Articles · Page 10
Notes from the team.
Where is my content coming from?
I was asked at Drupalcamp London how to identify where parts of a panel come from. Whether you need to change something on a site you inherited, are looking to trace your steps back on something you created long ago, or need to understand how to fix a colleague's mistake, it…Read article →Drupal 8: Creating a custom field - Part 3: Field formatter
This is part 3 in my series of articles about creating a custom field. I recommend reading Part 1: Field type and Part 2: Field widget first, if you have not done so already.Read article →Drupal 8: Creating a custom field - Part 2: Field drupal widget
This is part 2 in my series of articles about Drupal widgets, and specifically creating a custom field. I recommend reading Part 1: Field type first, if you have not done so already.Read article →Drupal 8: Creating a custom field - Using a custom field
Having written articles on how to create a Drupal 8 field type, field widget and field formatter I thought that now is the time to explain why you might want to create a custom field type. More specifically, why I have created a custom field.Read article →Drupal 8: Creating a custom field - Part 1: Field type
I have been experimenting with the Alpha release of Drupal 8 and so I'm sharing some of my experiences so that you can avoid the pitfalls I have encountered.Read article →Place blocks inside your content with EBA
Previously on this website I have written about rendering blocks programmatically and adding things to content to be managed alongside fields. It's time to combine the two! On many projects, we find ourselves needing to render a block consistently across all content of a…Read article →You should use Entity cache
If you have a Drupal 7 site, then you should be using the Entity cache module, here's why:Read article →Drupal Job Scheduler : Easily scheduling periodic tasks
Sometimes as a module developer you need to have some code execute periodically, like maybe every day or even once a week. This might be to optimise an external system, or pull in some external data or to compute some statistics every day etc. Drupal provides a very simple way…Read article →Automated deployments using Aegir
There are a few write-ups about using Aegir to automate your deployment process notably one from Mig5: Zero-touch Drupal deployment with Jenkins, Aegir, Git, Fabric and Drush. I recently wanted to set this up for our own project, but felt like I could make some improvements.Read article →Puppet and Vagrant dream team
Sorry if you are expecting the 'solution' to be given in this post, but this is basically a brain-dump of where I'm at with this problem, and my thoughts on how I might go about solving it.Read article →Guard livereload
Livereload is one the coolest things to happen to frontend development in the last little while, and actually it can really speed up your work. Basically it re-loads your CSS (and Javascript some of the time) automatically as you make changes. You don't have to make a change…Read article →Dnsmasq
When developing we tend to use a lot of different domains to do our work on, I typically will use the .drupal top level domain, so my project URLs look something like:Read article →Making the Flag Module's Confirmation form use AJAX
This article discusses how we can use a combination of techniques to take the standard 'Confirmation Form' provided by the Flag module and get it to load in a modal window rather than on its own page. We'll also extend this form slightly to allow the user to include some…Read article →Render a block programmatically
This is a real quick one, but so useful! We often want to render a block within content, perhaps as part of a node (maybe in hook_node_view, and then made configurable like a field), but there's no obvious way to do this correctly for any block. Drupal normally renders its…Read article →Creating Facebook Canvas Apps & Page Tabs
Facebook integration is obviously starting to become a de facto requirement with most web development projects. In most cases the requirements are reasonably straight forward and involve nothing more than including a ‘Like’ button on content, but what about actually adding your…Read article →Custom add another
Drupal 7 fields are great, but using multiple valued fields and field collection you can quickly reach the point of having a form that looks like this:Read article →Add stuff to a node and configure it like fields
UPDATE: The Extra Field and Extra Field Settings Provider modules facilitate doing this sort of thing in Drupal 8. Read on for older Drupal sites, and for the concepts behind this.Read article →Quick tips: Adding an empty master branch
When I create a git repository for a new project on Drupal.org I don't bother to create a master branch, branches named 6.x-1.x or 7.x-1.x have special meanings and are the ones that we're encouraged to use. However, drupal.org doesn't allow us to change the default branch on…Read article →Create a Drupal ajax link in Drupal 7 (it's easy)
In this example we have a table listing log entries of some kind. We want to put a delete link against each log entry allowing the administrator to delete the log entry:Read article →Drupal Entity Token Module
The Entity token module is part of the Drupal Entity Module package, it provides lots of new tokens to use everywhere that tokens are currently available. It does this by being aware of the structure of fields on entities and exposing extra options for fields that reference…Read article →Drupal Science Camp - The results
Drupal Science Camp was the first Drupalcamp in the UK of 2012. It was wonderfully organised by Rachel Lawson and Euan Bayliss at a magnificent venue provided free of charge by Napp Pharmaceuticals Limited.Read article →Using the Drupal overlay for non-admin paths
Drupal 7 ships with a module called 'Overlay', it is installed by the standard install profile and actually is pretty great for most people. If you don't know what I'm talking about then, it's this:Read article →Drupal Science Camp - 21st & 22nd January - Cambridge (UK)
If you are free on the weekend of the 21st and 22nd and are anywhere near Cambridge (the UK one!) then make your way to the Drupal Science Camp. The details on their website are a little sparse so far, but it's shaping up to be an interesting little event - plus ComputerMinds…Read article →Monitoring Varnish
We put almost all of our Drupal sites behind the excellent Varnish HTTP accelerator, and it gives us a massive performance boost for most site visitors. However it seems to have a tendency to crash without warning and occasionally just dies, leaving our sites down.Read article →Let's talk
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