My wife and I are fans of M*A*S*H. When B.J. first arrives in Korea Hawkeye takes him to Rosie’s Bar and tells him: “I can’t think of a single reason why we’re here, except that we’re needed.” Oddly I’ve found this to be true of a great many service opportunities in my life; often the most useful ways to serve my community seems to require doing a things that should be utterly unneeded. ...

One of the best practices for Drupal 8 that is still emerging is how to create modules with complex deployable configuration. In the past we often abused the features module to do this, and while that continues to be an option, with Drupal 8’s vastly improved configuration management options and the ability to install configuration easily I have been looking for something better. I particularly want to build modules that don’t have unnecessary dependencies but I can still reliably include all the needed configuration in my project. And after a few tries I think I’ve struck on an effective process. ...

Can your plan handle the bizarre? Last winter Dries, the Drupal Association, and the whole Drupal community, stumbled when concerns about a leading contributor’s potentially exploitive relationship got caught up in discussions of Gorean subculture and related sexual behaviors (warning researching this topic will quickly lead you to NSFW information). The intriguing details drew in an ever-expanding audience but were actually irrelevant the main concerns and the secondary ones that followed. The DA lost control of the message and the story and the entire community suffered as a consequence. Last spring and summer I was asked to step in to help them regain control of the message and start to resolve the crisis. It wasn’t the first time I was part of a crisis response with unusual details, and likely won’t be the last. ...

I recently completed a Drupal 8 project that required pulling data from a remote database. The actual data is not terribly complicated, so Drupal’s role in this case is mostly to provide an abstraction layer that converts the database into a (cacheable) JSON response. Pulling all the pieces together took a little more research and guessing than I expected so I figured I might save a few people time by writing it up. This is more of an intermediate than a beginner project and so I’m going to skip over lots of detail that important to making it all really work. To really understand what’s happening here you’ll want a basic understanding of Drupal 8’s controllers and database services. ...

This week, for the second time in a year, the unacceptable behavior of a high profile man in the Drupal community has been the topic of public discussion and debate. This time the organizations involved acted more clearly and rapidly, if imperfectly. The issue came to the forefront during #metoo campaign, and again showed that the Drupal community reflects the world around us. I listened to friends and colleagues respond in various ways to the events and to the recognition of several men that they had been allowing this behavior to go on right in front of them for years without intervention. It is clear that in Drupal, like in all parts of our society we can – and must – do better. ...

One of the challenges that organizations of all shapes and sizes frequently face is getting good pictures to go with their web site design. Good images can draw in your audience but a missing or poorly displayed image risks damaging your credibility. Frequently organizations fall in love with a site design that includes excellent pictures on every page. Each story in the design has a wonderful supporting image to highlight a person, place, or topic. Landing pages may have main images with carefully placed text and overlays to help draw the eye and keep people’s attention. Those designs and images may be great, but only if you provide new images as fast as you create new pages (often faster). ...

With the turmoil in the Drupal community this spring and summer I have seen a wave of calls for open source projects to judge their community members, and other contributors, by the code contributions alone. It’s an idea that sounds great and has been popular among developers for at least forty years. Eric Raymond, while writing about Drupal, described it this spring as a right developers deserve. In some circles it gets treated almost as religious doctrine: “Thou shalt judge by code alone.” ...

Since the beginning of June I’ve been having intermittent issues with my Atlantic Broadband internet service. When it works, it’s great ( except they still won’t let my wife and I have different last names), but when it’s not it’s really annoying. After several hours on hold, 5 or 6 visits (I’ve lost count), and them testing everything in sight, I finally started writing software to see if I can help find the problem. ...

Awhile back I wrote up a pattern for creating static blocks on Drupal 8 sites. This week I was working on a site where one of those blocks needs to be enabled or disabled on specific nodes at the discretion of the content author. To make this happen, I’m adding a new feature to my pattern. In older versions of Drupal there were a number of ways to go, like the PHP Filter, or custom handling in the block’s view hook, but I figured there were probably more appropriate tools for this in Drupal 8. And I found what I needed in the Condition Plugin (more evidence that plugins are addictive). According to the change record they were designed to centralize a lot of the common logic used for controlling blocks, and I found it works quite nicely in this case as well (although a more generalized version might be useful). ...

Any experienced developer, and anyone who has worked with developers, knows that we’re terrible at estimating project times. There are mountains of blog posts telling developers how to do estimates (spoiler alert, they are wrong), and at least as many telling project managers not to rely on the bad estimates from developers. Most of the honest advice doesn’t actually help you develop a number it helps you develop strategies to make a slightly better guess. ...