Talking Drupal #493 - Drupal Developer Survey

Today we are talking about The Drupal Developer Survey, Last
year's results, and How it helps Drupal with guest Mike
Richardson. We’ll also cover HTMX as our module of the week.


For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/493
Topics

What is the Drupal Developer Survey

How often does it come out

How did it come to be

What type of information does it collect

Do you look at other surveys

What were some of the most interesting stats last year

Core contributors

How do you expect last year to compare to this year

Do you think the outlook will be more positive with Drupal
CMS

Drop off in Drupal 7

Home users

DDEV usage

AI questions

Security questions

Resources

Drupal Developer Survey 2024 Results

2025 Drupal Developer Survey

HTMX Sucks

Guests

Mike Richardson - Ironstar Dev Survey richo_au
Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Andrew Berry - lullabot.com deviantintegral
MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu


Brief description:

Have you ever wanted to replace Drupal’s AJAX
capabilities with a lightweight library that has no
additional dependencies? There’s a module for that.



Module name/project name:

HTMX



Brief history

How old: created in May 2023 by wouters_f though recent
releases are by fathershawn of Memorial Sloan Kettering
Cancer Center

Versions available: 1.3.5 and 1.4.0, both of which
support Drupal 10.3 and 11



Maintainership

Actively maintained, latest release less than a month ago

Security coverage

Test coverage

Documentation included in the repo as well as online

Number of open issues: 3 open issues, 1 of which is a bug



Usage stats:

92 sites



Module features and usage

To use HTMX, you need to attach the library to the render
array of one or more elements where you want to use it, and
then add data attributes to your render array that indicate
how you want HTMX to react to user behaviour

HTMX can help make your Drupal sites more interactive by
dynamically loading or reloading parts of a page, giving it a
more “application-like” user experience

There is a planning issue to discuss gradually replace
Drupal’s current AJAX system with HTMX, and a related Proof
Of Concept showing how that could work with an existing
Drupal admin form

A number of elements in the current AJAX system also rely
on jQuery, so adopting HTMX would also help to phase out
jQuery in core. HTMX is also significantly more lightweight
than JS frameworks like React

HTMX is really a developer-oriented project, which is why
I thought it would be appropriate for this week’s episode