If there is more wind or sunshine on a given day, the usage of gas and/or coal goes down, making the grid greener. At night, energy usage is lower, but there is also no solar energy. So depending on wind speed, the grid can be clean or dirty. This fluctuates throughout the day. Power at night remains a dogged problem, since there’s no sunlight at night and the wind typically tends to also be less powerful overnight, at least in Amsterdam, where our server is located. At night, power still comes from a mix of sources, leaning more towards non-renewable power. Each year, the web host checks the actual CO₂ usage for the pas year, and compensate through paying to have trees planted.

We were paying $54/month to Cloudways for a Digital Ocean server with 4 Gb RAM, 2 CPUs, 80 Gb storage, and 4 Tb transfer. Unfortunately, none of the underlying hosting companies Cloudways uses are trying particularly hard to reduce energy consumption. The only one that seems to be doing something is Google Cloud, but that would have increased our hosting costs 50%. Most hosting companies that purport to be green do so via energy credits. That includes companies like Google Cloud and Greengeeks.com (probably the most widely used sustainable hosting company stateside).

It was important to me that this be done with as much actual renewable energy as possible, and not just credits. While researching green web hosts I found the Green Web Foundation’s directory to be a handy resource. I looked for Virginia and US options first, but settled on a Dutch web host named Greenhost. I chose Greenhost because it gets power from wind energy and other renewal sources, and the grid in the Netherlands is using a strong and growing mix of renewables compared to many places.

Now we pay just $44/month, for a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Since this is a VPS, we need to manage the operating system manually, whereas the Cloudways hosting is a managed cloud server. The VPS approach allows fine-grained control over the server. It also comes with a reverse DNS; something Cloudways does not provide. That has caused issues for some of our customers’ email setup, because the lack of that reverse DNS caused domain reputation issues due to some blacklists flagging the lack of a reverse DNS record.

In the near future we will be moving all of the sites we manage to this new hosting, and as we set up new sites for customers or change their hosting, we will promote the use of 100% sustainable hosting.

In addition to green hosting, we also use Cloudflare to further reduce server resource utilization, by keeping bots and bad actors from hitting our server. I encourage others to think about their hosting choices. There are good sustainable options out there.

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This post is a follow-up on one I wrote last August; Drupal 11 is Out – What This Means for Drupal Site Owners.

Drupal 11 has now been out for nearly a year. Drupal 10 will reach its end of life (EOL) on December 9, 2026, which coincides with the release of Drupal 12.

We manage many Drupal sites, almost all of them on version 10, and can report that many modules now have D11 versions. There are some stragglers, and those tend to be modules with complex issues to overcome, e.g. third party library dependencies that might clash with changes in Drupal core. In other cases they are modules that aren’t super widely adopted and are reliant on a very small team of people volunteering to get a D11 release out. We help on these issues where we can, in the spirit of open-source, and are credited on 54 issues to date. At the rate of D11 releases I have observed, I expect many D10 sites to be able to update to 11 by year’s end, well ahead of schedule.

Drupal CMS

Drupal CMS was released January 15th, on Drupal’s 24th birthday. Drupal CMS is a packaged, recipe-driven experience built on Drupal 11, aimed at making Drupal easier for non‑technical users without sacrificing its core power. Recipes are a kind of building blocks (of code) used to preconfigure Drupal CMS. Drupal has a robust configuration import/export system using .yml files, and recipes are built using .yml as well.

What’s great about Drupal CMS is that it provides a way for site builders, marketers, and web developers to start a Drupal site quickly. In the past, Drupal had a reputation for complexity, and when compared to WordPress, setting up a Drupal site and getting it launch-ready took longer than with WordPress.

Drupal CMS boasts a much faster setup, and makes it worth a look when considering a site’s long term needs, since Drupal does offer an excellent architecture, plus contributed modules that do things WordPress can’t. Drupal CMS (and D10/D11) themes still use Twig, so theming still isn’t as easy as with WordPress, but that tradeoff is often worth it for sites with complex enough needs. You could start a site with Drupal CMS, and then down the road when your needs get more complex, you can customize it, since it is still just Drupal under the hood. Best of both worlds.

The post Update on Drupal 11 and Drupal CMS appeared first on Plethora Design.

Casper Voogt is featured in this latest episode of the long-running Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast:

1072: ALL of the things our websites NEED to succeed w/ Casper Voogt.

LISTEN ON

The post ALL of the things our websites NEED to succeed: Wantrepreneur to Entrepeneur Podcast 1072 appeared first on Plethora Design.

The post Drupal CMS: a New Version of Drupal Aimed at Marketers and Website Builders appeared first on Plethora Design.

“From mastering HTML in the late ’90s to building a thriving web development agency, Casper Voogt’s journey in today’s Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight showcases the power of strategic pivoting and relationship-building. His transition from a 9-5 job to running a successful web development business demonstrates how side hustles can evolve into flourishing enterprises. With clients ranging from small businesses to government agencies worldwide, Casper’s story illustrates how staying adaptable with technology trends while maintaining a personal touch can lead to sustained entrepreneurial success.”

Read the blog post

The full interview is available here

The post Casper Voogt Featured in Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Podcast Blog appeared first on Plethora Design.

The most important thing to know about keywords is that it’s based not on hidden settings (as used to be the case 10, 20 years ago), but on the text the user actually sees on the site.

The easiest ways to boost specific words or phrases

The post SEO Keyword / Keyphrase Basics for Site Owners appeared first on Plethora Design.

