Drupal 8's comment system has the ability to be threaded so that users can reply directly to other users comments and create threads of conversation. I have always found this difficult to use and difficult to read so I wanted to turn it off when I set up this site. The only issue I had was I could turn off the threading but couldn't alter the ordering of the comments.

Sorting colors is the sort of thing that you never really think about until you need to do it. Sorting a bunch of items by their color is useful in a number of applications, but the simplest is just to display items to the user in a more controlled manner. As it happens sorting with colors is a much more complex topic than I originally thought and required digging into quite a bit more maths than I expected.

Incidentally, there is a whole world of color maths that I didn't know existed until I started looking into this. It was worth learning about though.

Deployer is an amazing tool that is used to deploy websites (hence the name). I have looked at other tools, but because Deployer is built and run using PHP, using it to deploy PHP sites makes sense. It also means that I don't have to figure out complex XML documents or learn Ruby just to understand what the deployment is doing.

The Search API Solr Search module has a bunch of controls for boosting certain fields. This allows you to give more weight (i.e. boost) to the title and less weight to the body, which means that when a search term appears in the title of a page it has more weight than a page that only has the term in the body. This weight value is ultimately used to calculate the score of the page and this directly effects the ordering of results.

Drush sql-sync is a very easy way of grabbing a copy of a Drupal database from one site and installing it on another site. The normal application of this task is to copy the database from the production site to your local environment for facilitate local development. There are one or two steps to sort out before you can use the command

This post assumes you have Drush 8 installed on your machine as Drush 9 uses a different syntax for sotring Drush aliases. This also assumes that you have setup SSH key access to all servers you need to get access to.

It's been a couple of weeks since DrupalCamp London 2018 so I thought I would try to write up my experiences for the weekend. DrupalCamp London ran from 2nd to the 4th of March and consisted of a CxO day before a 2 day conference.

I was struggling with a problem on a Drupal 8 project that was in development recently where a block used to show information to anonymous users was cached for the first user who saw it. This meant that the special message meant for the first user was then being seen by all subsequent users who visited that page. This only happened when page caching was turned on, but as it's best practice to do that I didn't want to turn that off just to solve one little problem.

For the past few months I have been organising an unconference event with †he other organisers of the North West Drupal User Group (NWDUG). An unconference is just like a normal conference, with the exception of the sessions. All of the sessions are selected on the day and then presented by the delegates. Thankfully, everything came together and on November the 4th at MadLab in Manchester we had 55 people show up for the day. Once we introduced the day and got some sessions on the wall we started out.

The PHPNW 2017 Conference was run over the weekend of the 30th September to 1st October at the Manchester Conference Centre and I went along to participate. PHPNW has now been going for 10 years and it looks like this will be the last (more on that later) but this year was just as good as ever.