Thunder release: Improved sitemap generation

There is a new Thunder release: With it, we drastically improve the sitemap generation, simplify the image upload a bit and are finally ready for PHP 8!

First things first: We’ve spent a lot of effort on improving the sitemap generation speed. We saw on larger sites, that generating the sitemap took about 30 minutes and consumed a lot of memory. We reduced that generation time to 3 minutes and heavily reduced memory usage, as well. Additionally, the sitemap generation does not include clearing the entity cache anymore.

More information about those fixes can be found in the release notes of simple_sitemap 3.10: https://www.drupal.org/project/simple_sitemap/releases/8.x-3.10

If you experience similar problems with the sitemap generation, we urge you to update and set the config value entities_per_dataset in simple_sitemap.settings configuration to a value that fits your circumstances. It will be set to 50 by default, and that will already give you huge performance boosts, but depending on your server configuration you might try and increase this value to gain even better performance.

We have considered the sitemap innovations to be very relevant and have therefore shipped them in both Thunder 3 and Thunder 6. If you are still using Thunder 3, please note that support for Drupal 8 and therefore also for Thunder 3 will end on November 2, 2021.

There are two more new features for Thunder 6: With this release, the distribution is ready for PHP 8, the current standard. PHP 7 is still supported until November 2022.

We've also made an adjustment that may seem small but will hopefully improve editors' lives a bit: When an image is uploaded via the dropzone, the image's filename is automatically set as the filename in Drupal. This behaviour was previously only available in image galleries when multiple images were uploaded at once and has now been adopted for single image uploads at the request of Burda editors.

Release Thunder 6.1.2: https://www.drupal.org/project/thunder/releases/6.1.2
Release Thunder 3.5.8: https://www.drupal.org/project/thunder/releases/8.x-5.8