Drupal Planet

This is the third post in a series. I wrote about my experiences moving this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, and then zeroed in on theming the site using Radix as a base theme. Out of the box, Radix subthemes don't generate sidebar regions for block placement, something many websites want.

As a way to illustrate theme development using Radix, and as a recipe for a common site-building requirement, this post will walk through how to add sidebars to a Radix subtheme.

I recently wrote about my experiences migrating this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. In that post I said that I would write separately about my experiences theming the site. This is that post.

I was broadly happy with the look and feel of the Drupal 7 version of the site, so didn't want something vastly different. At the sametime, I wanted to make sure that I was using the most maintainable underlying code, behind what end-users see.

I've finally updated this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. This post runs through my experience of this upgrade, including explaining why I bypassed Drupal 8 and 9, and why I didn't upgrade straight to the latest Drupal 11. Overall, I'm very positive about running it on Drupal 10.

Drupal no longer releases a new version of Core when an upstream dependency fixes a security vulnerability. It is the responsibility of site maintainers to keep track of security advisories for all such dependent libraries. That is no small task, and a way to automate this is needed. This post looks into how this can be done.

Drupal sites contain a settings.php file with site-specific settings, that is based off default.settings.php at the time the site is installed. As Drupal evolves, default.settings.php will change. Sometimes, it's worth incorporating those changes into the settings.php file for an already-installed site. This post runs through a low-friction way to keep on top of this house-keeping.

cPanel offers users a shared hosting environment which could be thought to exclude running NodeJS (and therefore Node driven theming tools like Gulp and Grunt). In fact, this is easily overcome, as I explain here.

I've been putting off learning how to build sites in Drupal 8, and migrating my existing Drupal 7 sites over to Drupal 8. Why? Drupal 8 uses a lot of new tools. I want to learn how to set up a Drupal 8 site in the "right" (optimal) way so that I don't incur technical debt for myself later on. That means I have a lot of tools to learn. That takes time, which I don't have a lot of. So I've procrastinated.

I'm a big fan of Piwik, an open source analytics suite. Think Google Analytics, StatCounter, Sitemeter, etc. … only self-hosted an open source. There are many benefits of using it:

Yesterday, the Drupal Security team issued a Security Advisory for the Mollom module, SA-CONTRIB-2018-038. The module is now marked as "unsupported".

The security team is marking this project unsupported. There is a known security issue with the project that has not been fixed by the maintainer.

Drupal 8 and 9 use Composer for package management, but Composer requires more memory than is available on most shared hosting environments. This post discusses the problem, and explores a way of working around it to get things working.