For many agencies, and large organisations that have tens or hundreds of Drupal sites, it can be difficult to keep tabs on which sites have what modules installed and whether they are up to date or not. Manually crawling through each site can be time consuming and error prone.
In this post, I describe a solution that allows you to keep a dashboard of site status information that you can query to find out precisely what is going on on each of your sites.
John Albin Wilkins' session outlines mistakes and introduces basic techniques for CSS layering and using design components, the heart of any front-end CSS project. It also covers ticket structure, project organization, and tricks to implement components when you can't change Drupal's classes.
Video: Kim's DrupalGov Canberra 2014 presentation.
Although Drupal 8 has had a Conditions Plugin API for a several months, it wasn't until during DrupalCon Austin sprint we managed to get blocks to use the Conditions Plugin API for block visibility.
The great thing about Condition Plugins, is they are re-usable chunks of code, and many contrib projects will be able to take advantage of them (Page Manager, Panels, Rules anyone?)
In this post, I show how you can create an example Page Message module that uses a RequestPath condition plugin to show a message on a configured page.
One of the key goals of namespaces in PHP is to avoid collisions between class and function names between different libraries. Using namespaces and the PSR-0/4 standard creates a clean and simple way of sharing code across projects. This is a core part of the Drupal 8 architecture.
This approach has been a large factor in the PHP Renaissance and the huge amount of sharing of code across PHP external libraries.
In this post, I will show how we can leverage external libraries in existing Drupal 7 sites, using similar techniques to how it is being done in Drupal 8.
Previously I have demonstrated how to create a new route controller in Using Drupal 8's new route controllers then how to restrict access to it in Controlling Access to Drupal 8 Routes with Access Checks. But that's not where the fun ends!
What about when we need to create a route dynamically. For example, if we need to create routes for content types that we don't know will exist in advance? In Drupal 7, we created dynamic routes with a foreach loop in hook_menu(). In Drupal 8, we can do all this and more with a RouteSubscriber.
In the previous post, I looked at how to put together a basic route controller in Drupal 8, and restrict access by specifying permissions. But there are my situations where basic permissions aren't enough.
In Drupal 7 we had procedural access callbacks. In Drupal 8 we now have AccessCheck services.
This post takes you through how to use the new AccessCheck interface to provide a custom access checker for your routes.
As part of the Web Services and Context Core Initiative, traditional procedural page callbacks were converted to shiny new Object Oriented route controllers.
In this post, we cover the basics of creating a route controller, and how to pass in dependencies using dependency injection.
In following posts, we'll look at how to convert Drupal 7 custom access callbacks, to the new AccessCheckInterface, as well as dynamic routes.