Tutorials

In my 15+ years in the Drupal community, I've been fortunate to have been able to lead a few Drupal-related groups and I sometimes find myself in the position of encouraging other leaders - who are experiencing burnout - on how to gracefully step down from leadership positions after multiple years of service. When I say "groups," I'm talking about things like: Drupal event organizers Drupal module/theme/project maintainers Drupal initiative leaders Drupal working group leaders It seems counter-intuitive to encourage folks to step away from things they have successfully led, but I'm very fond of the concept that the true

There's no doubt that the ECA module is changing the way Drupal sites are built - at least for those of us that use it regularly. I recently used it to pre-populate a form field on a node add page and it turned out to be easier than I figured it would be. The task was to pass the value I wanted to pre-populate into the form via a query string variable. Something like: https://mysite.ddev.site/node/add/article?myvalue=1 On the node add page, there exists an entity reference field whose value I'd like to pre populate with a value of 1 ( myvalue

Migrating content into Drupal is an extremely useful skill for most Drupal developers. Often, the most difficult step in learning to do migrations is the first one - that of getting everything set up and running your first migration to ensure that everything is working as expected. Most Drupal migration-related blog posts and documentation that I've seen either completely ignore the setup process or gloss over it before diving into the details of writing migrations. I like to ensure, both here, and when working with participants in our Professional Module Development course , that we ensure a solid understanding of

If you've been a Drupal developer since before the time of modern Drupal (pre-Drupal 8,) then you probably remember the Theme Developer module . This module is/was used to figure out theme template usage and possible overrides in Drupal 7. With modern Drupal, this same information is available directly in the HTML source code of a file when Twig development mode is enabled. The Visual Debugger module by Marcos Hollanda combines the best of the present with the best of the past to surface template information directly in the user interface without having to dig into the page's HTML. Pre-impressions

While preparing the recent Markdown Easy 1.0.1 release, I utilized a couple of tools that I hadn't used before in order to help improve code quality as well as the quality of the release notes . cspell cspell is a Node.js spell-checker for code that was made available to the default Drupal GitLab templates in February, 2024. There is a new SKIP_CSPELL variable that can be set if you'd like your project to completely ignore cspell (it is enabled by default.) Documentation on using cspell in Drupal GitLab pipelines is available . I'd wager that most Drupal contrib maintainers will

Teaching folks why a settings.local.php file is an important part of setting up a personal development environment is so important to us here at DrupalEasy that it is a foundational part of both of our long-form Drupal training courses . While preparing for an upcoming podcast mini-series I've been invited to participate in with the Talking Drupal folks, I'll be mentoring someone who is looking to re-enter the Drupal development scene after missing out on Drupal's transition from its pre-Symfony days. One of the tasks I have outlined for this person is to set up a settings.local.php file. When I

Recently, Randy Fay of the DDEV project blogged about two new Docker providers available (and supported by DDEV) for MacOS: Rancher Desktop and OrbStack . Both of these join Colima and Docker Desktop as supported Docker providers for DDEV on MacOS. What is a Docker provider? I know that I certainly have asked this question - more times than I care to admit. As Randy explains in the blog post: All of the Docker Providers on every platform (except Linux) are actually wrappers on the open-source Docker/Moby project, which is supported by Docker, Inc. In other words, in order for

Like many folks, I've been fascinated by the incredible evolution of AI tools in 2023. At the same time, I've been working to figure out exactly where AI fits into my various roles as a Drupal developer, trainer, and business owner. In this blog post, I detail a recent exploration I made into using AI ( GitHub Copilot , to be precise) to generate a PhpUnit test in a Drupal contrib module that I maintain. tl;dr I was impressed. Prerequisites For this exercise, I used Visual Studio Code with the GitHub Copilot extension installed. I am using the Copilot Business

As a Drupal module developer, if you're as big of a fan of PHPStan as I am, then you'll no doubt have run across the Unsafe usage of new static() error that PHPStan throws when analyzing code at level 0. In this article I will describe what causes this error and provide four possible solutions, weighing the pros and cons of each.

DrupalPod is a browser extension and GitPod configuration that allows Drupal contributors to quickly and easily spin up a personal development environment in their browser without pre-installing anything. Before we go any further, let's break down some of these concepts a bit more… GitPod is a cloud development platform - meaning that everything necessary for development is installed in the cloud and the only thing that needs to be installed on one's local machine is a modern web browser. Developers can customize their cloud development environments virtually any way they see fit depending on the nature of their project. GitPod

Earlier this year, the Drupal Association (DA) and various community contributors announced the general availability of GitLab CI (Continuous Integration) for Drupal contributed modules . The goal of this project is to replace the existing, bespoke, Drupal CI for running automated tests for both Drupal core and contributed projects with GitLab's existing CI tools, thus saving community and DA resources in the long-term. For contributed module maintainers, this means being able to specify more flexible tests and code validations, depending on the module's unique needs. Much of this functionality will be made readily available to module maintainers via GitLab templates

Over the past few years, we've published a couple of blog posts about setting up Xdebug for Drupal module development. But, like all things in tech, there's always more to learn as tools and technology evolve. The setup I was recently working with one of our Professional (Drupal) Module Development students trying to determine why she wasn't able to use Xdebug to debug a PhpUnit-based functional test. To be clear, the breakpoint wasn't set in the actual test class, the breakpoint was set in some custom module code that was called by the test class. In functional tests, Guzzle is

Introduction If you use Visual Studio Code and DDEV , there's a new extension that may increase your efficiency. The DDEV Manager extension provides a user interface within Visual Studio Code for just about every conceivable DDEV command. As I am a user of both tools, and I often teach and present on the topic of maximizing one's efficiency related to Drupal development when using DDEV and Visual Studio Code, a thorough review of this new extension was a no-brainer for me. Installation Installation of the extension is typical of any other Visual Studio Code extension - from the "Extensions"

I've been a big fan of the Termcase module for a long time - it is my go-to module for sites that employ free-tagging taxonomies. Termcase allows site-builders to force consistency on tag names (all lowercase, all uppercase, first-letter uppercase, etc…) It's one of those modules that I was surprised that not everyone used (or had even heard of.) While working to update a Drupal 9 site that uses Termcase to Drupal 10, I became curious if free-tagging was still a commonly-used technique on modern Drupal sites. In an effort to satisfy my curiosity, I performed a 100% not scientific

I learned a valuable lesson last week. First, some context. One of DrupalEasy's clients is a large international industry association that is currently running a large Drupal 9 site with about a dozen custom modules and well over 150 contributed modules. We were brought onto the project a couple of years ago to do some custom module development, but until recently weren't all that involved in the overall site maintenance and development. As part of a recent task we've been working on, I stumbled on an issue that was occurring only on my local, and not in a way that