In the community

The Scenario On a recent client website, I needed to programmatically load and render 3 blocks. Plugin blocks to be precise. In modern Drupal, there are 3 types of block you can load/render: Content blocks Config blocks Plugin blocks And today we're interested in plugin blocks. Plugin blocks are blocks defined by the block plugin API in Drupal. They typically extend the BlockBase class and reside in a modules src/plugin/Block directory. Now, with that in...

Sass @import rules are deprecated and will be removed in Dart Sass 3.0.0. Using Sass >= 1.80 and wanting to shush those @import deprecation notices with minimal effort? Or ready to upgrade towards 3.0.0 ? There was a nice clear notice , with a decent explainer. But you want a quick 1-2-3, so keep reading 🙃 It should take you minutes, not hours. Do the upgrade They made a lovely cli tool to help us...

When a client has a need or idea that other people might benefit from, it's a great opportunity to contribute a module back to the community. I recently created the new Autocreate Access module to solve a problem on a project where Drupal's autocomplete tagging widget for taxonomy terms didn't work as our client expected. Typically, Drupal sites utilise this field widget to allow users to create new categories for their content on the fly...

Fighting spam is an ongoing arms race. There will always be nefarious attempts to post unwanted content onto websites, that's just the nature of the global internet nowadays, but can we keep ahead of it? Some techniques are complex, maybe using AI / natural language processing, but there are also quite simple opportunities to reject spam. We had a lot of contact requests come into our site that used the Cyrillic script - which is...

I've started working on maintaining Views Data Export again. I've decided to document my work in 2 week 'sprints'. And so this article is about what I did in Sprint 2. Sprint progress At the start of the sprint in the Drupal.org issue queue there were: 91 open bugs 17 fixed issues. 81 other open issues That's a total of 189 open issues. By the end it looked like this: 48 open bugs 4 fixed...

As explained in the previous article in the series I've started working on maintaining Views Data Export again. I've decided to document my work in 2 week 'sprints'. And so this article is about what I did in Sprint 1. Sprint progress At the start of the sprint there in the Drupal.org issue queue there were: 204 open bugs 276 other open issues. So that's a total of 480 open issues. By the end it...

Views data export is a module that's in use by over 100,000 sites but hasn't been maintained very well by me over the years. This is the story and the plans for getting back into healthy maintainership.

We use platform.sh to host many of our client Drupal sites, and many of those sites use Solr. In this guide we talk through quickly matching the Solr configuration used by platform.sh and DDEV.

We recently went through the process of applying for Cyber Essentials. Cyber Essentials is a program created by the UK government to help businesses get on top of their Cyber security. It was an interesting process for us to go through, and certainly helped us to formalise and document practices we had been doing for years. We did hit a bit of a blocker tho for our developers, specifically on point A7.6 Use of Administrator Accounts...

Keeping a PaaS product online at all times comes with a high level of responsibility. In early 2024 we set up a proof of concept setup with Cloudflare, which would allow us to make a significant ongoing cost saving whilst also playing with some really cool APIs.