In the community

OSX's Spotlight tool made searching files and starting tasks a dream. That dream, though, still had space for more. What if you could execute commands from Spotlight? Or do *really* clever things? Cue Alfred, stage left.

Everyone has their preferred command shell. The bravest amongst us probably has some highly customised craziness, and the more unsure probably are using the plain mac Terminal. Somewhere in between, though, lies a world of fun that really should be explored. There are some great tools out there, and one of our favourites is Zsh. Zsh is a shell that encapsulates all of BASH, and then a whole load of useful, 'standard' and 'other' features...

I'll keep this short and sweet, but we thought this would be a useful tip to share with the world as a potential security issue with the combined use of File::getFileUri() and FileSystem::realpath(). Consider the following code excerpt : $file = File::load($some_file_uri); if ($file) { $uri = $file->getFileUri(); $file_realpath = \Drupal::service('file_system')->realpath($uri); } Seems pretty harmless right? Load up the file from $some_file_uri , If we have a valid file then get the URI and then...

There is a whole world of functionality that opens up when your editor can not only edit your code but understand it, and that's why we use PHPStorm. Read on for some thoughts, advice and tips for getting the most out of your IDE.

The other day, I shared with the office that I was really blown away by Steve T's Zsh tip about installing a plugin that gives you a desktop toast notification when a long-running command in a zsh terminal completes. So astounded I was, that I declared that we should put our heads together and share companywide our top tools and tips. No longer should the most useful things be kept quiet, and no longer shall...

Update: this article's suggested method has serious shortcomings, use other methods when you can! For example, run the following with drush to just upgrade drupal core code (leaving database updates to be run separately): drush pm-updatecode drupal --check-updatedb=0 If you've got a Drupal site, which you need to update quickly (for example, to address last night's security advisory!), here's a tip. Run this from the command line: curl 'https://github.com/drupal/drupal/compare/7.59..7.60.patch' | patch -p1 This assumes your...

A client noticed the dates on their news articles were not being translated into the correct language. The name of the month would always appear in English, even though all the month names had themselves been translated and showed correctly elsewhere. The problem turned out to be down to the twig filter being used in the template to format the date. This is what we did have: ```twig {% set newsDate = node.getCreatedTime|date('j F Y')...

The Problem I imagine many of us have been there: there’s some CSS class in your markup, and you need to do something with it. Maybe you want to remove it, change it, or perhaps alter its style declarations. “Easy peasy,” you think, “I’m a developer. I got this.” And so you should. Next, if you’re anything like me, your first instinct is to fire up your search tool of choice and search your...

Let's say you've built a custom form for your Drupal 8 site. It contains various elements for input (name, email address, a message, that kind of thing), and you want to send the submitted values in an email to someone (perhaps a site admin). That's a pretty common thing to need to do. This could be done with Drupal's core contact forms, webforms, or similar -- but there are cases when a bespoke form is...

I volunteered to carry out the migration for the new ComputerMinds site as migration was one of the very few areas of Drupal that I hadn’t delved into thus far. With Drupal 8 becoming more and more popular, now was a great opportunity to learn the migration ropes. Luckily, Drupal 8’s migration has greatly improved since Drupal 7 so my life was made somewhat a little “easier”! This article will be aimed at some of...