Conversations with other people in the Drupal community, and related communities, has been a continued source of inspiration for me. Back in September, in a discussion at the San Francisco Drupal Users Group, someone mentioned a Backdrop module that uses Javascript to automatically format dates and times in the timezone of any visitor using Javascript.
One of my early Drupal mentors, Khalid Baheyeldin, used to say that a big part of the value of working with open source software is the freedom to scratch your own itch. And if, as a community, we pool those improvements, we can have free software that's always evolving and getting easier to use.
Few people who read my occasional scribblings on here will know that for a brief but glorious period of time I played men's roller derby. In fact, during my tenure I was assistant captain for the local team, and through a series of unfortunate events blew out my knee during tryouts for the national men's team. Anyone who knew me growing up would have never thought I had any business even participating in national tryouts for an athletics team (except maybe bowling), but in a number of the tests I held my own, and it's a memory I will always cherish.
It's been a while since I shared an update on how Smart Date is evolving, so I thought I should do a rundown of some of the recent features and developments. Even people using the module every day may not be aware of all the changes, unless they've been combing through the release notes.
My work on the Smart Date module began with a simple idea: make managing dates and times in Drupal as easy as users have come to expect in using popular calendar applications. Many of the ideas for features and improvements built into the module have come from the community: recurring events, calendar integration, timezone handling, and many more.
It’s well understood that a robust, API-first Content Management System (CMS) is a crucial part of a Composable Enterprise. What’s discussed less often is the degree to which the implementation approach for the CMS can also contribute to the key ideals of a Composable Enterprise: being able to quickly innovate, evolve, and adapt to changing market conditions.
When we think about how to make a Drupal website load faster, we often focus on how to make Drupal render the pages faster: optimizing queries, caching entities, and so on. But out of the box Drupal has several layers of caching enabled by default, and many popular Drupal hosts have additional systems in place like memcached and Varnish to further enhance the overall page load. In practice, the load of the page itself is often a small fraction of the overall time and data needed for a visitor to view a page.
Something I've enjoyed since starting work on the Smart Date module has been seeing it grow and evolve in ways I wouldn't have expected, in response to the community. I had three specific goals in the beginning: a more "app-like" and intuitive widget, natural language, deduplicated date range output, and more efficient storage of dates and times. Soon after its release, requests started to come in for additional features: calendar integration, repeating events, support for timezones, and more.