Drupal

Continuing my review of some Drupal PaaS hosting platforms I am taking a look at Dropsolid.

What I'm not doing is a massive deep dive on all platforms. Ultimately, your milage will vary and what you get out of these platforms will be different for most people. You will know the requirements of your project and what you need to accomplish.

Also, if you want to know more about a platform, then please contact them directly. I'm sure they will be happy to hear from you.

Based in Gent, Belgium, Dropsolid is a Drupal development agency who have built a Drupal hosting platform. The Dropsolid Experience Cloud is a platform built from years of experience in hosting and maintaining Drupal.

I met a few of the team at DrupalCamp London 2020 and they were kind enough to supply me with a key to evaluate the platform.

Continuing my review of some Drupal PaaS hosting platforms I am taking a look at Platform.sh.

What I'm not doing is a massive deep dive on all platforms. Ultimately, your milage will vary and what you get out of these platforms will be different for most people. You will know the requirements of your project and what you need to accomplish.

Also, if you want to know more about a platform, then please contact them directly. I'm sure they will be happy to hear from you.

Platform.sh is a PaaS site created by Commerce Guys, who are the main driving force being the Drupal Commerce suite of modules. They split off in 2016 and have grown to become a very respectable company in the PaaS space. They have also expanded their service to support a lot more than Drupal so you can easily deploy your Drupal and WordPress sites side by side.

Continuing my review of some Drupal PaaS hosting platforms I am taking a look at Pantheon.

What I'm not doing is a massive deep dive on all platforms. Ultimately, your milage will vary and what you get out of these platforms will be different for most people. You will know the requirements of your project and what you need to accomplish.

Also, if you want to know more about a platform, then please contact them directly. I'm sure they will be happy to hear from you.

Pantheon provides a PaaS solution started in 2010 in the USA. They now have a worldwide support staff and have data centres in a variety of different locations throughout the world. They started out as a specialist Drupal host, but now have support for WordPress hosting solutions.

I've been looking at Drupal hosting solutions recently, and after trying a few I thought I would write a quick review of each. I was specifically looking for hosting providers that provide dedicated Drupal hosting support and an administration dashboard of some kind. It turns out that a handful of such suppliers exist. Whilst it is perfectly possible to setup a server on AWS or DigitalOcean and then install Drupal there, this isn't what I am looking at. The good thing about Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions is that you get hosting, backup, recovery, logging, tools, and analysis all built in. Some platforms even have extra tools like build pipelines, marketing systems or analytics.

Drupal 9 will be released on June 3rd, 2020 so with this just around the corner I thought I'd put together a post about how to check if your site is ready. The transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was more of an upheaval than an upgrade. Updating a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8 requires a lot of effort involving code changes and migration steps. Drupal 7 modules are not compatible with Drupal 8 and so any custom code written needs to be adapted to the new structure of Drupal. The difficulty of this change made the Drupal community take notice and think about how future versions of Drupal are introduced.

Drupal Views is a great way of exposing data to users via a search interface. This can be done directly via the database or via a Solr server. Plenty of Views plugins exist to allow reacting to the search input and output in a variety of different ways.

The other day I needed to add a personalised message to Views output to inform a user that their search keyword didn't find any results. There is a plugin for Views that allows this, but it only shows a basic search string.

What I needed was a way to print out the following block of HTML, containing the search term that the user searched for.

DrupalCamp London was held on the 14th and 15th March 2020 and I went down to City University London to partake in the event. I wasn't talking this year, so I was there purely to enjoy the conference.

Drupal has a little flaw in its user permission system that allows users to give themselves, or other users, roles that they shouldn't be able to. If the user has the 'administer users' permission this essentially gives them access to alter roles for any user on the system, meaning that they can grand administrator access to any user on the system. The fix to this involves a couple of actions.

From the pages of 'crazy things you can do with Drupal 8' comes this idea that I recently had to implement on a site. This was on a site that had implemented translations, but they needed something a little extra. The central idea was that if you visited a page on the site in a particular language, and that language didn't exist, then to try and give the user a similar language.

If you weren't already aware, Drupal's default behaviour is to return the default language version of a page if the language requested doesn't exist. If the Path Auto module is installed (which is usually the case on most Drupal sites) then Drupal will not be able to translate the path alias correctly and will issue a 404 if the requested translation doesn't exist. Drupal can't take the path for the French page /fr/about-us and find the original node because as far as it's concerned /fr/about-us doesn't exist.

For a long time the drupal_set_message() function has been a mainstay of Drupal development. You can use this function to print a message or an error response to a user. This is useful to do as it can be done almost anywhere before the final page rendering functions and will be printed into the same area of a Drupal page.

This has recently been deprecated in Drupal 8.5.0 and so I was looking around on how to do the same thing in a new way. Drupal now has a messenger service, powered by the class Drupal\Core\Messenger\Messenger. This can be included into your code using the following shortcut.

$messenger = \Drupal::messenger();

This can be used to print messages to the user. For example, to print a standard message with a blue background do the following.

$messenger->addMessage('Message printed to a user.');

This can be done in one line like this.