Articles tagged with "Configuration"

Drupal's form API has been brilliant for many years. Still, recently I found myself wondering why I needed to build a configuration form if I already had a schema for my config. Defining a schema facilitates API-first validation (including some pretty smart constraints), specific typing (e.g. actual booleans or integers instead of '0' or '1' strings), and even translation in Drupal. 

That last part got me thinking; if Drupal automatically provides translation forms for typed configuration, why must I build a form? I started diving into the code and found config_translation_config_schema_info_alter() which maps certain config data types to element classes...

Drush, the brilliant command-line tool for Drupal, is capable of giving you its output in several ways. Its global --format parameter can be set to a type that you can use in useful ways. Most recently, I found this incredibly useful when I had made some configuration changes through Drupal's admin pages, and needed to then script those changes to automatically apply to hundreds of sites on a platform we manage.

I simply asked Drush for the value of the configuration I had set, formatted as the PHP code to set those values. Then I could drop...

So 2020 is in full swing, we are already midway through February and any new year’s resolutions you may have set yourself may have slipped … but why not set yourself a new resolution of keeping on top of your Drupal site maintenance? Even as a developer working with Drupal every day, sometimes you can forget some of the basics in regards to site maintenance, so I’ve detailed some of the most important aspects you should be mindful of below.

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 end up frequently pulling irrelevant changes back from live, which seems unnecessary.

Here's some examples of the kind of config that I'm thinking 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 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...

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 simple, if perhaps surprising fix. If you ever run into it, it will have a different property (i.e. due to whichever plugin or default...

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 writing a very quick guide to help those from my wrong doings.

(This guide assumes you have a multilingual site setup with [i18n's Variable translation...

Define a schema for any bespoke configuration, it's not too hard. It's needed to make it translatable, but Drupal 8 will also validate your config against it so it's still handy on non-translatable sites. As a schema ensures your configuration is valid, your code, or Drupal itself, can trip up without one. Set up a schema and you avoid those problems, and get robust validation for free. Hopefully my example YAML shows how it can be quite simple to do.

In Drupal 8, there are many ways to interact with configuration from PHP. Most will allow you to write the config values, but some are read-only. Some will include 'overrides' from settings.php, or translations. There are many layers of abstraction, that each have different purposes, so it can be easy to run into subtle unintended problems (or more obvious errors!) if you pick a method that doesn't quite suit what you actually need to do. Here I'm going to outline some of them and when you might pick each one.

For me this is the biggest unanswered question hanging over my development of Drupal 8 websites: How should I add config to a Drupal 8 site?

This article will provide plenty of options, but unfortunately no definitive answer.