Sam Becker

Managing technical debt is important for the health of all software projects. One way to manage certain types of technical debt is to revisit code and decide if it’s still relevant to the project and to potentially remove it. Doing so can reducing complexity and the amount of code developers are required to maintain.

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend and deliver a session at DrupalCon Vienna. The session was based around leveraging and getting productive with the automated testing tools we use in the Drupal community.

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.

A requirement that comes up from time to time is being able to use content stored in Drupal and produce rich HTML emails. In a lot of cases the design of these emails matches the design of the existing, already implemented front-end website.

In a recent project, we explored ways of creating HTML email’s which wouldn’t require us to start from scratch and would also evolve as the website’s look and feel did. Our design goals were thus:

• Use the existing website’s CSS to skin the emails.
• Use existing Drupal site-building tools to construct the markup for these emails.
• Allow admins to easily create and preview HTML emails.

One of the aspects of the new object oriented architecture in Drupal 8 is the introduction of services. Services can be provided by any module and provide a mechanism for exposing reusable functionality by way of interfaces and classes. All services are instantiated via the container which is responsible for injecting a service’s dependencies.

Since services implement interfaces and are always instantiated via the container, we have the opportunity to alter what the container returns, ultimately allowing us to swap any existing service with a new one.