Update: The Drupal Association announced on 23 February 2022 that Drupal 7 end of life was extended by one year to 1 November 2023. It also announced the end-of-life date will be re-evaluated annually.
We at Evolving Web had plenty to write about in 2021. From technical tutorials about Drupal 9 to articles about accessibility and inclusion, we aimed to deliver relevant information and useful insights to the developers, content strategists, designers, marketers, and technologists who follow us.
If you missed some of it, we'll save you some time and walk you through Evolving Web's ten most-read articles from 2021, from #10 to #1!
If you develop for Drupal 9, you probably noticed that theming has improved a lot. And if you're upgrading your theme to D9, given Drupal 7's upcoming end of life in November 2022, you'll find the job considerably easier if you follow some basic but crucial steps.
Let's look at the main theming features on Drupal 9 and how to have your Drupal 7 theme ready for this latest version of Drupal.
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.
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!
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.
The web is full of information! Your web sites probably already use many APIs for maps, Twitter, IP geolocation, and more. But what about data that's on the web, but doesn't have a readily available API?
As a good Drupal developer, one of your New Year's resolutions should be to learn more PHP features. Today, we'll talk about iterating over tree-structured data using the awkwardly-named class RecursiveIteratorIterator.
Drupal allow you to set up installation profiles to fast-track creating a website. Rather than starting from scratch each time you create a site, you can select an install profile that does some initial configuration for you. This is super useful if you make a lot of websites that start the same way. I think multilingual websites are a good example, since there's a lot of configuration that gets repeated.
Often, organizations have big plans for multilingual Drupal. A website might be launched with only one or two languages in place, but the infrastructure is there to add more languages as soon as the translations are ready. Even if you already have two languages in place, there are many steps to adding an additional language.
