The Joy of Automated Tests

Date Reviewed

Automated tests are such a joy.  I have at times deleted tests but I've never regretted writing them. Today was a good reminder.

Debugging Drupal with Xdebug

Xdebug is a PHP extension that can massively improve your debugging experience and speed – for both backend and frontend developers. Conversely, it can also drag down your php speed to a crawl, so you want to configure it to be a simple toggled – and only enable when you are using it. Xdebug works with most IDEs but I will be specifically showcasing usage with PHPStorm as that is what I use it with.

Standardizing Sites with Drupal Scaffolding

Learn how to use the Drupal Composer Scaffolding plugin - both customizing it in your site and creating new data sources for it to standardize and improve your site builds. Presented at DrupalCon 2023 Pittsburgh

Getting the parent node of a Drupal 8+ node

Status
Old but mostly relevant
Date Reviewed

There are some circumstances that you want to get data from the node one level up a menu from your current node. However, doing that is not self-explanatory since there isn't actually any direct relationship between the nodes. I'll be referring to the nodes as "parent" and "child" for simplicity despite this.

Including Patches in Drupal Contrib Modules

Status
Old but mostly relevant
Date Reviewed

Occasionally in building a Drupal module (this was especially relevant for  7.x but even with 11 is still relevant), you can't actually quite do what you want to do without a change to another module or core. Every effort should be made to avoid that but there are instances that it is truly required and the right method.

Setting up Brotli Extension for PHP

Status
Old but mostly relevant
Date Reviewed

The Brotli extension for PHP, integrates the Brotli compression algorithm for use in PHP. Brotli compression is similar to gzip but has a higher compression ratio - up to 30% bandwidth savings.