Australia's top tier Drupal development agency

Recently, we worked on a project for Catholic Schools NSW, where one of the key requirements was controlling access to content. Some pages and resources needed to be available only to authenticated users, while the rest of the site remained publicly accessible. 

That requirement didn’t stop at the website itself, but it also extended to search. Authenticated users needed to see protected content in their results, while anonymous visitors should only see public content. 

This presented an interesting challenge. In a decoupled architecture, search doesn’t automatically inherit Drupal’s access controls, so we needed a way to make search permission-aware without compromising performance. We used OpenSearch to build a solution that ensured users only saw content they were authorised to access, while keeping the search experience seamless. 

Drupal 11.4 is here. Several features landing in this cycle, and across the broader 11.x series, trace back to ideas we explored in contrib first. Worth noting too: Drupal major releases don't introduce new features. The real architectural work happens in the minors, and by the time 12.0 arrives, much of it will already be available, paving the way for the next series of improvements in 12.x.

Here's what we've been working on, and what else is worth knowing about.

Nathan walks us through why security doesn't have to mean trading time against deliverables.