Michael Babker

So Drupal 7 Long Term Support is a thing. Specialized agencies are promoting the LTS of Drupal 7, but I have questions. Drupal 7 on PHP 8 is a science project, not a strategic approach, and PHP 7.4 is no longer supported; most hosting providers will cease offering it by the end of 2026. Most D7 long-term support SLA's only support PHP versions that were supported at the time of D7 EOL, which stops at PHP 7.4. Is the real end of life for Drupal 7 when PHP 7.4 is no longer available? I know there's Backdrop, but that too feels like a bridge, not the future. If you are running an important, strategic, scalable, or enterprise-grade Drupal 7 site, consider upgrading to Drupal 10 or 11, or consider a decoupled approach with Next.js and Drupal sooner rather than later. Chapter Three can help you navigate these decisions and guide you in upgrading and modernizing.

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I hate disparaging others but apparently this came up on Drupal Planet so I must. The article from "Drupal life hack's" with url drupal com ua has an article Object-Oriented Form API in Drupal 11. This has nothing to do with reality. Absolutely none. There's not a single thing in there which corresponds to a committed change. Please consult the change notices instead: "New Object oriented approach for working with form/render arrays" and "Widget elements can be written using object oriented approach".

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Drupal folks are everywhere! Former Drupal folks anyway. Over the last few days several people I know from the Drupal community have shown up on the front page of Hacker News. They weren't talking about Drupal. They've moved on to other things. Miguel Jacq released Enroll, a tool for importing existing servers into Ansible. This morning Mattias Geniar's post entitled "Web development is fun again" was sitting in the top 20. He discusses how AI has removed the need for deep domain knowledge, which in turn has made "web dev fun again". If it is a day ending in y, then Jeff Geerling is probably on the front page of the orange site. This was confirmed by him coming in second in the "The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025" rankings.

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🐘 "PHP Grew Up. Did You Notice?" PHP in 2024 was a completely different language than the one you're making fun of. I get it. The old jokes write themselves. mysql_query(). Global state everywhere. $_POST['whatever']. I lived through that era too. I have the scars. But here's the thing, while a lot of us moved on and kept dunking on PHP from the sidelines, the language kept shipping. Quietly. Consistently. Every year. PHP 8.0 brought named arguments, match expressions, and union types. PHP 8.1 brought enums, fibers, readonly properties, intersection types. PHP 8.2 brought readonly classes, new random APIs, and a serious cleanup of the deprecation backlog. That's not maintenance. That's a language that's actively evolving. Over the next few weeks I'm going to walk through the features I wish I'd paid attention to sooner. Not with docs-style explanations, just real examples of how they changed the way I actually write code day to day. If you still think PHP is stuck in 2009, stick around. I think you'll be surprised. Feature 1: Readonly Classes You were writing 3 files to do what one keyword now does For years, making a truly immutable object in PHP felt like a punishment. You'd write a class, make all the properties private, write a constructor, write a getter for every single property, add a docblock, hope nobody on the team did something creative with reflection... and then do it again for the next DTO. Every. Single. Time. PHP 8.2 just added readonly class and I genuinely felt a little embarrassed about how much boilerplate I used to write. The readonly modifier on the class means every single property is automatically readonly. No setters. No accidental mutation. No defensive getters. You can still make properties public because nothing can change them after construction anyway. This is the kind of feature that makes your DTOs, value objects, and API response models genuinely pleasant to write. I've refactored probably a dozen classes since this landed. Each one got shorter. None got worse. What pattern do you use for immutable data transfer objects? Still doing the old approach? #PHP #PHP82 #WebDevelopment #CleanCode #PHPGrewUp #BackendDev #BackendDevelopment

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You don't need to hire a software farm for anything anymore. You need one developer who sits next to you for 6 weeks and learns how your business runs. Not how it looks in a deck. How it actually runs. The messy inbox system. The Notion doc nobody follows. The 4-step process your EA does manually every morning. A good AI developer, someone who works in n8n, Claude, and modern automation tools, turns that into systems that run without you. We placed one with a 12-person e-commerce brand. In 8 weeks he'd automated their order exception workflow, their influencer outreach follow-up, and their weekly reporting. The admin team is being trained in AI. Those that don’t adopt are gone. 3 tasks. Each one was eating 6-8 hours a week from someone on the team. That’s money in your pocket. 416h per year. That’s almost a full quarter's worth of work. A dev shop's savings don't matter if they can't ship. Ours do. I wrote more on this on more detail in the blog linked below: https://lnkd.in/gVpWJGZw DM me if you have been seeing AI happening in front of you and want to know how you can avoid missing out.

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Now works with LocalGov Drupal (or any CMS for that matter - more here: http://jadu.net/lgr) For councils running #LocalGovDrupal, the challenge of helping residents quickly find the right service or answer is a familiar one. Traditional search often falls short, and most AI chatbots are clunky, impersonal, and expensive to train and run. AgentEx: Search from Jadu now works seamlessly with #LocalGov #Drupal, bringing powerful agentic AI search directly into your website, without the need for annoying chatbots or complex technical integrations. With just a short implementation, it transforms your existing search box into an intelligent digital assistant that understands natural language, speaks over 70 languages, and delivers task-focused answers in real time, 24/7 and accessible to everyone. Why this matters for Drupal users? The LocalGovDrupal community also prioritises accessibility, reuse, and cost-efficiency. AgentEx: Search fits naturally into this ecosystem, offering councils a way to bring #AI to their residents without compromising on those values. Especially important in light of Local Government Reorganisation and the opportunity for much needed service reform. As councils merge or collaborate across shared services, websites often become more complex. Residents just want to know when their bins are collected, how to apply for school places, or where to find support. AgentEx: Search uses your existing content to deliver accurate, accessible responses instantly, guiding people to tasks, not just pages. (more about LGR: http://jadu.net/lgr ). Agent-Ex: Search is the single front-door for newly re-organised councils. Unlike generic AI tools or external scraping solutions, AgentEx: Search is trained on your site’s actual content. It doesn’t invent answers or rely on vague matches, it reads your structured data and delivers it back as plain-language responses that align with your brand and meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards. Crucially, it’s not a chatbot. There’s no awkward pop-up to dismiss. It enhances your search bar with AI-powered intelligence that users trust, presented in a way that feels familiar. Whether a resident types or speaks their query, AgentEx: Search responds quickly and clearly, in their language and with a clear call to action. Many authorities don’t have the time, resources or budget to overhaul their site or retrain editors. That’s where AgentEx: Search shines. It integrates quickly with LocalGov Drupal, requires no manual tagging or AI expertise, and brings immediate value by reducing contact centre load and improving customer satisfaction. More: http://jadu.net/agent-ex Nick Hill Helen Olsen Bedford Dipti Amin Lee Russell Mark Say Mark Chillingworth Mike Gifford, CPWA Simon Gray Richard Beards #localgov #localgovdrupal #ai #agents

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