Whenever we start a new Drupal project, we have to choose what kind of theme we're going to create. Are we going to use a framework like Bootstrap or Zurb Foundation? If so, do we start with a contrib base theme or do we implement the framework ourselves? Are we going to use a classic Drupal base theme like Zen or AdaptiveTheme? Or are we going to build the theme 'from scratch' starting with Drupal core or a core base theme?
Updated on June 20, 2022
Drupal's Configuration Management (CM) is a "killer feature" for a web Content Management System (CMS). When setting up a Drupal site, we spend a lot of time on site configuration: Roles, Permissions, Content Types, Menus, Vocabularies, etc. In most CMS's, all these changes are stored in their databases, making it hard to deploy, track, reuse and rollback important changes.
A detailed tutorial on creating custom fields in Drupal using the field API.
If you are a web designer, chances are you have heard about Material Design.
Material Design is a popular "design language" developed by Google that came out in June 2014. Since then, it has kind of become the visual identity of most of Google's mobile applications for Android. Many mobile app developers are using it and the approval rate among web designers is also rising, mostly because of its simplicity and the influence of mobile apps on responsive design.
At Evolving Web we love using Docker! So when I needed to do work on several different sites, I just spun up a few Docker containers, and now I've got this:
Three shells in three different containers, and it's super hard to tell which is which.The hostnames are just random hex strings—so confusing!
Drupal has a powerful menu system, but most of the content on a typical Drupal website doesn't end up in the menu navigation. Articles, blog posts, events, you name it. Most content is linked to from views, not directly from a menu. So how do we make it easy for users to know where they are in the hierarchy of the site if they are looking at content that isn't in a menu?
As Drupal themers and site builders, we often have to look for creative solutions to build landing pages. Landing pages are special pages often used for marketing campaigns, to attract particular audiences, or to aggregate content about a certain topics.
One of the first questions I get asked when teaching a Drupal theming class is which base theme to use. The answer has always starts with the unsatisfying: "It depends". Now that I'm teaching Drupal 8 theming, we have a couple new base themes in core added to the mix: classy and stable.
You can learn the difference between the two and how to use them in this previous post.
This week, our client came up with a seemingly simple request that turned out not so simple: When listing events, they want to show upcoming events before past ones. Not only that, they also want events nearest the current day to show up first. But with a bit of thinking and a custom views sort plugin, this turned out quite easy!
Updated on June 15, 2022
You might think that using the drush command-line tool is only something hardcore developers do, but it turns out it's super-helpful for site builders and theme developers too! In my experience, using drush will speed up the usual Drupal Admin tasks 3 to 10 times, compared with visiting the Drupal admin pages in the browser.
We noticed Evolving Web's shiny new Drupal 8-powered blog was loading slower than in D7, and using the blackfire.io PHP profiler we were able to narrow down the bottleneck to Drupal 8's block visibility approach.
Drupal core is pretty well optimized. But after you've finished building your Drupal 7 or 8 site, you might find some pages are loading slower than you'd like. That's not surprising—you've probably enabled scores of contrib modules, written custom code, and are running over 100 SQL queries per uncached request.
What are SASS and Compass and why and how would I use them? Don't worry, we'll guide you through the process of using SASS with your Drupal 8 theme.
You've found an old blogpost! Drupal 8 reached end of life on November 2, 2021.
Read about reasons to upgrade to Drupal 10 or our Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 migration guide instead.
We just upgraded our site to Drupal 8, and a big part of that was migrating content. Most content was in JSON files or SQL dumps, which are supported by Drupal's migrate module. But what about images and other files? How could we bring those along?
We'll show how to write a custom migrate process plugin!
