Upgrading to Drupal 9
Let me take you on a journey. We'll pass by Drupal content renderer services, AJAX commands, javascript libraries and a popular front-end framework. If you've only heard of one or two of those things, come lean on the experience I took diving deep into Drupal. I'm pleased with where my adventure took me to, and maybe what I learned will be useful to you too. Here's the end result: a contact form, launched from a...
Once upon a time, we wrote an article about how to render fields on their own in Drupal 7, which was really handy because Drupal 7 wasn't always intuitive. It's common to want to display a field outside of the context of its main entity page, like showing author information in a sidebar block or in a panel, but you had to just know which functions to use. Drupal 8 came along since then using...
This is a real quick one, but so useful! We often want to render a block within content, perhaps as part of a node (maybe in hook_node_view, and then made configurable like a field), but there's no obvious way to do this correctly for any block. Drupal normally renders its blocks per region, so there is no single function to embed a block. I came across this really simple solution by Damien Tournoud in a...
Drupal 7 brought us Entities, and with them the powerful [Field API][] for 'storing, loading, editing, and rendering field data.' attached to them. If you're managing everything through 'manage fields' and 'manage display' tabs of your content type, then every part of that process is rather wonderfully taken care of for you. [Field API]: http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules--field--field.module/group/field/7 We often, however, come across the need to render a field outside the context of it's entity. A common example might include rendering a node's author in a sidebar block. Sure, modules like Panels and CCK Blocks will do this for you, but doing it manually is actually not that hard.