Drupal articles

We've heard of test-driven development, behaviour-driven development, feature-driven development and someone has probably invented buzzword-driven development by now. Here's my own new buzzword phrase: review-driven development. At ComputerMinds, we aim to put our work through peer reviews to ensure quality and to share knowledge around the team. Chris has recently written about why and how we review our work. We took some time on our last team 'CMDay' to discuss how we could make doing peer reviews better. Here's some of our thoughts. Many of them are essentially answers to this question: Why is reviewing hard? How can we make it easier?

Anyone familiar with the Drupal core development lifecycle will know that presently the Drupal community supports two major versions at any one time: the current major release and its immediate predecessor. This means that at ComputerMinds we are currently helping our clients support and develop both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 sites. So the obvious question that we get asked is ‘when is it time to upgrade’?

We can’t properly answer this question without bringing the next major release, Drupal 9, into the mix. So let’s look at the development timeline for these three versions. According to a blog post...

At ComputerMinds we like to think that we’re all pretty good at what we do; however, nobody is perfect and this is why we always ensure that our code is properly peer reviewed as part of our quality assurance process.

Peer review is literally just what the name implies; we work together to review each other’s code to make sure that it all makes sense. This approach means that we’re able to spot obvious mistakes before they become a problem. It also has the huge advantage of allowing us to transfer knowledge between our team on a day-to-day basis.

###Pull...

Growing and maintaining a healthy workplace culture can be really hard. Keeping people happy and not just working hard can get more difficult over time, so we're super proud of our 'Minds for all that they contribute to our offices and our livelihood. It is so often the people alongside you that can make or break your day, and we consider ourselves very lucky to have such a great bunch of guys and girls making the CM world go round.

With offices in both Bristol and Coventry, CM can sometimes feel a bit fragmented. However much Slack can bring the...

There's nothing like Drupal's default spinning blue AJAX animation to make you notice that a site's design hasn't been fully customised. The code from my previous article showing how to fetch a link over AJAX to open in a Foundation reveal popup would suffer from this without some further customisation. After clicking the 'Enquire' button, a loading icon of some kind is needed whilst the linked content is fetched. By default, Drupal just sticks that blue 'throbber' next to the link, but that looks totally out of place. Our client's site uses a loading graphic that feels much more appropriate in style and placement, but my point is that you can set up your own bespoke version. Since it's Christmas, let's add some festive fun!

After reading this from Ars Technica, which describes how a developer offered to 'help' the maintainer of an NPM module - and then slowly introduced malicious code to it - I can't help but wonder if the Drupal community is vulnerable to the exact same issue. Let's discuss!

###Please, don't touch my package
NPM modules have been hacked at before, and it's not pretty when it happens. Because of the way we use packages, it's a lot easier for nasty code to get sucked in to a LOT of applications before anyone notices. Attacks on the code 'supply chain', therefore...

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 button link in the site header, with the page beneath obscured by an overlay. The form allows site visitors to get in touch from any...

Developers spend what, maybe 30% of their time scouring the internet for documentation and answers to questions. What IF you didn't have to do that? You could save hours of time, right!

Bring on Dash, the brilliant solution to that very problem.

OSX's Spotlight tool made searching files and starting tasks a dream. That dream, though, still had space for more. What if you could execute commands from Spotlight? Or do *really* clever things?

Cue Alfred, stage left.

Everyone has their preferred command shell. The bravest amongst us probably has some highly customised craziness, and the more unsure probably are using the plain mac Terminal. Somewhere in between, though, lies a world of fun that really should be explored. There are some great tools out there, and one of our favourites is Zsh.

Zsh is a shell that encapsulates all of BASH, and then a whole load of useful, 'standard' and 'other' features. Generally it's been nice to work with, though I must confess I've not by any means plumbed the depths of what it's capable of.

What...