Skip to main content

Our blog

Welcome to our growing knowledge base.

Building a layout system for Paragraphs

A recent Drupal 8 project of ours had some great requirements around it’s landing pages, aimed at reusing existing components in a range of layouts and combinations. Paragraphs quickly established itself as the site-building tool of choice and Flexbox always wins for me as the CSS grid/layout approach, so we looked at how the two could be combined to give the client the flexibility they needed, without over-complicating the editor experience.

Enterprise Drupal Hosting with Skipper

PreviousNext has worked closely with a large government agency on their public portal for the last few years. As one of the most visited Drupal sites in Australia with more than 7 million page views per month, the agency was seeking higher performance and cost efficiency from their Drupal hosting provider. 

DrupalCon Dublin 2016: Confessions of a control freak

I recently attended DrupalCon Dublin where I spoke about being a less controlling project manager. Having experienced a shift some years ago to a more agile way of working, it’s a topic I was keen to explore.

In my talk I outlined how implementing a model of centralised control on a project is not a healthy approach. I discussed how it may be one of the main contributing factors that can lead to projects becoming quite challenged, or even failing altogether. 

Join us at the DrupalSouth Code Sprint

The Drupal open source project only exists because of code contributions by tens of thousands of developers and Drupal focused companies around the world. In his recent post, project founder Dries Buytaert blogged that “The Drupal community has a shared responsibility to build Drupal and that those who get more from Drupal should consider giving more”.

Australia’s contribution to Drupal code is significantly underrepresented, with PreviousNext the only Australian company in the Top 100 contributors listed on Drupal.org’s global marketplace. DrupalSouth represents the best opportunity for a wider pool of Australian Drupal developers to change this status by participating in DrupalSouth's official Code Sprint, being held on Wednesday, 26th October.
 

Launching an AJAX modal from a WYSWIYG link and customising the response with MainContentRendererInterface in Drupal 8

On a recent project a feature was requested to allow admins to launch some content within a modal window from the WYSWIYG on a Drupal 8 website. The goals were as follows:

  • Open any content on the site in a modal window.
  • Fall back to a plain link for search engines and non-js based browsers.
  • Implement a branded modal design.

This is how we accomplished it.

Custom views filters with Search API and Simple Hierarchical Select

A recent project involved the use of the Simple Hierarchical Select module to input category data for a particular content type. Simple Hierarchical Select provides a clean way of browsing hierarchical vocabularies to easily add taxonomy terms to nodes.

An initially tricky user interface problem to utilise this module with Search API and Views exposed filters was solved using a couple of Drupal 8 plugins and a bit of smart thinking!

Drupal Developer

Base themes without the bloat

Base themes in Drupal are incredibly useful but often add bloat to the finished sub-theme when care isn’t taken to remove unnecessary css files, or files that are 5% used and 95% overridden. When porting aGov to Drupal 8 we took the opportunity to improve how it’s theme inheritance is managed, making it easier to create trim, lightweight sub-themes.

Introducing Drush CMI tools

Now we've got the experience of a number of production D8 sites under our belt we took the time to consolidate our CMI workflow into some useful drush commands.

And naturally we've open sourced them.

Read on to find out more about our drush CMI tools.

Drupal 8 FTW: Is it a test or is it a form? Actually, its both

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.

Pagination