Talking Drupal #434 - Talking Drupal

Today we are talking about te show itself. We’ll also cover Autosave Form as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
www.talkingDrupal.com/434

Topics

• Update on the show
  • Guest hosts
  • MOTW Correspondent
  • Newsletter
• Sponsorship
• Open Collective
• Content
• New content in 2024
• Expanding team

Resources

• Open Collective

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Stephen Cross - stephencross.com stephencross

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted an autosave feature on your Drupal site’s forms, so content creators won’t lose their work if they accidentally close the window or lose power? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Autosave Form
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Nov 2016 by Hristo Chonov of 1x Internet, who is also one of the organizers of Drupal Dev Days 2024 in Burgas
  • Versions available: 8.x-1.4 which works with Drupal 9 and 10
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, most recent comment less than 3 months ago
  • Test coverage
  • 38 open issues, 20 of which are bugs
• Usage stats:
  • 6,414 sites
• Module features and usage
  • Works by automatically saving the content of the current form every 60 seconds, though the time period is configurable
  • When a user opens a form, if an autosaved state exists for that form a dialog will be shown asking if they want to resume editing or discard any autosaved states
  • Once a form is submitted, any saved states will be automatically deleted
  • Notionally it should work with both content entity forms and config forms, but the majority of development and testing has been with entity forms in mind
  • The project page also mentions an issue with nested entity reference inline forms, and has links to relevant Drupal core issues
  • Worth noting that this module uses AJAX to save the states to the Drupal database, separate from entity revisions
  • If you want a solution that save form states into the browser’s localStorage instead, you can check out the Save Form State module, using the jQuery Sisyphus plugin