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Thriving on Chaos in Drupal
Today, I want to share my thoughts from a book passage related to Drupal. The book, Everyday Chaos by David Weinberger, is largely about how chaos is the new reality in today’s machine-learning-driven world. In this book, Drupal is discussed in the chapter on strategy and possibility where it is contrasted with more traditional methods of product development and organizational vision. The book is amazing and insightful, and the section on Drupal was a welcome surprise.
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Drupal Podcasts (and some PHP ones)
Today’s DrupalFest post is on the lighter side. I am just going to talk about some of the podcasts I listen to related to Drupal, PHP, and software development in general. I’ll try to cover all the Drupal podcasts I know about. Let me know in the comments if I have missed something. As for others, I am just listing those I listen to.
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Why you shouldn’t decouple Drupal and why you should
Today’s post is going to be a quick one; not because it is an easy topic but because a lot has been said about it already. Today, I want to share my thoughts on decoupling Drupal; thoughts that are mainly a mix of borrowed thoughts from several places. I will try to link where I can but I can’t separate my thoughts from borrowed ones now. Anyway, by the end of the post, you might have read a lot of things you already knew and hopefully, one or two new things about Decoupling Drupal.
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The magic of Drupal events
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.
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Accessing Drupal.org API
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.
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My advice to my younger self (and to new Drupal developers)
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.
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Code Quality check tools for Drupal
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.
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Speed up Drupal websites by using PHP’s preloader
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.
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Quick setup of a Drupal site
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.
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My (updated) Drupal Story
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.