A change that was snuck into Drupal version 8.8.0 and wasn't mentioned in the 8.8.0 change notes was a small change to the setting that controls the placement of the configuration directories. The alteration deprecated the $config_directories setting from the settings.php file and move the configuration into the $settings array. You can see the detail behind this change on the Drupal change record.

The fix for this is very easy and only needs a single line of code to change in your settings file.

Change this:

To this:

Whilst setting up docker on my local development machine the other day I encountered a permission problem. After installing docker I found that I had this permission problem that meant I couldn't run docker using my local user accounts. I was therefore forced to run docker as sudo, which I didn't want to do every time.

This is the error I was getting.

A common technique when creating graphics or visual representations of data is to map a value between two scales. This is useful when working on a set of values and you need to map them to a different set of values in order to show them on a graph.

The maths involved here is essentially figuring out the relationship between the value (v) in our initial scale (x, y) and multiplying this by the maximum range of the second scale (a, b).

a + (b - a) * ((v - x) / (y - x))

Taking the value of 0.5, which is in the scale 0 to 1. Mapping this to the scale 0 to 100 means we make the following calculations.

This results in the value of 50.

The PHP splat operator (...) has been available in PHP since version 5.6. When it was introduced I made note of it but have never really used it, so I thought it might be interesting to explore it a little.

Internally, the ellipsis operator in PHP is called T_ELLIPSIS, although I have heard a few different names for the operator in the past. This includes names like:

• Ellipsis
• Unpacking operator.
• Packing operator.
• Three dots operator
• Spread operator
• Splat operator

Personally, I think the splat is the correct name for this operator, so I'll be using that from now on.

A Data Access Object (DAO) is a way of taking data out of a database or API and present it in a unified way across your application. As a design pattern this has uses in standardising how a particular bit of data is passed around, without having to resort to using arrays to accomplish the same job.

I was doing some work with PHP's PDO library the other day when I noticed that I could fetch data out of a database using the fetchAll() method with the PDO::FETCH_CLASS flag. This flag automatically returns the data in an object. This got me thinking more about how this worked, but I couldn't find many articles talking about this. Hence this post.

Setting Things Up

Let's take a class called SpecialText that will store an ID and some text, along with a __toString() method to allow the printing of those values. We will use this class throughout this post to store data from the database.

Spam is a constant problem for any site on the internet that has a publicly available form, but automatically preventing spam can be tricky. The idea is to prevent the automated spam bot from being able to submit data to your site, but not at the detriment of the users. There is a careful balance between preventing spam and prevent real content being submitted by real users. Manually moderating blog comments is usually a good idea, but many websites contain contact forms and user registration forms that are often targeted by spam bots.

Whilst Drupal does have a number of protections against cross site submissions or denial of service attacks and even has build in user and comment moderation. It does, however, need a little bit of help with preventing spam.

Drupal has a number of modules to deal with automated spam and they fall mainly into a number of different categories.

Adding events to HTML elements with jQuery is pretty simple, but I found that extending those events wasn't an easy task. I was faced with an issue where I had some third party code that performed an action on an element, and I needed to add an event and call the same handler from that event. As this was within a CMS I had limited scope to just add my new event to the existing code, so I needed a way of pulling out the current jQuery events and then calling that event handler separately. This post looks at how I accomplished this.

Let's start with a couple of simple form input elements.

I was looking at some malfunctioning code the other day where the price was pulled out of one API service and sent to another API. The problem stemmed from the fact that the value coming out of the first API was as a string and the second API required the price in pence as an integer.

The difference in formats here meant that the number had to be converted from one format to another. During this process it was found that the value was sometimes out by a single pence.

For example, whilst the first API sent over a value of £20.40, the second API received a value of 2039, which is one penny out. This class did have some unit tests, but the tests but had failed to account for this rounding error.

As it turned out, this wasn't the only problem with the class in question, so I thought I would write up a quick PHP:CSI showing the problems and how I solved them.

Continuing my review of some Drupal PaaS hosting platforms I am taking a look at Dropsolid.

What I'm not doing is a massive deep dive on all platforms. Ultimately, your milage will vary and what you get out of these platforms will be different for most people. You will know the requirements of your project and what you need to accomplish.

Also, if you want to know more about a platform, then please contact them directly. I'm sure they will be happy to hear from you.

Based in Gent, Belgium, Dropsolid is a Drupal development agency who have built a Drupal hosting platform. The Dropsolid Experience Cloud is a platform built from years of experience in hosting and maintaining Drupal.

I met a few of the team at DrupalCamp London 2020 and they were kind enough to supply me with a key to evaluate the platform.