Talking Drupal

In a Talking Drupal Cafe conversation, Stephen Cross chats with recent Talking Drupal Guest Host, Tim "Tea Sharp," a relatively new Drupal user at Appalachian State University, starting with a light discussion about a 3:00 PM drink before digging into Tim's path from sustainability science and design through nonprofit work, WordPress site building, and finally Drupal in higher ed. Tim describes learning Drupal 7, discovering Views, and then helping his team manually consolidate hundreds of departmental subdomain sites while migrating to Drupal 10 using a product approach and a shared distribution initially built with Lullabot. He discusses training and documentation for non-technical site managers, professional development through DrupalCon Atlanta and Drupal Camp Asheville, interest in Drupal AI for tasks like alt text generation, and aspirations to keep speaking, contribute more, and improve module discoverability and documentation.
For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/cafe021
Topics
Finding Talking Drupal
From Sustainability to Design
Pandemic Pivot to Web
WordPress Site Builder Era
Discovering Drupal at App State
Drupal 10 Rebuild and Consolidation
Team Structure and Iteration
AI in Drupal Workflows
Upgrade Blockers Cleared
Aspiring Drupal Speaker
Raycast Productivity Talk
Stage Fright Reframed
Posting Beyond Comfort
Finding a Username
Joining Talking Drupal
Better Module Discovery
Open Source Burnout Lessons
Why More TD Cafe
Final Encouragement
Tim Sharp
Tim is a self-taught Web Developer at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. At App State, he works with a team of developers to support over 300 websites. Tim is passionate about community organizing and recently became a co-organizer of Drupal Camp Asheville.
Stephen Cross
Stephen is the founder of Talking Drupal and Drupal Developer.
Guests
Tim Sharp - tea-sharp
Stephen Cross - stephencross

Today we are talking about Drupal Advocacy, Non-Code Contribution, and the future with guest Tiffany Farriss. We'll also cover Better Social Sharing Buttons as our module of the week.
For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/575
Topics
Tiffany New DA Role
Sustaining Drupal Next 25
Time Box And Priorities
Three Bucket Strategy
Fixing DA Finances
Transparency And Trust
Trust Through Transparency
What Advocacy Solves
Why Reputation Lags
From Scattered To Focused
Beyond The Drupal Bubble
Problem First Storytelling
Proof Over Promotion
Scaling Non Code Contributions
Funding Drupal Sustainability
Success Metrics
Resources
Drupal Advocacy Program
Guests
Tiffany Farriss - association.drupal.org farriss
Hosts
Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Tim Sharp - tea-sharp
MOTW
Correspondent
Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Brief description: Have you ever wanted to let visitors share your content on social media, without loading any tracking scripts or third-party JavaScript? There's a module for that.

Module name/project name: Better Social Sharing Buttons

Brief history How old: created in Aug 2018 by Joery Lemmens (flyke), though recent releases are by Shelane French (shelane)
Versions available: 5.0.0, which works with Drupal 10.1, 11, and 12

Maintainership Actively maintained, latest release in July, adding Drupal 12 support
Security coverage
Number of open issues: 17, 5 of which are bugs against older branches

Usage stats: 8,347 sites

Module features and usage Supports 16 services, including Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Reddit, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Telegram, and email, plus handy extras like print and copy link
Each button is just a plain link to that service's share URL, opening in a new tab. No trackers, no external API calls, no ad servers
That's a nice win for performance, and for privacy and GDPR, since nothing third-party loads until a visitor actually clicks
You can place it as a block, as a pseudo field on nodes or paragraphs, or call it from Twig with Twig Tweak
The global settings form lets you enable services and drag them into order, and each block instance can override that list, the icon set, and the sizing
The module comes with two icon sets: colored squares, which become round if you set the radius to 100%, or flat icons you can color with a CSS fill. The colored set also exposes CSS custom properties, so you can re-brand it from your theme
The icons are minified SVGs in a single sprite, so they load once no matter how many buttons are on the page
There's also a per-node submodule: enable it per content type, and editors with the right permission get a checkbox to turn sharing on or off for individual nodes
Under the hood it's nearly all Twig, one template partial per service, with just a little JavaScript for copy link, print, and Bluesky. Copy link even uses an aria-live region to announce the confirmation to screen readers
The block uses the current page's URL and title, so it works on user and term pages too, while the field version shares the node's own URL and title
Developers can tweak what gets shared with an alter hook on the block's items
Caveats: Facebook Messenger needs a Facebook App ID, and Metatag is recommended so services get proper Open Graph previews, and if a service changes its share URL format, the module needs an update
Back in episode #548 we covered Social Media Links, and the two look similar: both give you a block of social network icons, with a choice of icon sets. But they solve opposite problems. Social Media Links is "follow us": it links out to your own profiles, using URLs you configure in the block or a field. Better Social Sharing Buttons is "share this": it builds each link on the fly from the current page's title and URL. So plenty of sites could use both

