lee.rowlands

Earlier in the year we worked with a household Australian name to help them build a next-generation more-performant version of their energy-comparison site.

We used Blackfire.io to optimize the critical elements of the site.

Read on to find out more about our experience.

Drupal 8 comes with a services based architecture allowing clean dependency injection, separation of concerns and another way to modify how Drupal works without hacking core

You've probably heard that Drupal 8 lets you swap out a core service for your own implementation, hey, I even said it myself here and here, but how do you achieve that?

Read on to find out how to manipulate Drupal 8 services at run-time and how this compares to other popular PHP Frameworks like Laravel, Silex and Symfony

Drupal 8 comes with two extension points for module developers to allow other modules to interact with their code.

The trusty alter hook, the linchpin of Drupal versions past is still there - allowing other modules to interact and intervene in the behaviour of your module.

But there is a new kid on the block, the event system.

So as a module developer how do you decide whether to use the alter system or the event system.

In an effort to continue the velocity of work on Drupal 8 criticals from the Ghent criticals sprint, we've taken it upon ourselves to get together for at least one hour each Friday to focus on Drupal 8 criticals

Read on to find out what we got up to in the first week, but also how you can get involved.

During this weeks developers' meeting our lightning talk was all about Drupal 8's ThirdPartySettingsInterface.

Here's the video introduction to this powerful new feature in Drupal.

During our weekly developers meeting I spoke about my approach to contributing to Drupal core, sharing some tips and tricks I've learnt along the way

This is a preview of a proposed session for DrupalSouth Melbourne 2015

Drupal 8 comes with built-in support for PHP Unit for unit-testing, the industry standard for unit-tests.

But that doesn't mean you can't use PHP Unit for your testing and CI in Drupal 7, if you structure your code well.

Read on to find out what you need to do to use PHP Unit in Drupal 7.

As you may have read last week, we're starting up a Drupal 8 CX initiative which will feature a site for tracking the status of Drupal 8 module ports.

We'll be displaying a curated list of modules that we've identified as priorities for Drupal 8. But in order for others to build their own site to track their own priorities, we're building the site using an install profile.

Because I'm using an automated phing task to 'burn and reinstall' the site on a regular basis, I needed a simple lightweight solution for default content - for things like blocks (using bean) and basic nodes.

Read-on to see my approach.

On Saturday morning at DrupalSouth, Kim Pepper and I presented Everything you wanted to know about Drupal 8 but were too afraid to ask.

Drupal 8's plugins system is the bees-knees, taking the lessons learnt from Drupal 7 and Ctools plugins.

But we want it now right?

So how can you write plugins for Drupal 7's ctools module that will be a breeze to update to Drupal 8?

Read on to find out more in this latest post in our Drupal 8 now series.