The planning for a 4.0 release of Smart Date began towards the end of 2021, but there were still lots of opportunities to fix bugs and add features without going to a major release. In the end, the need for a major release was triggered by Drupal 10, though in actuality by its updated PHP dependency, to use a minimum version of 8.1.
Towards the end of 2021 I had an idea: what if Drupal could expose content in a grid, similar to what users might be used to in database GUIs like Sequel Pro or Sequel Ace? I was able to put together a simple proof of concept, and the Autogrid module was born.
Anyone who has ever gone through the process of trying to maximize their site's Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights score will have seen suggestions to increase the cache lifetime of static assets: at least 1 year for assets like images and fonts, and at least 1 month for assets like CSS and Javascript files.
There are a number of great reasons to consider a headless architecture for a web project. I sometimes hear site speed listed as a primary motivation. Is a headless website guaranteed to be faster? Let's explore this idea.
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.