In the community

I volunteered to carry out the migration for the new ComputerMinds site as migration was one of the very few areas of Drupal that I hadn’t delved into thus far. With Drupal 8 becoming more and more popular, now was a great opportunity to learn the migration ropes. Luckily, Drupal 8’s migration has greatly improved since Drupal 7 so my life was made somewhat a little “easier”! This article will be aimed at some of...

Let's have a quick look through our development process on this project and pick out some of the more interesting bits. As briefly mentioned in the last article we are using a composer set up and all code is version controlled using git on github. All pretty standard stuff. Frontend In the previous article I briefly discussed how we set up Pattern Lab. Before getting stuck in to the components that would make up the...

The new GDPR laws are here, hurrah! Having a number of developers handling databases from a number of client sites could easily be a nightmare, but we at ComputerMinds spent quite some time thinking about how to get and keep everybody safe and squeaky clean on the personal data front. Here's a quick run-down of the key things to be aware of - and a pretty poster to help you keep it all in mind...

Steven and I had been encountering (fairly savage) static electric shocks from our desk chairs. For a number of months we'd been noticing the issue, each "crack!" seeming louder and more painful than the last. Almost every time we walked across the room, our chairs would greet us with a stab to the hand. The comedy value grew just as the frustration did; we'd enjoy listening for that signature sound whenever our colleagues returned to...

We ran into an obscure error recently, when saving a view that used a custom views plugin. It was supposed to be a very simple extension to core's bundle (content type) filter: InvalidArgumentException: The configuration property display.default.display_options.filters.bundle.value.article doesn't exist. in Drupal\Core\Config\Schema\ArrayElement->get() (line 76 of [...]/core/lib/Drupal/Core/Config/Schema/ArrayElement.php). Several contrib projects ran into this issue too: Drupal Commerce, Search API and Webform Views integration. There's even a core issue that looked relevant... but it turned out to be...

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...

We didn’t see this project solely as a chance to rebrand and rebuild for ourselves, it was also an opportunity to try something new and expand our collective knowledge with the potential for using with clients in the future. We had been discussing using Pattern Lab for Front End development for some time and this was the perfect opportunity to try it out. Patten Lab allows the creation of component-driven user interfaces using atomic design...

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...

Now that we had settled on the branding and had established and planned exactly what we needed to create, I could start looking at designing the new website. I wanted a clean, spacious site with a modern look and feel. I always keep a close eye on changing design trends and it was important that for our site I was careful to design something that would age well...

Before I could actually start designing, we needed a clear understanding of exactly what we wanted from the new site. We conducted a full SEO analysis to see which content was popular on our existing site and what was not often read and could be consolidated. We also discussed the current state of our business and the direction we wanted to be heading in. We were taking on more and more big development projects and...