Article
Posted on 12th January 2021
Takes about 5 mins to read
Update! Since this article was written, a new 'lenient' composer endpoint has been created on Drupal.org to support using modules with Drupal 9 that haven't been marked as compatible with it yet. See the documentation, which boils down to adding a new common entry under 'repositories' in your composer.json, above the usual https://packages.drupal.org/8 one. The rest of this article is still useful for understanding how patching fits into composer's workflow. The vast majority of community-contributed...
Article
Posted on 16th June 2020
Takes about 4 mins to read

There are some key files like robots.txt and .htaccess which are often tweaked for Drupal websites. These can be considered part of the 'scaffolding' of a site - they control the way the site works, rather than its content or design. Any new release of Drupal core that includes changes to them specifically mentions that they need updating, as those changes may have to be merged with any customisations made on your site. For example...

Article
Posted on 3rd April 2018
Takes about 5 mins to read

Drupalgeddon2 happened! We got all but two of our projects updated within an hour, with those remaining trickier two fully patched another hour later. The key was planning the right process using the right tools. We actually use these tools for regular deployments every day, but speed was essential for this security update. Here's what we did, since some of you may be interested. 1. Our on-call developers split up the various sites/environments/projects that would...

Article
Posted on 22nd November 2016
Takes about 5 mins to read

I've recently been playing around on Windows 10's new Bash on Ubuntu feature, which provides a native bash linux shell for Windows. I thought I'd try and get a Drupal 8 site running, via composer, served from Apache, without any need for a virtual machine in Windows. Kristian Polso wrote a great tutorial that got me most of the way there, but I wanted to share some extra discoveries and thoughts about the experience. Skip...