[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on May 15, 2020]

There is a lot of excitement in the Drupal community about the release of Drupal 9. In particular, one of the most appealing elements is how the transition to Drupal 9 promises to be the easiest major upgrade in more than a decade.

In reminiscing with other community members about some painful upgrades from long ago, it got me thinking about how the nature of the majority of Drupal modules has changed.

One of the strengths of Drupal has long been its ability to easily model complex content architectures. The ability to quickly configure and manage a variety of content types with distinct collections of fields and other configurations makes Drupal an excellent choice for structured and robust handling of a multitude of different kinds of data.

When I think about the admin experience of Drupal, I often think about context. 

As a longtime Drupal user, it's easy enough for me to know that wherever I am in a Drupal site, there's a predictable spot in the admin menu where I can select a content type and start creating content. For people new to Drupal, or even new to the concept of managing website content, this is nowhere near as obvious. Training will help, but we can also employ the principle of multimodal interaction to provide additional options in ways that will be more obvious.

The JAMstack seems to be what's getting a lot of press lately, but there's actually a lot to be excited about in the Drupal technology stack of late.

Something I've been passionate about for a while has been the admin experience we create to support the sites we build in Drupal. I remember a while ago noticing that particularly for site I was building for less technical clients, I would often spend at least as much time making the content editor experience easy to use as I spent on the public face of the site.

There were a few key principles that guided me:

As part of my recent work in setting up a Raspberry Pi as a web server, I came across mention of the Cockpit project as an easy-to-use, browser-based UI to help manage your web server.

The idea: set up an inexpensive Raspberry Pi as a web server, for personal projects.