Articles tagged with "The Right Way"

Rendering Drupal block plugins can be tricky. In this article we explain how to render them and how you might go about finding the correct ID to pass into createInstance(). We also have a handy tips and tricks section at the bottom which is worth checking out alone!

Many of us at ComputerMinds have always taken pride on doing Drupally things the right way whenever possible, and then helping the community do so too. One of these things is displaying values from fields on content entities. We wrote before about how to do this in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. It's now the turn of Drupal 9! Thankfully, this updated version is basically the same as the last one, as D9 is very...

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...

Drupal empowers site builders and editors to configure their sites in settings forms. Configuration management lets developers push changes up to live sites to be imported. But developers have to be considerate to ensure imports will not wipe out those changes made directly through the live sites' settings forms. At the least, they have to export the changes before making further tweaks. But admins may make further changes in the meantime too, so developers can...

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 article will talk you through the steps to follow to write a simple PHPUnit functional (Kernel) test for Drupal 8. I have been doing a lot of work on Drupal 8 migrations for the past few months so that will be the focus of the test.

Occasionally there's something you need to achieve, which would be really easy if only you could have it performed via Drush - some script that could be run on the server during an update or migration process, perhaps. But it all looks a bit too scary, right? "The task is tricky enough already, let's just do it some other way"? Well, it's actually surprisingly easy to write your own Drush commands, and it's totally something...

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.