I missed joining the DrupalNYC meetup today. Well, I almost missed it but I was able to catch the last 10 minutes or so. That got me thinking about events and that’s the topic for today–Drupal events and their impact on my life. I travelled extensively for 4-5 years before the pandemic restrictions were put in place and since then, I have attended events around the world while sitting in my chair. These travels and events are responsible for my learnings and my professional (and personal) growth. And these are the perspectives that have given me the privilege that I enjoy.
I am going to keep today’s DrupalFest post simple and talk about the API to access content on drupal.org. The Drupal.org API is a public API that allows you to access content such as projects (modules, themes, etc), issues, pages, and more. The API returns data as a simple JSON structure and has only limited features with regards to filtering and gathering nested data. In this post, I will describe more about this API and various ways to access it.
I recently opened up a spreadsheet where people can put in their ideas of what I can write about in this DrupalFest series. Someone put in a topic of what advice I would give my younger self. This idea intrigued me and I thought I will make an attempt at writing down advice to new Drupal developers. I am not very comfortable presuming that someone would want to take advice from me; so I am going to say what I would want my younger self to know.
This is the fourth post in my DrupalFest series and I am excited to keep it going. I want to write about different tools I am aware of for running quality checks on Drupal code. This will be somewhat similar to my last post where I presented various options but focused on the method I use nowadays.
PHP 7.4 introduced the concept of preloading classes (files) on server start-up into the PHP opcache. This gives us performance benefits for sites that tend to load a lot of files with every request; something that Drupal is known to do. A properly configured web server would have opcache (opcode cache) enabled anyway, but preloading brings in a modest performance boost on top of that.
This post will cover quickly setting up a Drupal website for testing, experimentation, or evaluating features on your local system. While I cover a different set of options briefly, I will mainly talk about a tool we have built to let us quickly scaffold Drupal sites with best practices built in. This post is a part of the DrupalFest series which celebrates 20 years of Drupal. Let’s get started.
I thought for a while about what should be the first post in this series. Drupal is many things. It is a complex system used in a variety of ways ranging from small sites with few pages to rich information portals to even applications (yes, really). Then I thought of a recent tweet by webchick about Drupal’s strength and seeing most of the replies talking about community. It is easy. Drupal is many things but nothing without its community. Therefore, it makes sense my first post is about the community, or at least my story in the community.
It has been 20 years since Drupal began its journey in a dorm room and reached enterprises. April 2021 is marked as the month of DrupalFest and many people are celebrating it in various ways. With everything going on, I didn’t plan to do anything this month but I am now tempted to change my mind, and so I have.
The problem was that VS Code didn’t work like an IDE for Python anymore. There was no autocomplete of function suggestions and the IDE behaved sluggishly. Weirdly, even regular editor functions did not work; such as local changes were not being highlighted.
I have been trying to learn Go (golang) this week a bit more formally. I have worked with Go in the past but I could do it because it has syntactical familiarity with other languages I use or have used–PHP, JavaScript, C#, C, etc. This time, I wanted to do it a bit more formally as I am thinking of using Go to write a non-trivial application. In this post, I compare Go with other languages I know, mainly PHP, to compare concepts and build understanding.
