Drupal articles

I'll keep this short and sweet, but we thought this would be a useful tip to share with the world as a potential security issue with the combined use of File::getFileUri() and FileSystem::realpath().

Consider the following code excerpt :

$file = File::load($some_file_uri);

if ($file) {
  $uri = $file->getFileUri();
  $file_realpath = \Drupal::service('file_system')->realpath($uri);
}

Seems pretty harmless right? Load up the file from $some_file_uri , If we have a valid file then get the URI and then grab the real path.

Wrong (potentially, depending on what you do with $file_realpath).

If $file is a valid file, but for whatever reason the file is...

There is a whole world of functionality that opens up when your editor can not only edit your code but understand it, and that's why we use PHPStorm. Read on for some thoughts, advice and tips for getting the most out of your IDE.

The other day, I shared with the office that I was really blown away by Steve T's Zsh tip about installing a plugin that gives you a desktop toast notification when a long-running command in a zsh terminal completes.

So astounded I was, that I declared that we should put our heads together and share companywide our top tools and tips. No longer should the most useful things be kept quiet, and no longer shall I be content to miss out!

Everyone pitched in with a few ideas, and I thought it would be good to get them written up...

Update: this article's suggested method has serious shortcomings, use other methods when you can! For example, run the following with drush to just upgrade drupal core code (leaving database updates to be run separately):

drush pm-updatecode drupal --check-updatedb=0

If you've got a Drupal site, which you need to update quickly (for example, to address last night's security advisory!), here's a tip. Run this from the command line:

curl 'https://github.com/drupal/drupal/compare/7.59..7.60.patch' | patch -p1

This assumes your codebase was on Drupal 7.59 and you're currently in Drupal's root directory. If you're currently on a different version, adjust the numbers in the...

A client noticed the dates on their news articles were not being translated into the correct language. The name of the month would always appear in English, even though all the month names had themselves been translated and showed correctly elsewhere. The problem turned out to be down to the twig filter being used in the template to format the date. This is what we did have:

{% set newsDate = node.getCreatedTime|date('j F Y') %}
{% trans %} {{ newsDate }}{% endtrans %}

So this would produce something like '1 March 2018' instead of '1 März 2018' when...

The Problem

I imagine many of us have been there: there’s some CSS class in your markup, and you need to do something with it. Maybe you want to remove it, change it, or perhaps alter its style declarations. “Easy peasy,” you think, “I’m a developer. I got this.” And so you should.

Next, if you’re anything like me, your first instinct is to fire up your search tool of choice and search your codebase for that string. You’d expect that would lead you to where that class is getting added to your markup, along with anywhere CSS rules...

Let's say you've built a custom form for your Drupal 8 site. It contains various elements for input (name, email address, a message, that kind of thing), and you want to send the submitted values in an email to someone (perhaps a site admin). That's a pretty common thing to need to do.

This could be done with Drupal's core contact forms, webforms, or similar -- but there are cases when a bespoke form is needed, for example, to allow some special business logic to be applied to its input or the form presentation. The drawback of a custom form...

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 my finds and processes, rather than a “How to do a D8 migration”.

Since our new site was very different to our old one in...

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 pages of the site, we first needed to set up some global variables and grid. Variables allow us to reuse common values throughout the SCSS and...

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 :)

Remove personal data from your system

1. Review all databases on your computer, making sure to consider also those .sql dump files still sat in your downloads directory...