Keeping your Drupal modules aligned with the ever-evolving Drupal ecosystem is crucial for stability and maintainability. But manually testing module compatibility against various versions of Drupal core and other dependencies can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. Fortunately, Drupal offers a powerful solution: the GitLab CI Templates.
ECA 2 is a major milestone. The main improvements are:
Drupal 7 is going End-of-Life eventually. While this had been originally scheduled for a date which has passed for a couple of years already, support got extended and may well be finished in November this year - although that may still get extended again for another year or two. That's why there are plenty of discussions in and around the Drupal community of what should be done to all those still existing and mostly deeply necessary Drupal 7 sites. The options are:
Back in July, we've been so excited about the launch of ECA 1.0.0 after around 3,000 hours of development work in only 12 months, that we didn't even write a blog post at the time. The following weeks, the team was busy dealing with feedback and support, as well as starting to build even more features. That's how 4 months went by, certainly time for a recap of what has been happening and what ECA brings to the Drupal project and its community.
For an existing Drupal project, a customer requested a new feature for a marketing campaign they were about to launch: in their ERP system, they maintain a huge list of projects with many properties associated with them and a high frequency of data change. Both, existing projects get updated, and new projects get added to the list. Those projects should be promoted on their Drupal site, but of course, there is no point in maintaining that data manually or even twice.
A LakeDrops client runs a campaign where a single block containing a view should only be visible to invited, still anonymous users. This block is embedded in a landing page which remains accessible to all visitors. Due to high traffic, turning off Drupal's page cache isn't an option. So, how could that be done? The problem to solve: once the landing page gets visited the first time, that content will be cached and delivered as is to all subsequent anonymous visitors.
To solve this problem, we've chosen a 3-step-approach:
ECA stands for "Events - Conditions - Actions" and is a powerful, versatile, and user-friendly rules engine for Drupal 9+. The core module is a processor that validates and executes event-condition-action plugins. Integrated with graphical user interfaces like BPMN.iO, Camunda or other possible future modellers, ECA is a robust system for building conditionally triggered action sets.