Tagged Howto

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

How to Streamline Update Hooks Using the Batch API

When maintaining a Drupal 8 site in production, it’s often necessary to make changes within the site’s database, specifically when it comes to modifying settings or data that is not handled by Drupal’s YAML file-based configuration management API. Some common examples of settings or data not handled by the configuration management API include the following:

Hook42 Team
Open laptop in coffee shop with Batch API Updates and Drupal 8 logo on screen

Switching Themes For Progressive Enhancements

One of our recent projects required a progressive enhancement approach for visual changes. Instead of a full end-to-end rebuild of a Drupal theme, a progressive approach can be accomplished with theme switching. Many Drupal 8 projects leverage custom block types, Paragraphs, or Layout Builder to place one or more design components on a page. This provided the client with the ability to split up a larger architectural change into a small set of pages and components that can be gradually rolled out.

Hook42 Team
Street signs pointing in multiple directions labeled layout

Consuming JSON APIs in Drupal 8

Nowadays everyone has an API and it's fairly common to want a website you're working on to fetch data from a 3rd party API. That's because pulling 3rd party data into your website can not only enriches your website's content, but doing so can prevent the need to duplicate commonly needed data.

API provided data could include displaying weather information, going through drupal.org projects, looking through census results, or even displaying Magic the Gathering card data. In fact, every WordPress site comes with an active JSON API out of the box.

There really is an API for almost anything. It's no surprise that you'll eventually want to consume some random API while developing a Drupal website. But enough of the sales pitch, let's get started consuming JSON APIs.

Photo of kittens looking at JSON and Drupal logos

Using Lando for Drupal 8 Core Issue Patch Testing

Drupal thrives with love and care from the community. We help move the Drupal project forward by mentoring, sharing knowledge, helping with drupal.org (d.o) issues, and more. If you want to help in the d.o issue queues, you are very welcome! While there are many ways to help, one important piece is reviewing and testing code patches.

lando icon

Field Notes: UI Patterns Module

When it comes to Atomic Design systems in Drupal 8, there’s hardly a shortage of solutions to choose from. Pattern Lab and KSS Node are certainly among the most popular and the recently released Mannequin looks incredibly exciting. However, in all these aforementioned solutions, exposing that component data to Drupal has never been particularly straightforward.

UI Patterns infographic

Roping in TextWrangler

As Hook 42's Community Evangelist, I frequently venture into the prairie of Drupal documentation. It's not quite the Wild Wild West, but having a solid text editor in my holster keeps me saddled up and ready to ride.

Hook42 Team
Lego cowboy with a lassoo

Node.js version control in Drupal themes

It is important that for any given project, each developer uses the same version of Node.js and related Javascript (JS) packages. In this article, we’ll discuss how to use “Node Version Manager” (NVM) to install multiple versions of Node.js, how to use “Automatic Version Switching for Node.js” (AVN) to automatically switch Node.js versions when changing to a project directory, and how to use “Node Package Manager” (NPM) to keep track of JS packages.

Hook42 Team
Drupal and Node logos

How to Help with the Drupal 8 Contrib Porting Tracker

Drupal 8 RC2 is out and a full release is coming on November 19th! But, in order to make more great websites on Drupal 8, we need to port a bunch of contrib projects from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. There are a LOT of contrib projects out there (over 12,000 modules, themes, and distributions!), so the new Drupal 8 Contrib Porting Tracker helps track these projects so the community can see what’s going on in a centralized place.

Hook42 Team
mountain climbing illustration

GREP or: How I Learned to Stop Searching and Love the Command Line

It took me a while, but the *nix command line won me over. The turning point came when I discovered the true potential of grep (which gets its name from globally search a regular expression and print).

I focus on frontend development, so this blog will use frontend examples with CSS, but in reality grep can be used for so much more. Grep is a great way to save time spent searching and better use that time doing.

Hook42 Team
Drawing of a storefront