Tutorials

Having a basic understanding of caching is a requirement of being a professional Drupal developer. Unfortunately, there can be many layers of caching which can make it challenging to figure out exactly how best to configure cache settings and troubleshoot potential caching issues.

Web page caching can be thought of as moats around the castle, where each moat is a caching layer and the castle can be thought of as the site's web, database, and other origin servers.

If you're a Drupal developer who designs information architecture (IA) for your organization and/or clients, then hopefully by now you're thinking in terms of entities, bundles, and fields, not limiting your thinking to only content types.

Over the past few years, the Drupal community has been (sometimes slowly) embracing the Composer dependency manager tool for PHP projects. We have become accustomed to adding Drupal modules and base themes to our projects using composer require but many of us have only scratched the surface of what more Composer can do for us.

One of the primary goals of the upcoming Composer 2.0 release is decreasing the memory footprint and increasing the performance of common commands. I decided to test out the performance of the second alpha release of Composer 2.0 to see how much real-world change users can expect to see. 

The Drupal::entityQuery method has been a staple for Drupal developers since the early days of Drupal 8. But without a dedicated drupal.org Documentation page, it can be difficult for new developers to get a really good handle on. 

Waaaaay back in 2013, I wrote a blog post about importing and mapping over 5,000 points of interest in 45 minutes using (mainly) the Feeds and Geofield modules.

As always-evolving Drupal developers, we have been in the process of moving towards having a Composer-based workflow for managing our Drupal project codebases.

If you use Drupal 8's configuration system, then you know that one of the trickiest parts of using it effectively is managing configuration on a per-environment basis. Luckily, the Config Split module makes it easy to manage different configurations in different environments, but how to set it up properly isn't always readily apparent. 

In this blog post, I'll provide one method for setting up Config Split in an efficient manner, with splits for local, remote development, and production environments. 

If you build Drupal 8 sites using the Drupal Composer/Drupal Project Composer template (DCDP), then you've likely noticed the development dependency webflo/drupal-core-require-dev. If you're like me, you probably didn't give it much thought the first 20 or 30 times you used the template. 

Version 1.9.0 of DDEV-local introduced the ability to share your local project online via a temporary, public URL using ngrok.

This allows you the ability to quickly and securely provide access to your local site to other developers and stakeholders as well as an easy way to test your local site on other devices.

Local development environments are in the midst a bit of a renaissance recently - mainly driven by the maturation and adoption of Docker-based solutions.

As someone who has been building Drupal sites for over 12 years now, I'd like to think that my knowledge and expertise has grown at a rate similar to the power, flexibility, and complexity of the Drupal project itself. For well over 10 years, Drupal training and development has been the focus of my consulting business; over the holidays I took some time to look back and really think about the lessons I've learned and how I can utilize them moving forward. 

Over the past year or so, I've been looking to replace my standard local development environment with a Docker-based solution.

Over the past several weeks, I've been working with three of the more well-known Docker-based local development environments that involve a Drupal focus: Docksal, DDEV, and Lando. The goal is to not only to figure out which one I prefer, but also to figure out which our two long-form online Drupal training classes should potentially standardize on.

Over the past few months, I've been test-driving various Docker-based local development environments with two goals in mind. First, as my "daily driver" for consulting work - I've been a long-time MAMP Pro user and I've been feeling for a long time that I need to modernize my local development tools.