Drupal articles

Update! Since this article was written, a new 'lenient' composer endpoint has been created on Drupal.org to support using modules with Drupal 9 that haven't been marked as compatible with it yet. See the documentation, which boils down to adding a new common entry under 'repositories' in your composer.json, above the usual https://packages.drupal.org/8 one. The rest of this article is still useful for understanding how patching fits into composer's workflow.

The vast majority of community-contributed Drupal 8 modules now have releases that are compatible with Drupal 9, but what can you do if you need to use a module that...

TLDR : Check your cookie popup!

It seems everyone is talking about core web vitals at the moment, spurred on by Googles’ recent announcement that page experience (which includes core web vitals) will start influencing search ranking in May 2021.

We won’t go into detail on web vitals in this post - there is plenty of information already on the web, including from Google themselves on the excellent web.dev site.

Instead, this post will look specifically at cumulative layout shift - or CLS as it’s known. I like to think of this as the jerkiness measure of your site -...

Over the last year or so, I've got quite engaged with Drupal slack. I've loitered in channels like #d9readiness and #config, discussed issues with members of the security team, and asked questions to module maintainers (and received answers!). But most of all, I've helped people out in the #support channel. This has been an interesting experience in many ways, so I thought I'd share my reflections. The Drupal slack workspace is intended for the community, so if you're reading this - it's probably for you too. Hopefully my thoughts might help prepare you to use it as an effective tool.

Ultimately, I've got...

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 similar to D8 on the surface, but with old cruft ripped out to allow it to continue improving. So the short answer to "How...

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 the size of their editing forms is useful. I figure the best way to demonstrate this is with a recipe that blends it together...

Drupal 7 introduced the brilliant feature of letting users cancel their own account and with it various options for what to do with content they've created when they are cancelled. One of these options is to:

Delete the account and its content.

Which can prove somewhat problematic if used incorrectly.

You see, Drupal is very good at the latter part: deleting all the content created by the user. It's not very good at warning someone that they are about to delete potentially a lot of important content.

The scenario

Let me set the scene for you. Someone had...

So we challenged ourselves to contribute back to the Drupal community this year. How are we doing? Here's a simple update on what each of us has done so far. Hopefully we'll see other ComputerMinds team members join this list by the end of the year.

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, there was a security release that added rules to .htaccess, which were essential for any site to incorporate and the template settings file, default.settings.php...

Update: Since writing this article the EOL of Drupal 7 has been extended from November 2021 until November 2022.

It’s here! June 3rd 2020 marks the official release date of the first production ready version of Drupal 9. It feels like Drupal 8 was only released a short while ago but it turns out it’s been 4.5 years already! The release of any new major version of Drupal is an exciting milestone in the project’s history and with a shiny new brand logo in place, Drupal 9 is ready to hit the ground running.

We are already well underway doing...

We've been busy recently, but that doesn't stop us at ComputerMinds contributing back to the Drupal community! For our latest multilingual website, we needed an XML sitemap with alternate links and hreflang attributes. This site uses separate domains for each language - for example, www.example.se (??) and www.example.no (??). Search engines need these alternate links to help them understand how to match up each translation of a page, which are distributed across these different domains. But this site is built on our existing Drupal 7 e-commerce platform that uses the XML sitemap project, which has no support for alternate links (nor entity translation...