Today we are talking about the UN, Open Source, and Drupal with guests Tim Lehnen & Henry Poole. We'll also cover Live Update as our module of the week.
For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/574
Topics
What Is UN Open Source Week
Why Open Source Fits UN Goals
Who Attends and What Tech Is There
Conference Audience and DPI DPG
Drupal as a Digital Public Good
UN Uses Drupal at Scale
Why Attend and What to Gain
Upstream First Contracting
Open Procurement Curriculum
Reaching Procurement Conferences
Steering Spend Upstream
Funding Open Source Legally
Talking Louder Beyond Drupal
Digital Sovereignty Explained
Governance Values Matter
Fixing Funding Perception
Community Next Steps Closing
Resources
Appalachia
Omar Mohsine
Digital public infrastructure - DPI
Digital public good - DPG
ShareIT act Agencies need to use open source
PDF: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-17951/pdf/COMPS-17951.pdf

Ditap
NCMA
Sovereign tech agency
Palantir blog
Eva black - Four opens
FSF - Four freedoms
Drupal's open web manifesto https://www.drupal.org/association/open-web-manifesto
https://openwebsitealliance.org/charter.html#open-web-manifesto

Guests
Henry Poole - civicactions.com henry-poole
Tim Lehnen - drupal.org hestenet
Hosts
Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Tim Sharp - tea-sharp
MOTW
Correspondent
Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Brief description: Have you ever wanted parts of your Drupal pages, like blocks, views, or notifications, to update in real time without a page refresh, and without having to stand up extra infrastructure to do it? There's a module for that.

Module name/project name: Live Update

Brief history How old: created in Sep 2026 by Alessandro Feijó (afeijo) of Mindcore
Versions available: 1.0.0-alpha6, which works with Drupal 11 and 12

Maintainership Actively maintained, latest release just a week ago
No security coverage yet, since it was just created and only has alpha releases
Test coverage
Documentation: a detailed README, plus a roadmap doc and a built-in demo page
Number of open issues: none

Usage stats: 14 sites

Module features and usage Live Update positions itself as a generic real-time event layer for Drupal: modules publish events to named channels, and browsers subscribed to those channels update just the affected part of the page
Out of the box it uses plain HTTP polling back to Drupal, every 5 seconds by default, so it works on pretty much any host with no extra services
The transport is pluggable, though. Set it to automatic and it'll try WebSockets first, then an experimental Server-Sent Events submodule, then fall back to polling
For site builders, the base module adds an "Update this block live" checkbox to any block in the block layout, no code needed
There's also a whole suite of submodules: live-refreshing Views displays, single-entity updates, user presence blocks like "who's viewing this page", a notification bell with toasts, queue progress monitoring, remote JSON API tables, and an admin dashboard with an event monitor
One I think editorial teams will like: Live Update Form, which warns you when someone else is editing the same content you are
For developers, publishing is one line, a liveupdate_publish() helper or an injectable service, and on the front end you can either use data attributes in your markup or subscribe through a small JavaScript API
Every channel is access-controlled, and modules can weigh in on who's allowed to subscribe through by implementing hook_liveupdate_channel_access()
Under the hood, events are stored in their own database table with an optional time-to-live, and expired ones get cleaned up on cron. Polling clients just ask for anything newer than the last event ID they saw
There's a solid set of Drush commands too, including one to publish a test event straight from the command line, which is handy for debugging
Caveat: this is very new and still alpha, so I'd treat it as one to watch and experiment with rather than deploy into production today
And if polling isn't enough for you, there's a companion project, Live Update Go: https://www.drupal.org/project/liveupdate_go
It's the push transport Live Update is designed around. A small Drupal module, plus a standalone gateway written in Go that gives browsers a native WebSocket connection
Drupal stays in charge: it checks channel access, hands the browser a short-lived signed token, and sends signed events to the gateway, which fans them out to connected clients
You run the gateway as its own service, with systemd or Docker, behind a TLS reverse proxy. The README is very clear that you shouldn't try to launch it from PHP
It can scale horizontally using Redis or Valkey pub/sub, one gateway can serve multiple Drupal sites with isolated tenants, and if it ever goes down, Live Update falls back automatically and switches back once it recovers
Same maintainer, created at the start of October, and also alpha, with an alpha1 release and one reported site so far

Today we are talking about Drupalcon Rotterdam, Canvas and evaluating modules. We'll also cover Revision Graph as our module of the week.
For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/573
Topics
DrupalCon Rotterdam recap
AI summits and training
FrankenPHP app servers
Driesnote highlights
Advocacy and WordPress
Rosetta Sprint and MCP
Canvas multilingual and headless
3Frameworks And Voiceover
Canvas And SDCs
Headless And Signage
Drupal 12 Beta Testing
Rector And Deprecations
PHP 8.5 Requirements
Rethinking Module Evaluation
AI And Commit Scale
Module Discoverability
0Distributions Versus Recipes
Resources
Wordpal
Core metrics
Hosts
Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Tim Sharp - tea-sharp
MOTW
Correspondent
Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Brief description: Have you ever wanted to see a node's revision history drawn like a Git graph, with each translation as its own branch? There's a module for that.