• Recipes enable applying complex configuration with recipes
• Workspaces provide a robust content staging workflow on your production site
• Single-Directory Components enable simplified front-end development

You can read more about what’s new in 11 this drupal.org post.

Drupal 10 has long term support (LTS), meaning it will be supported until Drupal 12 is released, which is expected in 2026. Drupal. This gives Drupal 10 users considerable time to update to Drupal 11. A decent portion of popular modules now have D11 versions, so for some site owners it may already be possible to update to D11.

Drupal 8 and 9 are no longer supported, and sites running those versions should update to D10 or D11 as soon as possible. The update from D8 to D9 is a more challenging than later updates.

Drupal 7 has long-term support until January 5, 2025, when it reaches endo-of-life. After that it will receive no further security updates. Sites still on D7 should really have switched off of that a while ago, but still have time to make the switch. Read more about Drupal 7 end-of-life

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Drupal 10 was released December 15th, 2022.

Since then, many (but not all) contributed modules have released Drupal 10 compatible versions. This past year we have updated a fair number of Drupal 9 sites to 10, including some sites that started their lives on Drupal 7 (which we migrated to Drupal 8 and later updated to Drupal 9). That being said, there are still some contributed modules that don’t have Drupal 10 versions, or that have ‘release candidate’ / “rc”, beta, alpha, or dev versions (often requiring manual patching). We can help you update your sites to Drupal 10; reach out if you’d like our help on that.

Below are some more technical details of things you might run into trying to update from Drupal 9 to 10:

If you’re needing to update to Drupal 10 ASAP but are being held back by modules that aren’t yet Drupal 10 compatible, consider whether you can uninstall and remove any of those modules. Maybe you don’t absolutely need those, or maybe you can do without them for a while. For the ones you absolutely need, you will need to update them (ideally) to module versions that support both Drupal 9 and 10. That isn’t always possible; some modules’ Drupal 10 versions do not support Drupal 9. In such cases there is a handy Composer trick (for developers) to require one of several versions. let’s imagine a Drupal module named some_module with a D9 version 1.x and a D10 version 2.x. In this case it would require editing composer.json manually and adjusting the module line in the “require” code section as follows:

“drupal/some_module”: “^1 || ^2”

After that, depending on your setup, you may need to delete the module folder and run “composer install” from whichever folder contains your composer.json file.

Why use the above trick? If you don’t, updating to Drupal 10 will be harder, and will require manually changing the module version number *at the same time you update your site to Drupal 10*, making your update that much harder. It’s easier to update the modules to compatible versions first, and update Drupal core last. Speaking of which, you can use the handy Upgrade Status module to monitor your site’s readiness for the next major Drupal version.

Our policy for production sites has been to only update to proper numbered release versions and avoid pushing “rc” / beta / alpha / dev versions live. There have been exceptions, for example when a module release many iterations of beta versions and those get very good test coverage / developer eyeballs, and it’s obviously going to take a long time for a full release. In such cases I feel better about using it in production, but it’s still not something I prefer to do.

Feel free to reach out if you get stuck or need help. We have managed Drupal sites since the Drupal 6 days and can help get you updated to the next version.

The post Drupal 9 Support Has Ended: Are You Ready for Drupal 10? appeared first on Plethora Design.

This gives Drupal 7 site owners an extra 14 months to either migrate to Drupal 10 or rebuild their sites with another system, such as WordPress. We do site migrations; feel free to get in touch!

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Drupal does not generally support automatic updates, though work is being done to enable automatic Drupal core updates. That won’t work for Drupal 8+ installations using version control, though, which is probably a majority of Drupal 8+ sites. I will be discussing automatic WordPress updates from here on.

WordPress offers automatic updates on plugins as well as WordPress core. WordPress core supports automatic updates on minor as well as major versions. In fact, minor core updates are enabled by default and can only be disabled via custom code or special plugins. It also supports automatic updates on plugins.

The Pros

Plugins and minor core updates will simply update when they need to. Major core updates will still require manual attention unless you want to automate those as well, but that’s a bad idea since those can come with breaking changes.

The Cons

• Plugin and minor core updates can introduce bugs, and you may not notice those bugs until later… sometimes so late that your backups are useless. Figuring out what is causing the bug can sometimes mean considerable time time has to be spent solving the issue.
• Automatic updates also mean you lose the chance to check each plugin’s release notes, which might contain important information that can save your site from downtime.
• One example of such bugs: manual updates that some plugins need after they receive updates, for example Elementor, which often needs a human to go to Elementor > Tools > Regenerate Files & Data after Elementor has been updated. If that is not done, it can result in very public layout problems.
• On a similar note, if your site is using caching plugins, ideally those caches would be purged immediately after plugin updates, but that does not always happen with automatic updates, which can also result in strange-looking layout (missing CSS files etc) until someone goes in and clears it manually.

Our Approach

In most cases we manually update all plugins and major WordPress core versions, noting which we updated and from what version to what version. This gives us a log of what was changed, allowing us to check our logs to find out what changed and when; that cuts down on the time it would take to solve an issue with an update. We also will run such updates on a staging site first, if one is available.

If the project is under version control, this is also noted in the commit message. In some cases we enable automatic updates on certain plugins, or maybe all plugins in rare cases where we know we have reliable backups going back far enough, or if the site owner is OK with the potential for occasional downtime due to automatic update related breakage.

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