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We love sharing our knowledge about all things tech and community. 

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

It's a very sad week for us at Hook 42. COVID-19 has hit our clients and our families hard, and we regret to announce that we're closing up shop at the end of the month.

Hook 42 has been driven by our core values since we started in 2012: honesty, quality, community, ongoing improvement, work/life balance, and humor. We've loved being part of the open source community, in particular, the Drupal community all these years. We will always have fond memories of working with an amazing team, great clients, and wonderful community members.

so long surrounding illustration of fish and dolphin wearing space helmets

Successfully Migrating Bad Data in Drupal

There’s bad data everywhere, but nowhere is it more insidious than when you encounter it for the first time while trying to migrate a website. Bad data, in this case, is defined as any data that doesn’t conform to the expectations of the migrator and their code, whether that’s because of bad data entry, surprising contextual requirements, or historical changes in value patterns. It can come at you from a variety of directions and can have surprising origins.

glitchy computer screens

So You Need to Update to Drupal 8.8.x?

Welcome! If you need to update your Drupal 8 site to the latest feature branch, this post is for you. 

Drupal 8.8.0 introduced many exciting changes. On the heels of this release, we also saw a security release for Drupal 8.8.1, which covers four distinct security advisories (SAs). Drupal 8.7.11 also has fixes for those SAs, but developers might consider this a golden opportunity to take care of both updates at once.

Drupal 8 logo with text 8.8.x presented below

Looking Back, Looking Forward: DrupalCamp NJ, 2020

The Central NJ Drupal Group hosts one of my favorite Drupal camps in the northeast, and this year’s DrupalCamp NJ was no exception.

Location, Location, Location

Princeton University uses Drupal heavily, and gives back to the community by hosting the monthly Web Developers Central NJ Meetup and the annual camp.

This year’s camp was held in a new location, which will give us room to grow in the future. It is also closer to Princeton’s beautiful main campus.

Hook42 Team
DrupalCamp NJ Recap January 30 to February 1, 2020

How to use Hooks for building Drupal 8 themes

For this article, we enlisted front end developer, Abby Milberg, to give us a little inspiration for Drupal 8 theme building. Abby is the expert here, so I'll let her take it away.

What is a preprocess function?

A preprocess function creates or modifies variables and render arrays (arrays of data structured in specific ways that Drupal knows how to render as HTML) before they’re rendered and/or passed to a template.

Hook42 Team
woman typing on laptop viewing drupal 8 screen

Welcome to the Team Michelle!

Hook 42 is excited to be adding Michelle Darling to our growing team. As a front end developer, Michelle will be focused on web development for our team. Michelle’s past history working with Drupal and Wordpress content management systems is a great addition to the group. We understand being the new person is a little awkward at first, so to break the ice we had Michelle answer a few fun questions. Here’s what Michelle said.

Where are you originally from, and where do you live now?

I live about 40 miles from my birthplace in Champaign, Illinois. 

the phrase welcome michelle next to her headshot with hook 42 logo

The Happy Box

There have been two outstanding times where I have been brought to tears of joy in the creation of Hook 42.

Both times are the result of someone creating a tangible visual representation of Hook 42's personality. The creation was something so fitting to the vision, that deep in my soul I realized that someone understands the vision enough to expand on it, improve it, make it more than just an idea, and can help convey the message to others.

smile emoji placed over person handing hook 42 swag box to another person