Drupal 8

Services like dialogflow (formerly api.ai) do a much better job of natural language parsing (NLP) if they're aware of your entity names in advance.

For example, it can recognize that show me the weather in Bundabergis a request for weather in Bundaberg, if you've told it ahead of time that Bundaberg is a valid value for the City entity.

Having the entity values automatically update in your service of choice when they're created and changed in Drupal makes this much more efficient.

This article will show you how to achieve that.

In this week's Lightning talk, I go through a case study on an investigation into Deadlocks and Render caching and why cache contexts are so important to get right. Check out the video below to find out how we were able to withstand 10x the throughput with smarter caching.

In a recent project, we were outputting CSV and wanted to test that the file contents were valid.

Read on for a quick tip on how to achieve this with Drupal 10's BrowserTestBase

Conversational UIs are the next digital frontier.

And as always, Drupal is right there on the frontier, helping you leverage your existing content and data to power more than just web-pages.

Want to see it action - click 'Start chatting' and chat to our Drupal site.

This week whilst trying to update one of our projects to the latest version of Drupal 8 core, we had some issues.

We use Composer to manage our dependencies, modules etc, and on this particular occasion, things weren't straightforward.

In order to solve it, we had to use some of the lesser known features of Composer, so decided to share.

As you'd be aware by now - Drupal 8 features lots of refactoring of form procedural code to object-oriented.

One such refactoring was the way forms are build, validated and executed.

One cool side-effect of this is that you can now build and test a form with a single class.

Yep that's right, the form and the test are one and the same - read on to find out more.

Drupal's Batch API is great, it allows you to easily perform long running processes with feedback to the user.

But during Drupal 8's development processes it was one of the remaining systems that didn't get the full object oriented, service-based architecture.

Much of the batch API is largely unchanged from Drupal 7.

But that doesn't mean you can't write unit-testable callbacks.

Let's get started.

This one tripped me up on a recent Drupal 8 project.

Easy to miss when you're working in a development oriented environment with things like JavaScript preprocessing turned off.

A JavaScript file was being added just fine with aggregation turned off, but not getting added with it turned on.