Our favorite power tips for using Drupal
Several writers shared their advice for how to use Drupal effectively. These are the articles our community found most engaging.
Drupal is a very powerful web content management system that powers a host of websites. Webmasters and other web content writers can leverage web content systems like Drupal to create websites quickly and easily. Because it's such an important tool, technical writers need to know their way around Drupal and what Drupal can do for them.
Several of our writer community shared their advice for how to use Drupal effectively. These are the articles we most enjoyed reading:
What's new and cool in Drupal 10.1
Nadiia Nykolaichuk shared this excellent overview of the latest version of Drupal, released in June 2023. Nadiia highlighted features including Single Directory Components (SDC), debugging and caching settings, autoformatting, the revamped Actions bar, and updated user experience. If you use Drupal, you can't miss reading this overview of the new features.
Leveraging AI in Drupal websites
Generative text AI like ChatGPT can boost productivity, including creating web content. Drupal already has a growing number of free modules that can enhance your website with AI in a variety of ways. The potential enhancements include content generation as well as using AI to augment your content with generated metadata. Martin Anderson-Clutz shared this how-to article about how to use AI to generate content and metadata for your website.
Images and data displays help to highlight information and present very visual material in a way that readers will find engaging. But images can be large, and loading a bunch of images on a web page can slow down your website and reduce the end user experience. Nadiia shared this how-to article about how to use a feature called "lazy loading" so images that appear "below the fold" get loaded as the user scrolls down to them.
Well-built navigation is essential for the user experience and the overall success of a website. Simple, logical, and descriptive menus significantly increase content discovery, boost conversion rates, and benefit SEO. The Drupal web content management system offers easy and intuitive ways to create and manage menus. Menu management is more seamless in Drupal 10 which features a modern, accessible, and user-friendly theme. Nadiia shared this article about how to manage menus effectively in a Drupal-driven website.
Configuring roles and permissions in Drupal
Drupal has a robust system of roles and permissions enabling you to specify at a granular level what users can do on your website—from editing content to administering Drupal updates. Giving sufficient but not excessive permissions to the right users is vital for enhancing your Drupal website’s security. Nadiia provided this tour of how to configure roles and permissions using the Drupal administration UI, both with the Drupal core options and with some useful contributed modules.