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On a recent Drupal 8 client project our client was building listing pages using views exposed filters and adding these to the menu.

This resulted in several menu URLs pointing to the same base path, but with the query arguments determining the difference.

However Drupal 8's default menu-trail calculation was resulting in the menu highlighting all instances when one of them was viewed.

Luckily the active trail calculation is done in a service and it was simple to modify the default behaviour.

Read on to see how we did it.

Drupal 8 includes a datetime field type and widget out of the box.

The widget uses the HTML5 date element on supported browsers, providing a polyfill to a text field with jQuery UI's datepicker for browsers that don't yet support HTML5 date inputs.

However - HTML5 date formats always work in ISO8601 format - ie YYYY-MM-DD - which isn't very user-friendly for those using Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Luckily, with a few tweaks you can easily swap this into DD/MM/YYYY format for those browsers and then switch it back server side into the format Drupal expects.

PHPStorm has a lot of built in test runners, but it doesn't support Drupal's Simpletest test runner. In this blog post we'll see how we can execute Drupal tests inside PHPStorm using Drupal test runner.

Whilst working on a Drupal 8 project, we found that cache tags for a Block Content entity embedded in the footer weren't bubbling up to the page cache.

Read on to find out how we debugged this and how you can ensure this doesn't happen to you too.

typey has just turned 1.0, so I thought it would be a great time to show off some of its features.

Recently, I have been working on a site with a big multi-step form that is using a lot of custom form elements, custom auto-completes, custom form api states and ajax based sub-forms. It is all built using Drupal form api. The best thing about this form is that all the fields and sub-forms map to a data model.

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.

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