Planet Drupal

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...

I was recently tasked with upgrading jQuery from 1.9 all the way up the latest version of 3.x (3.4). And I seriously thought “There is no way jQuery is on version 3 already!”. How wrong I was. Thankfully I wasn’t the only one thinking this, a few of my colleagues were on my wavelength too! So yes, jQuery is really on 3.x and 1.x is actually really, really old! This article aims to help those of you in the same situation as me with some of the common pitfalls you may encounter. Some of this is semi-specific to Drupal 7...

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.

In case you're not aware, this year a bunch of us at CM are taking on a Drupal contribution challenge. Do go read about it!

I managed to squeeze in this contribution BEFORE the challenge started ? What a way to start the year!

We have a site that uses a large number of features to manage a large number of taxonomies, and I was tasked with rabbit-holing them all. That is, to make sure that if a user tries to visit any of their term pages, they just get a 404 page. Rabbit Hole is the answer, and lets...

We love making great websites, standing on the shoulders of the giants that have gone before us to make Drupal what it is today. Thousands of working hours from fantastic people around the world have gone into producing this digital experience platform. Many of those gave voluntarily for free, while many were directed by paying customers who gave back so the rest of us could benefit. Everyone stands to gain when innovation, graft and capacity are pooled together. All that functionality in your Drupal site has been written by a real person at some point, who considered it worth sharing...