Drupal Site Building

Since the release of Drupal 8, it has become tricky to determine what and where override configuration is set.

Here are some of the options for a better user experience.

All PreviousNext Drupal 8 projects are now managed using Composer. This is a powerful tool, and allows our projects to define both public and private modules or libraries, and their dependencies, and bring them all together.

However, a if you require public or private modules which are hosted on GitHub you may run into the API Rate Limits. In order to overcome this, it is recommended to add a GitHub personal access token to your composer configuration.

In this blog post, I'll show how you can do this in a secure and manageable way.

As seen in the recent Uber hack, storing secrets such as API tokens in your project repository can leave your organisation vulnerable to data breaches and extortion. This tutorial demonstrates a simple and effective way to mitigate this kind of threat by leveraging Key module to store API tokens in remote key storage.

A common problem that I’ve faced, particularly in the last few years, is how to deliver the complex, component driven design that clients want while also giving content authors full flexibility with those components without creating an un-maintainable, or brittle product.

Since 2012, PreviousNext has been developing and maintaining the aGov distribution for Drupal 7. aGov provides a means for Australian Government organisations to meet their accessibility and security obligations with free and open-source software hosted on the platform of their choice.

In the last few weeks we have been working on the Drupal 8 version, and are happy to announce today the first Alpha release!

In this post we share some of our experiences developing a Drupal 8 distribution.

During PreviousNext’s weekly developers meeting I recently gave a lightning talk about how to use kss-node to auto-generate a website style guide. If you’ve even tangentially followed front-end development, you’ll find that this is yet-another blog post describing “project A implementing technology B with hip, new language/framework C.”

But kss-node is really cool and useful, especially if you understand how it fits into the larger picture of the new web development process. Fortunately, my previous post provides that big picture, so if you’d like to understand how Agile is turning web development inside-out and how style-guide-driven development is the new website development workflow, please go read that first. Then head back here for the screencast to get you started with kss-node.

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.

If you’ve looked at front-end development at any time during the past four years, you know that there has been an explosion of new technologies. We are inundated with new projects like bower and cucumber and behat and KSS. It is a lot to take in. At the past two Drupalcons there have been sessions about this overload, My Brain is Full: The state of Front-end developement. Essentially those sessions are asking “What the hell is going on?”

“Everyone is describing the one little piece they’ve created, but don’t explain (or even reference!) the larger concepts of how all of these elements link together.”

— Frank Chimero, July 2014 Designer News AMA

This is my attempt to explain.

Video: Kim's DrupalGov Canberra 2014 presentation.

Get started with some quick and easy ways to improve the content editor experience, using contributed modules.

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...