Talking Drupal #566 - DrupalEasy: Responsible Drupal AI

Today we are talking about Drupal, AI, and learning to use it responsibly with guest Mike Anello. We’ll also cover Entity Mesh as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/566

Topics

• Course overview
• Fast moving modules
• Inside vs outside AI
• No code approach
• Keeping curriculum current
• Essentials vs add ons
• Chat Claude Code setup
• Inside vs Outside AI
• Rules and Provider Calls
• Guardrails in Drupal UI
• Model QA and Testing
• Local Models and Costs
• Token Budgets and Logging
• Course Use Cases Overview
• RAG and Vector Basics
• Class Schedule and Pricing
• AI Predictions and Wrap

Resources

• New DrupalEasy class: Responsible Drupal AI Basics
• Training at orlando
• amazee ai
• Jrockowitz losing my skill
• AI module ecosystem
• AI browser provider (LLM in Google Chrome)
• amazee.ai Private AI Provider
• Derecho

Guests

Mike Anello - drupaleasy.com ultimike

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
JD Flynn - dorficus

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted a way to analyze and visualize the ways in which the content on your Drupal site is interlinked? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Entity Mesh
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Jan 2025 by Jorge Tutor (gedur) of Metadrop
  • Versions available: 2.1.0 and 2.0.3, both of which work with Drupal 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release last month, and a commit just yesterday
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation? Project page is pretty descriptive
  • Number of open issues: 13 open issues, 4 of which are bugs, but 2 of those were marked fixed in the past week
• Usage stats:
  • 437 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With Entity Mesh installed, the module will analyze the rendered output of your nodes using a chosen account, looking for links to other content
  • That means it will find not just links in entity relationship fields, but also links within formatted text, menus, and more
  • The results can be visualized in a D3.js 3D visualization, displayed as a table, or exported as a CSV
  • The report also exposes a set of Views-style filters, to help you narrow down to the specific set of information you want to understand
  • Entity Mesh analyzes the DOM of your rendered nodes, looking for links, iframes, and images. Internal paths are further analyzed and categorized, for example based on whether the specified path redirects, is broken, points to something that is access-denied, and so on
  • From a marketing perspective, that allows you to understand the paths available to navigate from a source page to a target page, the content linked to or from a specific page, and will also augment the content deletion confirmation form to advise the user of any existing links to the content being deleted
  • There are obvious SEO advantages to being able to find redirect chain, broken or access denied links, and there are GDPR compliance implications for being able to identify iframes that might load third-party cookies
  • The project page also mentions that this module could be very useful to run after a content migration, for QA
  • The actual analysis of your site content be triggered by drush, an admin form, or by cron, and you can set limits on the size of the batch to run, because of the weight it puts on your site by rendering every node it analyzes
  • The current versions Entity Mesh also depend on the Entity Registry and Entity Render Context modules, that have essentially the same maintainers, so if there’s only part of Entity Mesh that you really need, you could also give those a look
  • Back in episode #321 we covered Entity Usage, and there are some definite similarities, but also some differences. While they both provide reporting on content relationships, Entity Usage does so by examining structured field values at save time. So, the information gathered is different, and collects data that can be displayed in views or custom code.