In the community

Drupal is lucky to benefit from a very active community of developers meaning that there is a wide and varied range of contributed modules to extend the functionality of Drupal core. In this article we’ll take a quick look at 10 interesting contributed modules; some are well known whilst others are a little bit more obscure. 1. Admin menu (D7) / Admin toolbar (D8) Out of the box the Drupal admin interface can be a...

Websites need to look pretty and be blazing fast. That often means lots of beautiful high-quality images, but they can be pretty enormous to download, making the page slow to load. Images are often one of the 'heaviest' parts of a website, dragging a visitor's experience down instead of brightening it up as intended. If a website feels even a tiny bit unresponsive, that tarnishes your message or brand. Most of us have sat waiting...

Update: Since writing this article the EOL of Drupal 7 has been extended from November 2021 until November 2022. Your current website/platform is built on Drupal 7 and news has hit your ears about 7’s end of life (EOL). Maybe your website is a Drupal 8 website and you want to know what the future has in store for you. Good news is, you don’t have to do anything immediately, but it is definitely a...

Drupal receives security updates several times a year, and we always apply them as soon as possible. Since Drupal security issues can make the headlines, it's important that site owners know that their site is secure and up to date - it provides for peace of mind and for pride in an excellent site. We decided this year to ensure that clients know about security updates to Drupal Core on their site. Via a quick...

Last night saw the popular EU Cookie Compliance module fall from grace, as the Drupal community discovered that numerous inputs in the admin form were not being sanitised. To me, this shows some serious failings in how our community is handling security awareness. Let's do some fixing :) ### 1) We need to make this OBVIOUS, with clear examples One of the most important things when trying to get people to write secure code is...

Drupal empowers site builders and editors to configure their sites in settings forms. Configuration management lets developers push changes up to live sites to be imported. But developers have to be considerate to ensure imports will not wipe out those changes made directly through the live sites' settings forms. At the least, they have to export the changes before making further tweaks. But admins may make further changes in the meantime too, so developers can...

ABJS is a contrib Drupal module, and, without any requirements or ties to paid services, is as low cost as you can get. As we’ll see, it’s pretty basic but it really lets you get down to building your own understanding of how A/B testing works. The beauty of ABJS is in its simplicity. The settings pages are fairly self-explanatory, which is really helpful. Let’s set up a basic A/B test to show how things...

If you need to do some A/B testing at minimal cost, this is our quick overview of the available options that we found. There are some powerful free options, and some free trials for some superb products. As with all things, the free options come with limitations that mean that for some circumstances it may be totally worth paying up for the right product/service. Free is not always better, and paid is not always better...

We've heard of test-driven development, behaviour-driven development, feature-driven development and someone has probably invented buzzword-driven development by now. Here's my own new buzzword phrase: review-driven development. At ComputerMinds, we aim to put our work through peer reviews to ensure quality and to share knowledge around the team. Chris has recently written about why and how we review our work. We took some time on our last team 'CMDay' to discuss how we could make doing peer reviews better. Here's some of our thoughts. Many of them are essentially answers to this question: Why is reviewing hard? How can we make it easier?

Anyone familiar with the Drupal core development lifecycle will know that presently the Drupal community supports two major versions at any one time: the current major release and its immediate predecessor. This means that at ComputerMinds we are currently helping our clients support and develop both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 sites. So the obvious question that we get asked is ‘when is it time to upgrade’? We can’t properly answer this question without bringing...