Planet Drupal

Drupalcon Lille 2023 was my first experience of a large Drupal event. I didn't know what to expect but I was so excited and looking forward to it! I have to say Drupalcon exceeded all of my expectations, in a good way!

In the beginning, I tried to remain humble as I’d never seen so many Drupal villagers before. But it didn’t take me long to start chatting to all the exhibitors, and contributors and connect with the community. It was a great opportunity to learn more about Drupal and be part of interesting sessions and informal conversations. It was...

A little over a year ago, I ventured into the world of Drupal; a complex content management system. Despite making considerable progress in understanding its intricacies, it's widely acknowledged that Drupal presents a steep learning curve. To navigate this learning curve successfully, one must maintain unwavering dedication and find satisfaction in troubleshooting and problem-solving, which can provide a rewarding sense of achievement.

I was fortunate to have an exceptional team that provided a constant stream of knowledge, invaluable advice, and overall support in my pursuit of mastering Drupal. A significant milestone in my Drupal journey was the invitation to attend...

Personally I’ve found most value in the smaller sessions. There are discussion-style groups around a common interests (BoFs) and presentation seminars. I’ve enjoyed being able to share what wisdom I can in the former – for example, about what page building experiences work best for our clients, or ways to accelerate projects. Drupal is built on collaboration so it’s only fair to give back where we can. My colleague Steven has given back by volunteering to help some sessions run smoothly. 

As for the front-led seminars, here’s which ones each of us found most interesting… 

Andrei: Decoupling your search solution...

Six of our team have come over to Lille in France where the annual Drupal conference for Europe is this year. It’s a new experience for some and a chance to reconnect with friends in the community for others. We’re all here to learn, and also share where we can. I’ll talk here about the first main keynote sessions, with more articles in the pipeline.

Tuesday opened the conference with a comical introduction from the local French Drupal association, in which we were taught which part of a baguette is «le quignon» and which is «les miettes». They – the...

As a Drupal site administrator, you may notice in the website logs that there might be a large number of repeated log messages along the lines of "An illegal choice has been detected. Please contact the site administrator." We recently had this problem on a Drupal site that was upgraded from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 which featured a product search that was built using Views.

Due to slight differences in the way in which the view and facets were built in the Drupal 9 site, this resulted in slightly different URLs being used when the user would filter the...

A common requirement for any website that sells products is to have a mechanism in place that ensures orders placed on the website are 'Exportable' - being made available as a file that can be sent across to a different system, to handle the processing of the order.

The Drupal Commerce 2.x module (for Drupal 9, 10) has the concept of order 'Workflows', along with defined 'States' and 'Transitions'. A workflow is a set of states and transitions that the order will go through during its lifecycle. Transitions are applied to an order and this will progress the order from...

One of our big Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 migration projects included bringing across image cropping functionality and data on a longstanding client's website. This site had used the Imagefield Crop module, but that was only for Drupal 7. We set up Image Widget Crop for the new site, which is better in a few ways but is also fundamentally different. The old site referenced the cropped images from content, only bringing in the originally-uploaded images for edit pages, to allow editors to adjust the cropping, which was then used wherever that image appeared on the frontend. But the new Image Widget Crop module allows configuring different crops for different situations.

The real challenge was in migrating the data! But we call ourselves Drupal experts, so of course we dug to find solutions. We found the following steps were necessary...

This one is entirely on us, we wrote the custom code, which makes us responsible for maintaining it.

The upgrade status module gives us a nice report of each custom project and what changes it thinks are required to bring the code up to date to work with Drupal 10.

We really don't have a lot of custom module code, and the code that we do have is very simple, standard Drupal 8/9/10 stuff, so there are a couple of calls to taxonomy_term_load_multiple_by_name to remove, and an accessCheck to add to an entity query, but other than that our custom...

We're continuing our series on upgrading this very website to Drupal 10...but our first proper bit of work to upgrade this site is essentially nothing to do with Drupal 10!

We built this site in the early days of Drupal 8 and Drupal core didn't really handle 'media' any differently to Drupal 7, but we wanted to try out some new modules that included having a library and drag&drop upload. However, these modules are an additional thing that we need to upgrade and have been pain in that sometimes the buttons don't appear, or they're buggy in other ways. Anyway...

Let's define the scope and goals of our project to upgrade this very website to Drupal 10.

Essentially, that's it: we want to upgrade this website to Drupal 10 so that we can benefit from security releases etc.
At the moment we want to do so with the minimum of effort, so I don't want to have to be writing lots and lots of code or changing fundamentally how the site works, but I am up for simplifying things if it gets us to a point where we have to maintain less code.

Since Drupal 9, major version upgrades now...