Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #575 - The Drupal Advocacy Program

Today we are talking about Drupal Advocacy, Non-Code Contribution, and the future with guest Tiffany Farriss. We'll also cover Better Social Sharing Buttons as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/575

• Tiffany New DA Role
• Sustaining Drupal Next 25
• Time Box And Priorities
• Three Bucket Strategy
• Fixing DA Finances
• Transparency And Trust
• Trust Through Transparency
• What Advocacy Solves
• Why Reputation Lags
• From Scattered To Focused
• Beyond The Drupal Bubble
• Problem First Storytelling
• Proof Over Promotion
• Scaling Non Code Contributions
• Funding Drupal Sustainability
• Success Metrics

• Drupal Advocacy Program

Tiffany Farriss - association.drupal.org farriss

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Tim Sharp - tea-sharp

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to let visitors share your content on social media, without loading any tracking scripts or third-party JavaScript? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Better Social Sharing Buttons
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Aug 2018 by Joery Lemmens (flyke), though recent releases are by Shelane French (shelane)
  • Versions available: 5.0.0, which works with Drupal 10.1, 11, and 12
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release in July, adding Drupal 12 support
  • Security coverage
  • Number of open issues: 17, 5 of which are bugs against older branches
• Usage stats:
  • 8,347 sites
• Module features and usage
  • Supports 16 services, including Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Reddit, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Telegram, and email, plus handy extras like print and copy link
  • Each button is just a plain link to that service's share URL, opening in a new tab. No trackers, no external API calls, no ad servers
  • That's a nice win for performance, and for privacy and GDPR, since nothing third-party loads until a visitor actually clicks
  • You can place it as a block, as a pseudo field on nodes or paragraphs, or call it from Twig with Twig Tweak
  • The global settings form lets you enable services and drag them into order, and each block instance can override that list, the icon set, and the sizing
  • The module comes with two icon sets: colored squares, which become round if you set the radius to 100%, or flat icons you can color with a CSS fill. The colored set also exposes CSS custom properties, so you can re-brand it from your theme
  • The icons are minified SVGs in a single sprite, so they load once no matter how many buttons are on the page
  • There's also a per-node submodule: enable it per content type, and editors with the right permission get a checkbox to turn sharing on or off for individual nodes
  • Under the hood it's nearly all Twig, one template partial per service, with just a little JavaScript for copy link, print, and Bluesky. Copy link even uses an aria-live region to announce the confirmation to screen readers
  • The block uses the current page's URL and title, so it works on user and term pages too, while the field version shares the node's own URL and title
  • Developers can tweak what gets shared with an alter hook on the block's items
  • Caveats: Facebook Messenger needs a Facebook App ID, and Metatag is recommended so services get proper Open Graph previews, and if a service changes its share URL format, the module needs an update
  • Back in episode #548 we covered Social Media Links, and the two look similar: both give you a block of social network icons, with a choice of icon sets. But they solve opposite problems. Social Media Links is "follow us": it links out to your own profiles, using URLs you configure in the block or a field. Better Social Sharing Buttons is "share this": it builds each link on the fly from the current page's title and URL. So plenty of sites could use both