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May 8, 2024

Drupal vs WordPress: Is The Tide Turning with Drupal Starshot?

Drupal vs WordPress: Is The Tide Turning with Drupal Starshot?
The Dominance of WordPress WordPress remains the dominant platform with over 40% of all websites on the internet using it compared to Drupal with around 2%. Its intuitive user interface, vast library of plugins and themes and endless amount of online resources make it an attractive choice for beginners and experts alike wanting to get online quick and hassle-free. Within the Open Source CMS World, the debate of Drupal vs WordPress has been a longstanding one (but perhaps not always a logical one). As a developer with over two decades of experience, I've worked extensively with both systems, watching their evolution side by side with keen interest. WordPress has long been hailed as the king of usability, loved by beginners wanting to get online quickly and without hassle, but recent advancements in Drupal suggest the gap might be closing and with the announcement of Drupal Starshot, Is Drupal catching up and preparing to take on Wordpress at it's own game?
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April 5, 2023

Drush 11 generate command examples

What is Drush? Drush (combo of Drupal + Shell) is a command line tool used to control your Drupal installation(s) with. With Drush you can easily running database updates, clear caches, log in, export/import configurations and more all by typing a few commands into your Terminal. If you don't already use Drush well in short once you try it you'll probably wonder how you ever lived without it. In addition, if your building Drupal projects with Composer (which you really should) it's very simple to install Drush both on your local machine and on your live servers. Fed up with writing module & theme code? Wish there was a way to get the module structure & files in-place before you start your custom coding? Well I recently found a bunch of useful Drush 11 commands that will streamline your module & theme development, here's some examples of Drush generate commands
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March 31, 2023

Patching Drupal contrib modules for Drupal 10 compatibility with Composer

Before we begin a little disclaimer, unless you are a developer it's best to only use official support releases that state they're compatible with your version of Drupal. That said if you're a developer & you understand the potential risk you can forget this! "The problem" with Composer (in this context) Using Composer to maintain your Drupal codebase is really awesome, it strictly ensures you only get code in your codebase that will (in theory) function on your codebase, exactly what we want! I've started to adopt Drupal 10 on most of my personal projects (this blog included) and along the way I've hit issues where a contrib modules doesn't have an official Drupal 10 compatible release but there is a patch for Drupal 10 compatibility in the modules issue queue. I only use Composer to maintain my Drupal projects so how do you patch a module when Composer won't download it (because it's not compatible) is the first place. Here's a quick tutorial to show how I've been getting around this!
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December 22, 2022

Upgrading to Drupal 10 and PHP 8

Introducing Drupal 10!!! After 7 alphas, 2 betas and 2 release candidates (RC), Drupal 10 was officially release on December 14th 2022, another amazing job from the Drupal core team & community. Drupal 10 was officially released last week (December 14th 2022) so to follow up on the preparing Drupal sites for PHP 8 post (a requirement for Drupal 10) in this post I'll run through how I upgraded this site to Drupal 10 and how I upgraded to PHP 8 on a Linode server.
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November 14, 2022

PHP 8 Drupal Compatibility testing

All the projects I've been working with are well maintained Composer based Drupal projects which definitely makes the setup a bit easier! PHP 7.x reaches end of life at the end of November 2022 so on a number of Drupal projects I've had to start preparing for PHP 8.x. With DevOps developers handling the actual server upgrades my job is/was to make sure the Drupal code especially any custom code was compatible from PHP 8.x. Here's how I did it!
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August 31, 2022

Super fast Drupal theme development with TailwindCSS

Super fast Drupal theme development with TailwindCSS
When building the new version of this website I needed to rapidly build out a good looking, easy to maintain Drupal theme. I tested a number of options and in the end went for a custom Tailwind CSS based Drupal theme so here's why & how I built my Drupal theme with Tailwind CSS. Drupal theme development can be time consuming so in this tutorial I'll show you how to rapidly build a good looking Drupal 8 or 9 theme using Tailwind CSS without writing a single line of CSS code!
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August 26, 2022

Migrating my local development to DDEV..........finally!

Migrating my local development to DDEV..........finally!
What's DDEV & why bother with DDEV? DDEV is an open source PHP development tool based on docker.DDEV makes spinning up a local development environment really rather simple: a few commands, a config.yml file and a couple of minutes waiting and you can replicate your live server environments locally ready for local development. Poor Docker performance on my old Mac has long left me using MAMP for all my local Drupal, Wordpress & PHP development but with Drupal 9.4 now requiring PHP 7.4 and my MAMP version only supporting up to 7.3 I decided it was time to give DDEV another try! Here's how I started to migrate all my local Drupal, Wordpress & PHP development to DDEV!
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February 15, 2022

Pain free Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 upgrades

Pain free Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 upgrades
Backup EVERYTHING & work locally! Even after 20 years of web development I still never ever "chance" large code or database updates and skip backing up all the code & database, that one time you don't will be the one time you regret it, even when working locally I take regular database backups of the site I'm working so I can roll back if needed. Since Drupal 8 end of life in November 2, 2021 I've had to perform (and still am) a lot of Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 upgrades in my day job(s). Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is a significantly easier upgrade than going from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 but it can still take a bit of work so here's what I learnt from upgrading 4 different Drupal 8 sites recently!
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April 2, 2021

Getting started with Drupal and Gutenberg

Getting started with Drupal and Gutenberg
What is Gutenberg & what does it do? Gutenberg was added to Wordpress as it's default content editor back in WordPress 5.0 and it got a bit of a "marmite reaction": you either loved it or you hated it. But since the initial "marmite reaction" it's grown & grown in popularity! Gutenberg might be best known as a Wordpress content editor/layout builder but did you know you can also use it with Drupal? Yes I've not gone mad, you can and it's gaining popularity fast especially with clients!! So in this post I'll show you how to get started with Drupal Gutenberg & bring all the fun of Gutenberg to Drupal's sometimes limited content editing!!
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