Drupal

Running Drupal on the PHP built-in server can be used for quick evaluation / testing, but also for day-to-day development. Let's see why, what it takes, and how to solve common pitfalls or requirements like a mail catcher, Solr, ...

Add a patch with Composer for a core or contributed Drupal project.

Gatsby and Next are both based on React and become more and more adopted, far beyond the Drupal sphere. Choosing a decoupled solution comes with a resource cost though (budget, team-wise), and might not be the right fit for every project. Working with these solutions is still time well invested.

We will see how to get a minimal and fast Drupal 9 setup in 3 commands. It just relies on a PHP built-in server, so no Docker here, the only requirements are Composer and PHP. Then, we will do a recap of the available tools for developers.

Here is a really simple way to handle synonyms (or extra keywords) using Search API out of the box with a database server and no custom code involved. Use case: we want to do a full text search based on synonyms that does not appear on the frontend. These ones should be set from the Tags vocabulary. The method should be flexible regarding translations, available for content editors and easily generalizable.

This post goes a bit against the mainstream, with one purpose in mind: for a low budget, leave a custom LAMP server provisioning for a well maintained LAMP stack that comes with a smart GUI and helpers for common sysadmin tasks like: several versions of PHP, a php.ini for each virtual host, backup system, internal monitoring, Let's Encrypt ready. We will use a Drupal 7.x website with CiviCRM 4.6.x LTS as an example.

The scope of this article is to illustrate the responsibilities of several tools and techniques used in the Drupal ecosystem (Composer, Drupal Console, Drush, Configuration management) to achieve quickly a simple custom Google Maps use case: an Address field will be defined on a content type. We want the address to be geocoded automatically for each node on save to display a Google Map. The display of the map will be achieved by a custom module to allow further extension.

Here are a plain list of modules that really gives site builders front and backend super powers and make these two categories of developers closer than ever. 

Page Manager

It supports the creation of new pages, and allows placing blocks within that page.
Like Drupal 7's Page Manager, it provides a concept of "page variants", each with their own selection conditions.
Additionally, it can be used to take over an existing page, like overriding /node/% to change what is displayed when viewing a node.

A collection of most used drush commands.
The full list of commands is documented on Drush Commands.

Fast site install for testing

Download Drupal core and install it in 3 commands.

The use case is that we want to sort a list of users by job title, where job title is a term reference to a dedicated vocabulary.
The sort is done by the job title term weight (defined via the vocabulary list).

I choosed to apply a custom sort function on a view, instead of a custom dynamic / entity query for two reasons :