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I recently joined PreviousNext and was soon getting acquainted with contributing to Drupal core and contrib projects. A big part of the contribution workflow is working with patch files in the issue queue, so I wrote this post to help anyone who wants to know about patching in Drupal.

This is a story of why we have migrated from Phing to Make.

The Drupal 8.3.x branch is getting ready to introduce a new experimental media module. This will bring enhanced media handling in Drupal 8. The closest solution in Drupal 7 to handle media is the file entity module. Now is the time to discuss migrations from file entity in Drupal 7 to media entities in Drupal 8. For core, there is already an issue for this, but for contrib... there is no migration. So, I wrote one.

We have been running containers in production for more than a year now and want to share some of the lessons learnt, by open sourcing our container suite.

Over the years we’ve embraced the idea of DevOps within our organisation. That is, bringing the developers closer to operations, and visa versa, to be more collaborative, embrace our agile processes, and become more efficient. When we designed Skipper, our Kubernetes-based container hosting platform, this was the focus of our attention.

The PreviousNext team are gearing up for our annual pilgrimage to DrupalGov Canberra, being held on Monday March 27 at the QT Hotel. With more than 200 tickets already sold, the conference is set to be one of the largest Drupal events in the Southern Hemisphere and a testament to how significant Drupal is now within the Australian Government.

In Drupal 7 we used Node Hierarchy module to keep track of a hierarchy of pages. Node hierarchy ties directly to the menu system. When getting a list of all ancestors or descendents, it is a O(n) operation, and at least one site we use it on has a lot of nodes in the tree. Performance was terrible. Add to that it has no notion of revisions or forward revisions, so changing the parent and saving a draft can cause all sorts of issues with your menu. When the time came to update the site to Drupal 8, we took a different approach.

At Drupal South 2016, I attempted to summarize some of my pain points with Drupal core.

The session 'At 16 years of age, does Drupal have an identity problem' is the result of this.

You can watch the recording, or download the slides below.

A recent Drupal 8 project of ours had some great requirements around it’s landing pages, aimed at reusing existing components in a range of layouts and combinations. Paragraphs quickly established itself as the site-building tool of choice and Flexbox always wins for me as the CSS grid/layout approach, so we looked at how the two could be combined to give the client the flexibility they needed, without over-complicating the editor experience.

PreviousNext has worked closely with a large government agency on their public portal for the last few years. As one of the most visited Drupal sites in Australia with more than 7 million page views per month, the agency was seeking higher performance and cost efficiency from their Drupal hosting provider.