I have two content types: Art and Artist. The first content type, Art, has an entity reference field to the second content type, Artist. I have a view named “Art” which shows all Art content with an exposed “Artist” filter that lets a user pare down their results. For example, a user might use the “Artist” filter to only show art by Cleon Peterson.
If you’ve done any javascript application development recently, you’ve probably come across Webpack. It’s a powerful javascript bundler that compiles all of your assets into small, production ready files. One feature I really like is the ability to easily configure separate builds based on environment variables. Webpack makes it easy to deploy multiple environments i.e. development, test and production with only the code and data specifically needed for each.
During a recent Drupal 8 project we needed to collect structured address information outside the context of an entity. Specifically, adding a section for address and phone number to the Basic Site Settings configuration page. As it turns out, the same functionality you get on entities is now also available to the Form API.
The Central Denver Drupal meetup is back for 2018! After a holiday break in December we’re going to start out the new year by looking at debugging using VDebug, a debugging client for Vim. Marc Isaacson will walk us through using Vim, Vundle and, VDebug (along with XDebug) to set up an awesome FOSS IDE that allows us to do interactive source debugging. Join us January 23 at Open Media Foundation.
For the November Meetup, Ryan McVeigh walked us through behavioral testing using Behat and other complementary tools. Behat is a PHP testing framework that leverages the human readable Gherkin syntax. This allows for anyone to contribute to writing tests on projects, not only the developer. This ease in test writing means the user stories created at the beginning of a project can easily become what automated testing uses to evaluate the completed work. We also looked at the Mink extension, which emulates the browser.
Last month, Tim Anderson showed us the ins and the outs of building a Drupal theme that needs to apply easily to many projects. Spanning multiple installs of Drupal, and multiple versions of Drupal itself can be a real challenge. We went through the foundations of a brand can influence what remains constant in a theme, and what needs to be easily configurable. We saw how Sass can be used to abstract those configurations out, making alterations to the base theme quick for spinning up sites fast.
Justin’s recent post about the product approach and Drupal's new release cycle got me thinking about what upgrading to Drupal 9 will really look like from a more technical standpoint.
Drupal’s vastly improved upgrade path is a huge win for the platform and a major reason organizations should consider migrating to Drupal 8 sooner rather than later.
Last month, Aten’s own Michaela Blackham presented on accessibility and what it means for each person in your company. From designers to developers to project managers and beyond, Michaela went through ways for everyone to champion making our products more accessible. She also explained that accessibility is more than just testing on screen readers for users with visual disabilities. Any person could become even temporarily disabled at any moment. A broken finger or sprained wrist will affect people’s ability to interact with the things we build.
