Drupal

I was recently asked to implement a feature on a Drupal site where all nodes of a certain type would redirect to a main listing page if that node had been unpublished. The problem in doing this is that if a post is unpublished then Drupal will issue an access denied response quite early on in the boot process. When the menu item is loaded it goes through an access callback which sees that the post is unpublished and issues an access denied before anything else can happen. So in this situation you can't use things like Rules to redirect users as the rule is never triggered.

The solution was to use hook_menu_alter() to change the access callback parameter of the node page. We are essentially replacing the normal access callback of node_access() with our own version.

To find out if the current user is anonymous use the following.

\Drupal::currentUser()->isAnonymous();

This can be used as part of an if statement like this:

if (\Drupal::currentUser()->isAnonymous()) {
  // Run action.
}

To get the currently selected language on a Drupal 8 site you need to run the following.

When creating re-usable theme templates in Drupal 8 it's quite easy to include that template by using the following snippet.

{% include directory ~ '/templates/parts/footer.html.twig' %}

This assumes that your footer.html.twig template file is kept in the same theme as the template you are working on. It's also good practice to add the template part to a directory called 'parts' or 'components' to separate them from the normal Drupal templates.

DrupalCamp London, now in it's 4th year, was held of the weekend of the 4th, 5th and 6th of March at The University of London campus in London. Myself and a few other developers from Manchester headed down for the weekend to attend. I wasn't able to attend the CXO day on the 4th, but we were all in attendance for the camp event.

When overriding theme functions in Drupal 7 you would normally copy the theme function into the template.php and alter it to suit your needs. This isn't always convenient though, especially if you are trying to abstract functionality into modules and not have code in your theme layer that is reliant on module code. If you add theme override functions to your module files then they won't do anything as Drupal isn't looking for them there and won't pick them up.

It is possible to alter the theme registry in order to get Drupal to pick up your theme functions from your module code. This helps collect together code that performs a certain task and allows you to deploy theme alterations along with module updates.

DrupalCamp Scotland 2015 consisted of a Friday training day, followed by a day of talks and sessions on the 6th and 7th November.

The training day was based around Drupal 8 and had us looking at installation, configuration, and development. In the morning we set up a couple of Docker containers (on a Digital Ocean box) to run Drupal 8 from and then looked at the Drupal command line tool when setting up the system. Once installed we looked at the system structure and how the configuration management system worked. In the afternoon we created modules and themes, also using the Drupal console to generate some of the code fragments. I think the use of Docker on a remote server was a good idea in getting everyone up and running on the system without having to rely on local LAMP stacks or whatever. The training day was really good and I was able to swap lots of ideas and techniques with the trainers and other attendees.

Or, how you can render a Drupal page with an entirely different template.

I recently had a requirement where I needed to get Drupal to render a single page of HTML that was entirely separate from the normal page layout of a site. This was actually part of an API callback, but this got me involved in looking at how delivery callbacks work in Drupal 7. It isn't necessary to create a new theme just for the job of rendering a single page with some custom HTML, especially as Drupal has mechanisms to provide this built in.

The city of Sunderland played host to DrupalCamp North, which saw Drupal users and contributors travelling from all over the UK and Europe to attend. The event, which was held from 24th-26th July, was jointly led by the North East, North West and Yorkshire Drupal User Groups and consisted of a three day sprint, a business day, and a two day conference.

Due to work constraints I wasn't able to attend the sprints or the business day but I attended the main conference days and a group of colleagues drove up from Manchester on the Friday night. Our accommodation was booked through Sunderland University and were a short walk away from the camp venue, which was great.

There are a few ways in which you can create complex node access systems. Modules like Taxonomy Access Control and Node Access will allow you to restrict node access in different ways, and work very well for setting up taxonomy or role based access control. There are a few edge cases where you need to restrict access to a node based on some arbitrary conditions like the age of the user or the contents of a field. This is where the build in Drupal access control mechanisms come into play. They do take a little bit of effort to get around how they work, but I hope to enlighten in this post.