lee.rowlands

Drupal 8.5.0 will come with a new experimental module, Layout Builder.

What is layout builder? Well its basically panelizer in core.

Watch the screencast for a quick run down of how to setup, configure and use it.

In November 2017 I presented at Drupal South on using Dialogflow to power conversational interfaces with Drupal.

The video and slides are below, the demo in which I talk to Drupal starts in the first minute.

After reading a blog post by Matthias Noback on keeping an eye on code churn, I was motivated to run the churn php library over some modules in core to gauge the level of churn.

Is this something you might like to do on your modules? Read on for more information.

Need a way to mix fields from referenced entities with regular fields from managed display?

Then the Display Suite Chained Fields module might be for you.

From time to time you may find you need to extend another module's plugins to add new functionality.

You may also find you need to alter the signature of the constructor in order to inject additional dependencies.

However plugin constructors are considered internal in Drupal's BC policy.

So how do you safely do this without introducing the risk of breakage if things change.

In this article we'll show you a quick trick learned from Search API module to avoid this issue.

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 Bundaberg is 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 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 8's BrowserTestBase

Drupal 8.4.0 comes out in October, and at that time 8.3.x will be end-of-life (EOL).

There are two major vendor updates in 8.4.0 so the time to test your contrib and client projects is now.

In this post we talk about the coming changes and how to test your client and contrib projects.

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.