Talking Drupal #471 - Off The Cuff #9

Today we are talking about Freemium Drupal Modules, The WordPress
hub-bub, and Drupal, Now with AI with our hosts. We’ll also cover
FullCalendar as our module of the week.


For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/471
Topics

Freemium Drupal

Wordpress controversy

Drupal CMS and AI

Resources

Dries Wordpress Blog Post

Non-Code Contribution: Using your passion and skills to power
open source.

DrupalCon Barcelona Driesnote

Drupal AI

Guests Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Aubrey Sambor - star-shaped.org starshaped
Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu


Brief description:

Have you ever wanted an interactive calendar to display
your Drupal events with drag-and-drop rescheduling, and
without using jQuery? There’s a module for that.



Module name/project name:

FullCalendar



Brief history

How old: created in Sep 2010 by ablondeau, though I’ve
been behind the most recent releases

Versions available: 7.x-2.0 and 3.0.0-beta2 versions
available, the latter of which supports Drupal 10 and 11



Maintainership

Actively maintained, latest release was this morning

Security coverage, though technically the 3.0.x branch
will have it once it’s stable

Test coverage, minimal but on the roadmap

Documentation - does have a user guide, but created for
the D7 version, so newer documentation is needed

Number of open issues: 337 open issues, none of which are
bugs against the 3.0.x branch



Usage stats:

3,388 sites, though the vast majority of those are for
the D7 version, since the 3.0.x branch is very new



Module features and usage

No jQuery!

Lots of configurability plus some extras specifically for
Drupal

Drag-and-drop to alter events

Option to require confirmation

Can display toast-style notifications when updates
are save

Double-click on a day or time to create an event at
that time

Can display events from different content types, even
if they use different fields to store dates, and yes,
even different kinds of fields, so a mixture of core and
Smart Date fields will work

You can set default colors and output type (block or
the newer, list-item display), and the ability to
override color based on content type or a taxonomy
reference



This module had been essentially dormant for over 4
years, but I decided to work with Jürgen Haas on reviving it
after a similar and popular project called Fullcalendar View
was not only marked as “Minimally maintained” and
“Maintenance fixes only”, but the project page directed users
to contact the maintainer to pay for a premium version, in
order to use the current version of the Fullcalendar JS
library, or to load events via AJAX, which as been an
often-requested feature because Fullcalendar View has had
common reports of performance problems on sites with lots of
event data.

Worse, the maintainer has closed as “won’t fix” issues
that had community-provided patches, because he only wanted
to provide said improvements in the paid, premium version

In my work on the Events recipe for Drupal CMS, I knew
that having a solid calendar would be important, and I didn’t
feel good about relying on a module that seemed to be pushing
users more and more towards a paid model. I’m grateful to
Jurgen and everyone who worked on FullCalendar before us for
creating such a robust and extensible code base