Module name/project name: Revision Graph

Brief history How old: created in Sep 2019 by Shibin Das (D34dMan) of Factorial
Versions available: 4.0.0, which works with Drupal 11 and 12, and 3.1.1 for Drupal 10 and 11

Maintainership Actively maintained, 4.0.0 landed in mid-August after two alphas the same week
Security coverage
Test coverage
Documentation: a solid README plus in-depth technical and revision-model docs in the repo
Number of open issues: zero open issues

Usage stats: 242 sites

Module features and usage With the module installed, every node gets a Revision Graph tab, right next to the core Revisions tab
One row per revision, one lane per language, so you can see when a translation branched off and how it's evolved since
Each dot tells you two things: a solid ring means that revision was live at some point, a dashed ring means it's a draft that never was, and a filled center means it's what that language is serving right now
It works with Content Moderation if you have it, showing your workflow states as text badges with whatever names your site uses, and adapts cleanly when you don't
Reverts, and edits made from the published version while a draft is pending, show up as forks instead of a straight line
Under the hood: Drupal doesn't actually store which revision a new one was derived from, so the module adds a small base field that records it at presave
Older revisions don't get backfilled, on purpose, since reconstructing that would mean guessing. Those edges are inferred, and the graph draws inferred edges differently from recorded ones, so it never implies more precision than it has
So on an existing site, make sure you run drush updb after enabling it
Ships a distinct color for all 95 language codes Drupal knows, so it looks good out of the box, but you can override a lane's color or the fallback palette in config
The graph loads in pages as you scroll, so long histories render quickly, and it's keyboard navigable, ARIA-labelled, and works in forced-colors mode
Great for editorial teams on multilingual sites, and handy for compliance or auditing when you need to answer "what was live, and when?"
Caveats: it's nodes only, and for obvious reasons a user will need the "view all revisions" permission to see the graph

Today we are talking about PHP, Open Source, and Sustainability with guest Elizabeth Barron. We'll also cover AI Image Classification as our module of the week.
For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/572
Topics
What is the PHP Foundation
Language Health Challenges
Paid Core Developers
Release Infrastructure
Foundation Role and Perception
Docs and Onboarding
Elizabeth Open Source Journey
Future of PHP Ecosystem
Listener Elephant Question
Ecosystem Security Hub
Advisory Board Limits
Modernizing Mailing Lists
Foundation Awareness Push
PHP Ambassadors Strategy
State of PHP Survey
Five Year Vision
Community Hour Podcast
php.net Design Refresh
Resources
The PHP Foundation
Derek Rethans xdebug
Infrastructure
https://github.com/derickr

Drupal advocacy
Link to community hour podcast
Php 8.5
Contribute to php article
Guests
Elizabeth Barron - thephp.foundation elizabethbarron
Hosts
Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Tim Sharp - tea-sharp
MOTW
Correspondent
Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Brief description: Have you ever wanted the images in your Drupal media library to be automatically given alt text, a rich description, and a set of tags, using AI? There's a recipe for that.

Module name/project name: AI Image Classification

Brief history How old: created in Sep 2025 by Artem Dmitriiev (a.dmitriiev) of 1xINTERNET
Versions available: 1.1.1, which requires Drupal 11.2 or newer

Maintainership Actively maintained, latest release and commit just two weeks ago
Security coverage
Number of open issues: 9 open issues, 4 of which are bugs

Usage stats: No usage data reported

Module features and usage This recipe applies core's image media type recipe, then adds a description field and a tags field to image media, with tags in a new "Image Classification" vocabulary
Editors get a "Generate Alt Text" button right on the image field, using the Field Widget Actions module, with a prompt written like an accessibility expert: under 100 characters, no "image of", flag logos and graphics
On save, a vision model writes a description of up to eight sentences: colours, photo versus illustration, people, mood, and key objects, using the media name for context
Tagging is chained off that description rather than the image itself, picking or creating up to five short, general terms, and reusing similar existing tags where it can
It also adds bulk actions to the media admin view, so you can run description and tagging across an existing library, not just new uploads
Description and tag filters are added to the media library, including the widget, so editors can search for "sunny summer day" right in the image picker
The stated bigger goal is making images discoverable by RAG and other AI search, so good descriptions become a foundation for future AI features. In fact, this recipe is a dependency for the Canvas AI Image Search recipe, which is still a work in progress
Under the hood, images get scaled to 400px wide and converted to PNG before they're sent to the model, which keeps things faster and cheaper
One caveat: your site needs an AI provider with a default "chat with image vision" model, and the recipe checks for that when it's applied
Also worth a look: the description prompt asks the model to describe people's age, gender, and ethnicity, and even name them if it can, so you may want to review that prompt for your privacy policies, and adjust accordingly
Like any recipe, it provides a robust starting point for some compelling features, and every prompt and setting can be tweaked after you apply it
Lastly, I wanted to mention that in today's Driesnote in here in Rotterdam, Dries demoed being able to use MCP to search images on his own site. A recipe like this could help you make sure the images in your media library have sufficient metadata to make that work reliably