Drupal 9

Drupal's path system gives authors the ability to override the path of an item of content. Whilst the internal path of a page might be "/node/1" the external path can be anything you want, and can be set when editing the item of content.

The addition of the Path Auto module makes this change of path easy for your users by using patterns and automatically generating paths based on the data contained within the content item. You might want to use a path that contains the type of entity being presented, what category it was added to, and even the title of the item of content.

This system creates powerful search engine friendly URLs that can add keywords to the paths that Drupal uses to find content.

When building custom entities there are a few things you need to do in order to add Path Auto functionality. It must contain a 'canonical' link that points to the entity and be a fieldable entity with a field called 'path'.

In previous articles I have written about injecting context into context aware plugins and creating custom context providers and wanted to complete the series by writing about creating context aware custom plugins.

The context system in Drupal is a powerful way of injecting dynamic data into plugins without writing code to add that data directly to the plugin itself. Instead of adding custom code to find the current user or the node from the route of the page you can inject the context into the plugin using the context system and add code to make use of that data. Although most commonly used in blocks it can be found in a couple of other plugin types in Drupal core, like the condition plugin for example.

In this article I will go through how to create a context aware plugin, including how to create custom plugins and how to allow that plugin to understand the context_definitions annotation. Once the custom plugin is complete we will render it using a Drupal controller action to prove that the context works correctly.

I've been doing a bit of Drupal migration recently, and one of the tasks I have undertaken is to migrate "likes" from a Drupal 7 site to a Drupal 10 site.

The likes in the old Drupal 7 site were built using a custom module, with the Flag module was selected to provide the new functionality on the new Drupal 10 site. This meant that I needed to migrate the old custom structure into the entity structure provided by the Flag module.

To add further complication, it was possible to add likes to nodes and comments, which meant that the flags on the new side needed to be applied to two different types of entity. This was simple enough to do using two different types of flag entity; one for nodes and one for comments.

Context definitions in Drupal are really useful when you want to inject context into your plugins and I have been using them for a little while now. It has made building custom blocks to add content to pages much easier as I don't need to copy the same block of code to find an entity of a particular sort into the block plugin.

One problem I encountered when using this technique was when trying to programmatically create and render a block. The problem was that the context wasn't available in the block when it was used in this way, and it took me a little investigation to find out how to put all of the pieces together.

Rendering a block programmatically is sometimes a necessity to do when you need the block outside of the block's normal region. You might create a block that collects together the output of a number of blocks, which allows you to template them together in a very precise way. You might also need to print out a block without having to create a region on a page.

When developing plugins in Drupal a common task is to inject context so that certain tasks can be performed.

For example, we might have a block plugin that needs to know about the content entity of the page it is currently being rendered on. We could potentially inject the routing system into the plugin and use this to find the currently loaded entity, but there is a drawback to this. There is a fair amount of custom logic involved in finding the content entity from the route and we would need to use this same code every time we want to solve this problem.

This method also hard codes the route into the plugin and so makes it difficult to select any other sort of context. There is also a problem when it comes to caching as you also need to inform the plugin about the use of routing so that the caching layers know how to cache things.

Whilst working on a module I found that I needed to do something that was difficult to find information for. I think part of that is because the solution is simpler than I was thinking, but it did cause me to get lost in source code and internet issues for a while.

What I needed to do was to load in a list of configuration entities that matched certain parameters. The configuration entity I was dealing with was used to manipulate the output of a form, but only if certain conditions were met first. I thought that this information might be useful to others who are looking to load configuration entities.

I have been using the Drupal dependency injection system for a while now, even giving talks and writing articles on the subject. As the release of Drupal 10 is just around the corner I have been thinking more about how to override dependencies to plugin classes.

I wanted to share a trick to overriding dependency injection that will make your life easier. The Drupal codebase itself does not use this trick, but it seems that many contributed modules have started to use this trick to create plugin classes.

In this article I will go through how to add dependency injection to Drupal classes in two different patterns.

Drupal has a number of coding standards and best practices that govern the way code should be written. This has many benefits but can allow for a consistent and maintainable code to be created.

All Drupal modules and themes are written with coding standards in mind and that allows Drupal developers to look at any project and see a similar style of code. If you ever submit code to Drupal or a contributed project you will be required to adhere to these coding standards, so it makes sense to get used to knowing about them.

The main tool that is used to test coding standards in Drupal is PHP_CodeSniffer, which is a widely used static analysis tool for testing PHP coding standards. It comes with a set of coding standards built in, but it is possible to add the Drupal coding standards for the tool to use.

Ajax Dialogs in Drupal are a good way of presenting content to a user without them having to navigate away from the page they are looking at.

This is useful when presenting a list of items or a link to something like a terms and conditions page. Users can click a link and view the content as a dialog box.

Creating dialogs in Drupal is built into the platform and are powered through the jQuery UI dialog component.

The content moderation module in Drupal core is a powerful way of allowing content to pass through a moderation workflow. This allows you to create workflows that take content from draft modes into a published state and back again.

Each content moderation state can have a "published" setting that tells Drupal if an item of content in this state should be considered as published. This means that if a page of content is put into a published state then users with the "view published content" permissions can view it.

Users would need the opposite permission "view any unpublished content" to be able to see a content in a state without this flag set.