Articles

Let's say you had a class that you wanted to use, but there was some sort of error in creating the object. This might be that the wrong parameters were passed, or the third party service (eg. a database) wasn't available at the time of creation.

If this happens you'll obviously want to handle the error correctly, but the question is would you throw an exception in the constructor or handle the error condition elsewhere?

Note that this article will talk about PHP, but the same discussion applies to other languages that implement OOP principles.

I was reminded recently about how a GitLab engineer managed to delete the prod database, and that got me thinking about one of my biggest (production) mistakes.

It's been at least 5 years since this happened so I think it's safe to tell the story of when I dropped a production database of one of my clients.

At the time I was working on a (pretty large) Drupal website for an international organization. The site consisted of an extensive content area and allowed users to make anonymous purchases through the website, which were sent to a CRM every night. It was hosted on the Acquia platform and used BLT to perform the day-to-day development operations on the site.

MySQL's slow query log is a key component in your MySQL administration setup. Whilst normal logging can help you in terms of tracking down issues with your database system, the slow query log can help you track down issues in your database setup before they become problematic.

Getting the slow query log set up correctly can help you find and solve issues with slow database queries before they become more problematic. Most slow queries will work fine when there's just a few rows, but as your data grows so will the time taken to find the data. Having the slow query log in place will show these queries and help you do something about them.

Drupal has a quick and convenient way of creating ajax dialogs that gives users the ability to embed links in content that open up dialog boxes when clicked. This is a useful way of presenting a bit of content to a user without them navigating away from the page.

I have previously written in detail about creating ajax dialogs in Drupal, and I refer back to that article quite often when the need arises.

The simplest way of creating an ajax dialog is by adding the class "use-ajax" and the data-dialog-type attribute, which can be one of dialog, dialog.off_canvas, dialog.off_canvas_top and modal. Using the "use-ajax" class tells Drupal that this is an ajax link and to intercept the click to perform an ajax request.

Routes in Drupal can be altered as they are created, or even changed on the fly as the page request is being processed.

In addition to a routing system, Drupal has a path alias system where internal routes like "/node/123" can be given SEO friendly paths like "/about-us". When the user visits the site at "/about-us" the path will be internally re-written to allow Drupal to serve the correct page. Modules like Pathauto will automatically generate the SEO friendly paths using information from the item of content; without the user having to remember to enter it themselves.

 Question

What does the following code print out?

function arrayPrint($array)
{
   echo implode(' ', $array);
}

$arrayA = [1, 2, 3];
$arrayB = $arrayA;
$arrayB[1] = 0;
arrayPrint($arrayA);

Godot is a great game engine and I've been looking for projects to help me expand my knowledge of the platform. After fiddling with drawing shapes and getting used to the interface I decided to create a text adventure game.

Text adventures used to be really popular in the early days of games, before graphical adventures were possible on the hardware available. I can remember playing a couple of adventure games in the late 80s and even playing some simple multi user dungeons (MUDs) in the 90s so text adventure games do have a hint of nostalgia for me.

There are a number of different tools that allow you to validate and test a Drupal site. Inspecting your custom code allows you to adhere to coding standards and ensure that you stamp our common coding problems. Adding tests allows you to make certain that the functionality of your Drupal site works correctly.

If you have tests in your Drupal project then you ideally need to be running them at some point in your development workflow. Getting GitHub to run the tests when you push code or create a pull request means that you can have peace of mind that your test suite is being run at some point in workflow. You also want to allow your tests to be run locally with ease, without having to remember lots of command line arguments.

In this article I will show how to set up validation and tests against a Drupal site and how to get GitHub to run these steps when you create a pull request. This assumes you have a Drupal 10 project that is controlled via composer.

This year's DrupalCon Europe was hosted between the 17th and 20th of October, in the French city of Lille. My DrupalCon adventure began early on Monday morning when Chris Maiden picked me up to drive to France via the EuroStar train. We arrived in Lille a little after 4pm, which was really good going for a nearly 400+ mile trip.

DrupalCon Lillie was a first for me as I was there representing Code Enigma, who had sponsored the event and organised a booth (well, a table). The booth wasn't so that we could sell anything, it was more more because we wanted to support Drupal and the sponsorship came with a booth. Driving to Lille allowed us to fill the car with 200 coffee cups, which we gave out at the event.

Using frameworks to handle the authentication of your PHP application is perfectly fine to do, and normally encouraged. They abstract away all of the complexity of managing users and sessions that need to work in order to allow your application to function.

That said, it is important to take a step back and understand how authentication works in PHP. This allows you to more accurately debug problems with framework authentication systems that you make common use of.

Creating an authentication system using PHP is pretty simple since PHP has many of the features and functions built in. In fact, frameworks will simply wrap this feature set into a coherent authentication model that can be expanded to introduce new features.

In this article I will go through the steps required to create an authentication system using PHP and MariaDB. I will assume you have some knowledge of PHP, but that you want to know more about how to authenticate users.