Drupal

The Shield module prevents access to a Drupal site by putting a Apache authentication system across the entire website. This means that to access the site you need a username and password.

This is useful in a number of different situations, but I use it most for protecting dev and staging sites from access. It's not the most complex authentication system in the world, but it's enough to prevent the embarrassment caused by having staging sites being spidered by search engines.

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.

The default ordering of comments in Drupal 8 is by thread. This means that even if you turn off threading the comments are always displayed in thread order. The CommentDefaultFormatter class is used by Drupal to display comments and contains this line of code.

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.

Setting Up Aliases

The first thing you need to do is set up your Drush aliases, this allows you to connect to the remote Drupal instance from your local machine. Drush aliases are kept in your ~/.drush directory. To see what aliases you have on your system use the command.

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.

Getting to the conference this year was a little more troublesome than usual. The snow and frost from that week had caused chaos on the trains (not to mention the roads) and so after many cancellations and delays I eventually made it to London the night before the Saturday/Sunday conference. The snow didn’t just affect me though, a few people couldn’t make it and a few sessions had to be rearranged. Thankfully, everyone made it to the camp in the end.

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.

DrupalCamp London 2017 was held on the 4th and 5th of March at the newly refurbished main hall of City, University of London. The new facilities are really nice and keep the conference in the same area, but they aren't too small that it feels cramped.

I had to update a Drupal 7 site recently and needed to change the field keys of a list field to be different values. This wasn't possible from within Drupal as it does a pre-check to make sure that the key doesn't already exist. If it finds any values present in the database with that key then it will reject the change. This is absolutely correct but causes a little bit of an issue when you need to update these values.

The solution to this is to alter both the field definition and the field data via directly altering them in the database. The following function provides a neat little way of doing this to a field by just passing in the field name and what the key values need to change to.

The European DrupalCon was held in Dublin from 26th - 30th September and I went along with a couple of colleagues to learn a few things about Drupal. I have been back from the conference for a few days now, and I wanted to write down some of the highlights of the conference in a blog post. There is a lot going on at DrupalCon and with 2000+ people, 3 full days of sessions, 2 tutorial days, multiple parties and over 10,000 cups of coffee consumed there is too much to write about here. So this will be a few random highlights and stand out moments of the conference.