Config Sync Directory Setting Change In Drupal 9

Drupal's update hook system is a powerful way of updating your site to introduce things that wouldn't be handled using the configuration system.

Modules will use update hooks to bring sites that have the old version of the module in line with the latest additions to the module. For example, if a new field is added to a table that the module uses then an update hook will be needed to add that field to all sites that are current using the old version. This update hook will be in addition to the install hook that would install the table with the added field in the first place.

Tying together different select elements in a form is done with very little effort thanks to the ajax and states system built into Drupal 9. This means that any Drupal form can have a select element that shows and updates options into another select element within the same form. Using this system you can create a hierarchical system where one select will show and populate another select element with items dependent on the first. This is great for giving the user the ability to drill down into options that are dependent on each other.

A recent Wired article about the Parler data hack talked about how a hacker group was able to steal publicly available information from the Parler website using an Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) or enumeration attack. This type of attack involves a hacker looking at the structure of the site and attempting to guess the next available resource by looking at the URL. Apparently, terabytes of Parler's data was downloaded by simply enumerating through the ID's of their publicly available posts.

I tried to do something the other day that I thought would be quite simple, but turned out to be really hard to get my head around. I had a Drupal 9 site with Paragraphs installed and I wanted a user to click a button on the node edit form and inject a particular Paragraph into a Paragraph field.

I found 2 solutions to this problem that solve it in slight different ways.

For the last few years I have been tagging articles as I write them on this site. This tagging has largely been to tie posts together in an aggregated list of other posts tagged with that term. I recently wondered if I could use those tags to show related content below each article. I have struggled with this feature on client websites in the past and it either boils down to a manually curated list or some sort of complex content analysis and Solr search.

Pushing data from Drupal into Solr is a really convenient way of creating a robust and extensible search solution. The Search API module has a number of different fields available that can be used to integrate with all sorts of fields, but what isn't included is computed fields or other data.

Thankfully, adding a custom field into the Search API system doesn't need a lot of code. A single class, with an optional hook, is all that's needed to het everything working.