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.
Recently the patch to bring Mink based testing to drupal core went green. As result of that Lee Rowlands (@larowlan), Nick Schuch (@wesome1989), Adam Hoenich (@djphenaproxima), and myself (@grom358) had a discussion to create a roadmap for improving testing in Drupal core. Here is what we discussed.
Panelizer is a great module for being able to modify the layout of a page on a per-node basis. However, its greatest strength can sometimes be its greatest weakness. We found this out the hard way when a client asked us to help them add a block on every single page of their site directly beneath the h1 page title. Read on for how we approached this issue.
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
Lightning talks were recently incorporated into the weekly developers meeting agenda. This week I have put my hand up to speak about Phing and implementing a basic build file sharing pattern.
After Drupal Camp Lahore and Drupal Camp Islamabad earlier this year, I was once again inivited to Drupal Camp Islamabad to present a session on Drupal 8 as a framework.
At PreviousNext we rely heavily on vagrant for development environments and phing for performing automated tasks to speed up site building and project development. These tools are hugely beneficial in the long run. In this blog we'll have a look at how we as drupal core developers can automate the tedious tasks like site install/ re-install, testing, coding standards validation and enable modules.
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.
When working with the Search API Drupal module, sometimes we need to programmatically add information that is not available for indexing as a field. Lucky we can write our own custom pre-processor to provide this information to the index.
Our client had some very specific requirements for their project. They needed to be able to insert links to files and they needed to keep the same URL for those files even if the file changed. Those familiar with Drupal will know that by default, Drupal will suffix the newer version of the filename with _0, _1 etc which obviously breaks the URL. Here's how we worked around the issue...
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.