Drupal Console: Generate Module & Theme Code

Drupal Console is software which allows you to alter your Drupal installation through the command line. According to the official website, “The Drupal Console is a CLI tool to generate boilerplate code, interact and debug Drupal 8.” Unlike Drush, Drupal Console is specifically for Drupal 8, the latest major release.

Although Drupal Console and Drush share many capabilities such as clearing the cache, generating one-time login links, or un/installing modules/themes, one distinct functionality that comes out of the box with Drupal Console is that it can generate boilerplate code for modules, themes, controllers, forms, blocks, and much more.

Continue reading “Drupal Console: Generate Module & Theme Code”

Drupal 8: Create a Simple Module

Drupal 8 came out with many new features and updates at the end of 2015. As Drupal 8 is object oriented and enforces PSR-4 standards, the way you make modules has significantly changed. However, this change makes modules much more organized to fit today’s coding practices. I will be demonstrating how to create a simple “Hello World!” module in Drupal 8. Continue reading “Drupal 8: Create a Simple Module”

Drupal 8: Major Improvements over Drupal 7

It has been a long time coming. With over 200 new features developed during the last 5 years by more than 2,000 contributors, the most anticipated version of Drupal was finally announced November 19th, 2015. This new release of Drupal contains spectacular features worth upgrading for than any previous release. The improvements evident in Drupal 8 justify that this is one of the best and largest updates in Drupal history.

Continue reading “Drupal 8: Major Improvements over Drupal 7”

Drupal 8: Ajax in Forms

Drupal Form Ajax Example

Why reload the whole page, when you can just update certain parts of the DOM? Ajax allows you to do just this, to dynamically update content. Just one of the many great uses of Ajax is Form Validation. In this example, we will see how to implement this.

Continue reading “Drupal 8: Ajax in Forms”

Drupal 8: RDF UI (Schema.org Mappings)

RDF UI is a module for Drupal 8 created by Sachini Aparna Herath for her Google Summer of Code 2014 project. RDF stands for Resource Description Framework; it provides a standardized model for data interchange. This module enables you to easily create mappings of Schema.org Things to Drupal Content Types and Fields. RDF UI will embed these specified mappings in the HTML as RDFa once your content is published. This blog post was made for Google Code-In 2014 to test and review RDF UI.

Continue reading “Drupal 8: RDF UI (Schema.org Mappings)”

Drupal 8: Load Balancing with HAProxy

As your website grows, there will be a point when there are more people accessing your web server than possible for a single server to handle. This is when load balancing will become a critical step in your Drupal setup. Load balancing increases reliability of your application in case a web server goes down and spreads the load across multiple web servers. In this tutorial, we are going to use HAProxy as a Layer 4 Load Balancer for our Drupal website. We will have a proxy server, two web servers, and one database server, all running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) 32-bit.

Load Balancing Diagram 2

The public will be able to access the proxy server; this server will then use an algorithm to redirect the user to a web server which will access the database server if needed and respond with generated web page or content requested.

In a production environment, there would be separate physical servers for each proxy, web, and database. However, for the sake of simplicity and availability, I will be using virtual machines.

Continue reading “Drupal 8: Load Balancing with HAProxy”

Drupal FluxKraft: FluxPocket – Pocket Service

FluxPocket is a module created by Umar Ahmad for the FluxKraft distribution of Drupal. FluxKraft is an easy tool you can use for self-hosted, social automation. However, it does not support Pocket by default.  As a result, Umar Ahmad made the FluxKraft module as part of his Google Summer of Code 2014 project. This blog post was made for Google Code-In 2014 to test and review FluxPocket.

Continue reading “Drupal FluxKraft: FluxPocket – Pocket Service”

Drupal 7: Drupalgeddon Exploit

Drupal faced one of its biggest security vulnerabilities recently. It was so bad, it was dubbed “Drupalgeddon”. It affected every single site that was running Drupal 7.31 (latest at the time) or below, as you can read in this Security Advisory.

Continue reading “Drupal 7: Drupalgeddon Exploit”

Drupal 8: Entity Embed Module

Entity Embed is a module created for Drupal 8 by Chandan Singh for his Google Summer of Code 2014 project. It allows you to embed any type of entity such as Content, Comment, and Role. This blog post was made for Google Code-In 2014 to test and review Entity Embed.

Continue reading “Drupal 8: Entity Embed Module”

Drupal 8: Setting Up Multi-site

There is an incredibly easy way to create multiple Drupal sites. You don’t need to duplicate the code. You can have multiple sites, with different content, users, and themes since each site can use a different database. They will all run on a single codebase and will be able to share modules. This is one of Drupal’s greatest features called Multi-site. It was first implemented in Drupal 4, and it is here now in Drupal 8.

Continue reading “Drupal 8: Setting Up Multi-site”