In this video I discuss block caching in drupal 8 & 9. It is quite radically different from drupal 7. I discuss cache tags, cache context and cache max-age.
What if you have to link to a specific url in in twig, but you only have the nid? Moreover, it is good practice to use the id and not a hardcored url. Here's what you should use:
I play a lot with importing and exporting content lately. When I remove content, the created menu items need to be removed automatically. Here's a snippet on how to delete all links in a menu.
Goodbye preprocess functions! Welcome to drupal 8. We use a nice plug-in to get control over our menu item and to show html inside the title. In this case we show a counter of the amount of messages a user has.
Some parts of custom entities seem different from nodes, but mostly they aren't. Small snippet for showing a created date of a custom entity in a controller
Sometimes simple tasks like changing a page title of a system page can be hard. Luckily, drupal 8 provides clean ways to do that. In this tutorial some info about RouteSubscribers.
Getting the output like you want it to be an be quite a challenge in drupal. This snippet shows you how you can add markup to your form labels in drupal 8.
In drupal 7 we had some contrib modules using a tag to make subtitles in our menu. In drupal 8 I try to avoid contrib modules on my menu items. Here's a hint on how to get it to work.
For a few months I'm working in my spare time on a module that can import instagram feeds and turn it into nodes. And on top of that, a nice javascript extension to make it look beautiful out-of-the box.
A thing developers can forget while testing, is to make sure all functionality of your module is stable when used in the context of ajax. Some plugins might stop working after an ajax call on the page. This is how to prevent such thing.
It is a bit strange that the name field (which functions like the node's title field) can be only 50 characters long. The snippet I'd like to share with you, makes it 255 long.
Short snippet that shows how to get url parameters in drupal 8. Where in drupal 7 you would have to do some $_GET or work with args(0), you now have a clean function to do this.
I had to loop over some images in Twig and dynamically adding image styles to them. Without using contrib this seemed a bit hard to do. I found a fix and I share it here with you.
A common issue you would have when using javascript plug-ins is that you do not want them to be added to your version control. You would want to add it to the main composer.json file that has to donwload the library for you. Here is how the solution works.
One thing that bothers me quite a lot is the error when you try to import existing configuration into a new drupal 8 website. I resolved this by adding a custom drush command that gets fired right before config import.
When using content moderation, the view_unpblished module does not work. But I really needed to get a user role to see all nodes created of this type and have access to it. With the following snippet, I fixed this.
A thing that is very nice about drupal 8 is the flexibility of views In this tutorial, a snippet about how to show a 'total' count of results of some number fields of a table.
I encountered a problem while working on a big migration. The client wanted to reuse files and images, so I added entity browser functionality. The problem however was that views does not provide a preview image for files. Therefore I created a small module.
Twig comes with quite some handy functionalities. Date formatting is an example. In this snippet an example of how to show the created date in a drupal 8 time format.
Use global theme javascript only in a few occasions. You should make sure javascript is only used on the right places. This snippet shows you how to load javascript when a specific view is loaded only.
Drupal 8 is becoming more and more API-first based. This means a lot of imports and exports of data will be done. A thing you might face here, is that the updating of entity reference fields is a bit tricky. Here I'll show you how it is done.
Sending files attached in e-mails is a necessary feature for a lot of applications. This snippet shows you how to attach a managed file f.e. an invoice to your custom e-mail.
Configuration management is great. But you'll encounter some difficulties at first when importing existing config to a new site. A typical error is the "Entities exist of type" error. Here's how to fix them.
Today I have a small helper module to share with you. A small pain in the ass is that the sending of e-mails requires a bit too much code. More specifically sometimes you would like to send simple alerts to webmasters. This helper module helps you with it.
One of the biggest flaws in drupal is the disability to do something easy as sending html emails out-of-the-box. In drupal 8 it is already slightly better, but you would need to know some things.
When you give users the permission to administer users, there is a security implication in that users with this permission can add the role 'administrator' role to any user.
Block access is a powerful way to show or hide content in some contexts. Instead of using contrib modules, this is very easy in small pieces of custom code. The following code prevents access to a block based on a subscription field in the user object.
The following code shows how to create a custom form in the drupal back-end and how to save custom config defined in your custom module. Powerful stuff and very flexible.
You can update custom config with a settings form you build.
In a custom module *custom_mailing* add a file called *custom_mailing.routing.yml* add the following route:
Custom formatters are great to get precise control over your field output. But I ran into something difficult when trying to output the description of a file field.
By default you get to see a strange screen saying how long your are a member. It is good practice to auto-redirect users on login to the /admin/content page. This snippet does the trick.
When editing notes, an often mentioned problem of webmasters is the lack of preview of their text. With this snipped you can embed the css of your theme in CKEditor, which makes it much more visible towards your webmasters.
A frustrating thing for webmasters is often that they cannot see the eventual lay-out of text styling in their CKEditor. This snippet fixes this issue.
When a drupal site has different domains for its language, difficulties can arise when developing locally. With this snippet, you override your language settings, so prefixes are used instead of domains.
I personally like using the drupal menu block module. It allows for quick creation of submenu's. The following patch fixes a bug that keeps showing regions, even when there are no subitems in the menu block.
From time to time it comes in quite handy to import configuration from other websites into yours. You site uuid is unique though, with the following snippet you get yours.
A typical setup is one where you would redirect all non www and http requests to https://www.domainname.com. I prefer to keep my .htaccess file in version control also. With the following snippet, I get it the way I want it.
I started using an automated script for my drupal installation, which will generate an admin user. But, after installation I have to edit the password.
I like a good user interface for webmasters, so a clear menu path is necessary. For the admin toolbar dropdowns, I usually create subitems programmatically.
I've had some difficulties loading a list of translated terms. More in particular I didn't want to show the untranslated terms, but ONLY the ones that were already translated in the current language
By default, users with the permission of 'administer users' cannot assign roles on the user registration form. With this snippet you can, but make sure to hide the 'administrator'-role for your users.
If you like to use the search api or a custom Views page for your search result I personally like to use the default search block and redirect it to my results page.
In this case I created a custom entity called 'submenu'. In my custom module a used HOOK_LINK_ALTER to make the submenu (which contains a textfield) visible on hover. I used the code below to render my custom entity content:
In some cases you want to embed a view inside your custom module. The views_embed_view() function is the way to go. With this little snippet, you can render any view.
When using lazy loading of images, I encountered an important issue. Social sharing engines like Facebook can't read placeholder images. In this drupal 8 tutorial we'll fix this issue by creating a small custom module handling image tokens.
Ever looked at Pinterest or Google images and wondered how to achieve this nice effect of loading in images? One of the things that frustrated me building drupal websites is the lack of nice front-end libraries. Fancyload solves the problem!