January is always a time of conclusions. We evaluate a past year, remember its best moments, and hope that the new year will bring us even more positive moments. It’s also a time of different rankings. We at Vardot decided to contribute to the good vibe of the community by going through the best articles of the last year according to BuzzSumo and choosing those ones that had a better feedback from you. The blog post you read now lists, in ascending order, the 12 most shared articles about Drupal in 2016.
12. Happy birthday Drupal (924 shares)
On Drupal's 15th birthday, the community celebrated with an infographic that reminisces about the significant events and achievements in the past year. No open source project can survive and
even thrive for so long without a vibrant community. Scroll through the article and you will feel the urge to attend that next DrupalCon in some exotic location.
11. Drupal founder sets up Acquia Labs to research the future of the web (958 shares)
Celebration of the past 15 years aside, Dries Buytaert is never complacent with his brainchild. He is already thinking ahead and inventing the next-generation web user experience. To that end, Dries set up Acquia Labs to engage in R & D. If he has his way, the web of the future won't be browser based, and page views will be a thing of the past. The next generation of user interaction will be voice-controlled, visual in the style of VR (Virtual Reality) or AR (Augmented Reality), and adaptable to user situations.
10. Improving collaboration with forks (1.1k shares)
The success of the open-sourced Drupal project hinges on the collaboration of a large community of developers to enhance and customize the product. Drupal developers collaborate by writing and sharing code. When an upstream developer modifies code that has been previously forked, the changes often need to be propagated downstream in a controlled manner. This article is a brief introduction on pull requests created from a fork. You will find the link to a longer guide at the end of the original article.
9. Several critical remotely exploitable flaws found in Drupal modules, patch ASAP! (1.5k shares)
The Panama Papers refer to 11.5 million private financial documents which were leaked from a Panamanian law firm. These documents collectively implicate 72 current and former heads of state in fraudulent activities such as tax evasion. The leak was caused by vulnerabilities in Drupal and WordPress, two leading content management systems (CMS). Drupal site administrators did well for heeding the call of this article to patch the known vulnerabilities.
8. Drupal: 15 years old and still gaining momentum (1.7k shares)
This is a blog post written by Dries Buytaert on the day of the 15th anniversary of releasing Drupal 1.0. It gives us a glimpse, from the firsthand perspective, of the path the Drupal project has taken over the years. Dries even recounted some product decisions he made, both rightly AND wrongly, over that time period. He shared about his own professional development as a result of this journey, and his renewed commitment to building a better and safer web for all.
7. Panama Papers hack: Unpatched WordPress, Drupal bugs to blame? (1.8k shares)
The author of this article plays the role of investigative reporter on the Panama Papers leak. It discusses 2 possible entry points for the intruder (or intruders) into the Panamanian law firm's computer systems: a public WordPress website and a customer-only Drupal portal. Both installations were running outdated and unpatched versions of the respective CMS software at the time of the leak. The author advocates keeping your systems up-to-date in this article. He praises WordPress for automating security updates, and then chastises Drupal for lagging behind in this crucial process.
6. Is this how a hacker got the Panama Papers? (2.3k shares)
It is very difficult to pinpoint, without access to the system log files, how an intruder hacks into a web system. But, that does not stop the author of this article to put forth hypotheses in the Panama Papers leak, even identifying the plugin that may be the culprit. Site administrators should read this article for the long list of things that the Panamanian law firm did wrong, so that they can avoid making the same mistakes.
5. The security flaws at the heart of the Panama Papers (2.4k shares)
This is the Wired magazine's report on the Panama Papers leak. The article distinguishes itself from other similar reports because it conducts its own primary research. Specifically, it cites both named security experts and anonymous sources alike. It is obvious that this article does not target a technical audience. However, it compensates for the lack of technical depth by offering breadth in its research. It covers some lesser reported probable causes for the leak, including the possibility of it being an inside job.
4. From encrypted drives to Amazon's Cloud - the amazing flight of the Panama Papers (2.7k shares)
The Forbes article tells a great story, not on what can possibly cause the Panama Papers leak, but rather on what actually happens after the leak. After the hacker with a pseudonym of John Doe handed over the papers, the journalists had a huge problem in their hands: one with a volume of 11.5 million documents and 2.6 TB in size. The huge database had to be encrypted for confidentiality, and, at the same time, be accessible to a horde of journalists around the world. In addition, powerful text analysis tools were required to help make sense with that many documents. This article is a good read to find out how the journalists solved their big data problem with open-source solutions.
3. Five ways to speed up Drupal 8 sites (2.8k shares)
This article lists 5 ways to optimize the speed of a Drupal 8 website. Many of the tips are new and specific to Drupal 8 installations.
2. Panama Papers: Email hackable via WordPress, docs hackable via Drupal (3k shares)
WordFence is a leading web security company, and this article is their take on the Panama Papers leak. It illustrates how an intruder can potentially hack into the unpatched WordPress server hosting the Panama Papers, and from there, gain access to the corporate email server. It also summarizes how the outdated Drupal installation makes it easy for hackers to break into Drupal and steal documents.
More to this topic: 5 security modules that every Drupal website must have
1. How to configure your Drupal 8 ARM template deployment to Azure using existing MySQL Server (4k shares)
The most shared article about Drupal in 2016 explains the parameters required to configure Drupal 8 on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.
The end of 2016 marks the first full year of Drupal 8.0 after its official release. With the buzz surrounding a major new release and some high-profile security flaws, the Drupal community was very active during the year. We are looking forward to more interesting blog posts in 2017. Don’t forget to share those ones you like most!