Working with Drupal 7

This article assumes a basic knowledge of the building of custom modules, the Drupal 8 / 9 Migration system, and the processes behind creating customised migrations from a previous version of Drupal. One of the more common components of any migration from a previous version of Drupal is the need to migrate files. In Drupal 7 there was a core ‘File’ entity type and on pretty much all of our clients' sites we would also...

I recently released a new contributed module to aid translation on Drupal 7 sites: Entity Translation: Separated Shared Elements Form (ETSSEF). Yes, it has a convoluted name! It finally resolves a suggestion from years ago in an Entity Translation project issue, to allow editing untranslatable fields separately to translatable ones. One of our clients has a multilingual product database site with a few hundred fields on their content, so anything like this that could reduce...

So 2020 is in full swing, we are already midway through February and any new year’s resolutions you may have set yourself may have slipped … but why not set yourself a new resolution of keeping on top of your Drupal site maintenance? Even as a developer working with Drupal every day, sometimes you can forget some of the basics in regards to site maintenance, so I’ve detailed some of the most important aspects you should be mindful of below.

We’ve recently given the dimplex.co.uk site a new face lift and stumbled across an interesting problem during development when it came to implementing the new product carousel on their product pages, more specifically, the handling of the images themselves. The design brief stipulated that the transparent studio style product images required a light grey background behind them, giving the impression of a product floating nicely in the middle of a light grey surrounding. We had...

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...

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 super quick blast from the past today; a Drupal 7 based article! I had some work recently to create a new "setting" variable for one our Drupal 7 multilingual sites, which meant creating multilingual versions of those variables. I soon found out that there is very much a correct way - or order - to achieve this as I got this one very wrong (I had to re-instate my DB!). So here I am...

As with every other Drupal agency on the planet, it was another fun evening of frantic patching of client sites last night due to the release of the highly critical SA-CORE-2018-004 security update for Drupal, released on 25/04/2018. Being so closely related to SA-CORE-2018-002 and knowing proven exploits for that were already affecting thousands of un-patched Drupal sites, time was of the essence for this one as a new exploit was sure to be released...

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 certain type. For example: Are you trying to place advertising blocks or fixed javascript code between the fields in the content of a page, not just shoved into regions around the...

This article discusses how we can use a combination of techniques to take the standard 'Confirmation Form' provided by the [Flag][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 additional data before clicking 'Confirm'. As an example we'll use the Flag module to create an 'Abuse' flag that will apply to a comment entity...