For the past two years I’ve been working on something less visible but no less important.

Since DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019 (an actual in-person conference — sounds surreal in 2021, doesn’t it?!) I’ve been working on Acquia Migrate Accelerate, or “AMA” for short. In a few days, another DrupalCon Europe is starting … so perfect timing for a recap! :D

Why?

Drupal 8 comes with an awesome migration system built in, originating in the Migrate Drupal 7 module. It standardized many migration best practices. But it still required a huge time investment to learn it.

Of course, there’s the “Migrate Drupal UI” (migrate_drupal_ui) module in Drupal core. But that does not allow for granular migrations. It allows for a one-shot migration: you see which things will be migrated and which won’t. You can click a button and hope for the best. It only works for the very simplest of sites. It is impressively minimal in terms of the code it needs, but unfortunately it also means one pretty much needs to be a expert in migrations to use it successfully.

It will be of little help as soon as you run into important data you want to migrate for which no migration path exists.

Mateu, Gabe and I agreed to sunset the API-first initiative, about which I’ve written a lot in 2016–2019.

We’ve all spent countless hours on it — Gabe and I were able to work on it mostly full time, Mateu contributed an incredible amount of his free time to get the API-first initiative and the JSON:API module ecosystem in particular to where it is today.

I learned a lot from these two lovely people, and we also had lots of laughs!

API-first Drupal with multiple consumers @DrupalConNA :D pic.twitter.com/GhgY8O5SSa

— Gábor Hojtsy (@gaborhojtsy) April 11, 2018

Mateu wrote a great retrospective, which is a superb way to end this project. Quoted here in full:

On 7 January, 2020, the Drupal module JSON:API 1.x was officially marked unsupported. This date was chosen because it is exactly 1 year after the release of JSON:API 2.0, the version of JSON:API that was eventually committed to core. Since then, the JSON:API maintainers have been urging users to upgrade to the 2.x branch and then to switch to the Drupal core version.

We understand that there are still users remaining on the 1.x branch. We will maintain security coverage of the 8.x-1.x branch for 90 days. That is, on 6 April, 2020, all support for JSON:API, not in Drupal core, will end. Please upgrade your sites accordingly.

Thanks to my fellow maintainers Gabe Sullice and Mateu Aguiló for writing this announcement!

2007 is the year of my first DrupalCon, and the year the #1 most wanted end-user feature was Better media handling. 2019 is the year that Drupal will finally have it. Doing things right takes time!

Back then I never would’ve believed I would someday play a small role in making it happen :)

Without further ado, and without using a mouse:

The text editor assisted in producing this HTML:

<p>Let's talk about llamas!</p>

<drupal-media alt="A beautiful llama!" data-entity-type="media" data-entity-uuid="84911dc4-c086-4781-afc3-eb49b7380ff5" class="align-center"></drupal-media>

<p>(I like llamas, okay?)</p>

If you’re wondering why something seemingly so simple could have taken such a long time, read on for a little bit of Drupal history! (By no means a complete history.)

Drupal 8.7 was released with huge API-First improvements!

The REST API only got fairly small improvements in the 7th minor release of Drupal 8, because it reached a good level of maturity in 8.6 (where we added file uploads, exposed more of Drupal’s data model and improved DX.), and because we of course were busy with JSON:API :)

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

1. JSON:API #2843147

   Need I say more? :) After keeping you informed about progress in October, November, December and January, followed by one of the most frantic Drupal core contribution periods I’ve ever experienced, the JSON:API module was committed to Drupal 8.7 on March 21, 2019.

The JSON:API module was added to Drupal 8.7 as a stable module!

See Dries’ overview of why this is an important milestone for Drupal, a look behind the scenes and a look toward the future. Read that first!

Upgrading?

As Mateu said, this is the first time a new module is added to Drupal core as “stable” (non-experimental) from day one. This was the plan since July 2018 — I’m glad we delivered on that promise.

This means users of the JSON:API 8.x-2.x contrib module currently on Drupal 8.5 or 8.6 can update to Drupal 8.7 on its release day and simply delete their current contributed module, and have no disruption in their current use of JSON:API, nor in security coverage! ¹

As promised 3 months ago, Gabe, Mateu and I together with twelve other contributors shipped support for revisions and file uploads today!

What happened since last month? In a nutshell:

Mateu, Gabe and I just released JSON:API 2.0!

Read more about it on Mateu’s blog.

I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. I’m excited to see more projects use it. And I’m confident that we’ll be able to add lots of features in the coming years, without breaking backwards compatibility. I was blown away just now while generating release notes: apparently 63 people contributed. I never realized it was that many. Thanks to all of you :)

I had a bottle of Catalan Ratafia (which has a fascinating history) waiting to celebrate the occasion. Why Ratafia? Mateu is the founder of this module and lives in Mallorca, in Catalunya. Txin txin!