Planet Drupal

Do you want to reach more markets and people? Do you want to tailor your content for clients from a range of locations around the world, without having to manage every single translation? Then the Language Hierarchy project could be for you! I wrote a while ago about how this module gives editors more power and flexibility without the extra effort that can come with each translation added to a site. Now Drupal 8 sites can use the project with confidence, as I produced its first stable release candidate for Drupal 8 last month! 

Thank you to all those that contributed...

We’ve recently given the dimplex.co.uk site a new face lift and stumbled across an interesting problem during development when it came to implementing the new product carousel on their product pages, more specifically, the handling of the images themselves.

The design brief stipulated that the transparent studio style product images required a light grey background behind them, giving the impression of a product floating nicely in the middle of a light grey surrounding.

We had 2 problems here:

1. A lot of the studio style product images didn’t have sufficient transparent space around themselves and we ended up with unsightly results; images would...

Does your site have an online store? Are you looking to have sales on during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period? Then read on - here are some quick tips to help you make the most of the sales period by ensuring that everything goes as smoothly as possible to make sure both your marketing and site are up to scratch.

Marketing / Promotion

You should have a plan in place for marketing your deals, otherwise how are people going to find out about them? This could include; promotions on your own website, promotion via social media (e.g Facebook...

Last month I begun my second decade of working with Drupal! How crazy is that? I started at ComputerMinds in 2009. Drupalcon Paris was my first week on the job - I just remember taking so many notes, as if it were a university course! I had a lot to learn then, but now I can look back with a much more experienced head, hopefully wiser, with some sort of perspective.

Here at ComputerMinds, we think of ourselves as Drupal specialists for the UK, but we don't limit ourselves to that. We offer clients a close working relationship and our general flexibility to get stuck into applying our skills to most problems. One of our clients, Alfresco, has come to trust us with more than just our Drupal wisdom. They wanted a new hub that would bring together documentation for a variety of their open source products, which are already on Github. Their documentation was written as Markdown files, so the hub would need to import and transform those files into HTML...

Drupal is lucky to benefit from a very active community of developers meaning that there is a wide and varied range of contributed modules to extend the functionality of Drupal core. In this article we’ll take a quick look at 10 interesting contributed modules; some are well known whilst others are a little bit more obscure.

1. Admin menu (D7) / Admin toolbar (D8)

Out of the box the Drupal admin interface can be a bit unwieldy and whilst this has been significantly improved over the years, especially with the advent of Drupal 8, there’s still room for improvement. Enter...

Websites need to look pretty and be blazing fast. That often means lots of beautiful high-quality images, but they can be pretty enormous to download, making the page slow to load. Images are often one of the 'heaviest' parts of a website, dragging a visitor's experience down instead of brightening it up as intended. If a website feels even a tiny bit unresponsive, that tarnishes your message or brand. Most of us have sat waiting frustratedly for a website to work (especially on mobile), and given up to go elsewhere. Drupal can be configured to deliver appropriately-resized versions, but what's...

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

Your current website/platform is built on Drupal 7 and news has hit your ears about 7’s end of life (EOL). Maybe your website is a Drupal 8 website and you want to know what the future has in store for you. Good news is, you don’t have to do anything immediately, but it is definitely a question that you want to start thinking about very soon.

This article is mainly aimed at Drupal 7 builds looking to upgrade to 8 or...

Last night saw the popular EU Cookie Compliance module fall from grace, as the Drupal community discovered that numerous inputs in the admin form were not being sanitised.

To me, this shows some serious failings in how our community is handling security awareness. Let's do some fixing :)

1) We need to make this OBVIOUS, with clear examples

One of the most important things when trying to get people to write secure code is making them aware of the issues. We need Drupalers of all levels of experience to know and understand the risks posed by unsanitised input, where...

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:

*...