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lee.rowlands

Lee Rowlands
Senior Developer

Location

Bundaberg

Drupal.org

larowlan

Twitter

larowlan

Lee has 22 years professional development experience with PHP, is a member of the Drupal.org security team and maintains the forum, comment, contact, contextual and block content modules in Drupal core along with at least 30 contrib projects. He is also the framework manager for core.

My blog posts

Safely extending Drupal 8 plugin classes without fear of constructor changes

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.

by lee.rowlands /

Sending Drupal entities to dialogflow with Chatbot API module

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.

by lee.rowlands /

Using Composer to debug issues updating Drupal core

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.

by lee.rowlands /