Planet Drupal

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...

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...

We didn’t see this project solely as a chance to rebrand and rebuild for ourselves, it was also an opportunity to try something new and expand our collective knowledge with the potential for using with clients in the future. We had been discussing using Pattern Lab for Front End development for some time and this was the perfect opportunity to try it out.

Patten Lab allows the creation of component-driven user interfaces using atomic design principles. This means we can create modular patterns all packaged up nicely that can be assembled together to build a site. Plus we can use...

Once upon a time, we wrote an article about how to render fields on their own in Drupal 7, which was really handy because Drupal 7 wasn't always intuitive. It's common to want to display a field outside of the context of its main entity page, like showing author information in a sidebar block or in a panel, but you had to just know which functions to use. Drupal 8 came along since then using 'grown up' things like objects and methods, which actually makes the job a little easier. So now for Drupal 9, 10 and beyond we have...

If you don't have access to the file system on the server for a Drupal site, when a security issue like Drupalgeddon2 comes along, you are entitled to panic! Many sites are run by a combination of teams, so sometimes you really don't have control over the server... but that might even mean there is another way to apply fixes. If you've been tasked with updating such a site (I was!), it's worth checking if the server has been misconfigured in such a way to actually allow you to patch Drupal, via Drupal!

A heavy caveat first: we would never...

Drupalgeddon2 happened! We got all but two of our projects updated within an hour, with those remaining trickier two fully patched another hour later. The key was planning the right process using the right tools. We actually use these tools for regular deployments every day, but speed was essential for this security update. Here's what we did, since some of you may be interested.

1. Our on-call developers split up the various sites/environments/projects that would need updating amongst themselves, using a simple online shared spreadsheet.

2. Ahead of time, we prepared pull requests for sites that simply use Drush make...

We've settled on what we think is a best practice for class naming for Javascript in Drupal – let me explain what I mean and then talk you through our reasoning.