Blog Posts - Drupal

Recently, we were helping a client get their Drupal 8 website set up for hosting on the Pantheon platform. They would eventually take over updates of both core and contrib modules for the site. While gathering resources to help them with the process, we found that, although Pantheon had documentation for Drupal core and contrib updates via Composer and/or Git, it didn’t have the process outlined for updated contrib modules via the Drupal administration GUI. The solution was to write our own gu

Creating a frosted glass effect using CSS is a better method than the old javascript hacks. Using CSS to create the frosted effect uses fewer resources from the site visitors computer by using the native browser rendering engine. To test this just drag the frosted glass example in the top right of this page.  Ok, without wasting much of your time I’m going to jump straight into it. The main components used for a classic frosted glass effect are: > The original content  - - > The frost

Recently we needed to build a knowledge base for a SaaS client to house support content in both text and video format. Since a lot of this type of content has a progression to it (first do this, then this) it made sense to dust off the Book Module. The Book Module The Book module has been in Drupal core since 2001, so it’s pretty much always been there. It provides a hierarchy to pages in Drupal that allow a next/previous functionality that is useful when you have content with an order to it.

I started in web development about a year ago. When I was hired on at Texas Creative in early October of 2016, I still only knew the bare minimum, but I was eager to learn more to further my career path.  Here at Texas Creative, we use Drupal, a content management system (CMS) I had no prior experience in. The idea of that seemed daunting, but I was eager to learn, and with the mentorship of my team in the past few months, I've certainly learned a lot and have grown to love Drupal. At first, wh

The improved blocks system in Drupal 10 provides a lot of flexibility to the site builder.  But, have you ever had the problem of blocks showing on undesired pages because of the limits to visibility patterns? The Problem Scenario Say you added a custom block that only shows for users, so you set a visibility path with a wildcard like so: “/user/*”. All works great, as it should, and life is great! Oh but no! Don’t celebrate too fast says your project manager. Here comes the problem. Your

We, the website development team at Texas Creative, are big fans of the Paragraphs Module. For the last couple of years, it has become a larger and larger part of our Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 websites. In this post, I will give three tips we’ve discovered that make Paragraphs even easier for the end-user to use, in our case clients. What is the Paragraphs Module? To quote the Paragraph module description page: “Instead of putting all their content in one WYSIWYG body field including images and

Google is leading the charge to a more secure web. The tech giant is taking steps in the way it handles non-secure websites in both search rankings and for its over 1 billion Google Chrome users. In search results, non-secure websites will now take a back seat to those that are secured with trusted SSL certificates. Texas Creative has answered the call by retroactively adding free SSL encryption to all of our Drupal websites. What is SSL? SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a web technology that creat

It’s Official!  We have finished setting up the necessary infrastructure and processes for building client sites in Drupal 8 moving forward.  A lot of that work was done during our first Drupal 8 website build, which is nearing completion.  What follows is a brief glance of my first impressions and future aspirations about Drupal 8 development. The Project As website builds worked their way through the pipeline in the first part of 2016, I was on the lookout for the right one to be our firs

Whether you are new to Drupal or a total Drupal superstar with 1,000,000 hours on the metaphorical “Drupal wheel”, making decisions about what modules to update to what version is not as straight-forward as it sounds. We’ve found many situations where the Drupal update page actually suggests that you “upgrade” a module to an older version. This has resulted in regressions and extra work more times than we’d care to admit. But it is clearly a problem begging for a good solution. Our f

This series will cover three Drupal 7 mistakes that I see regularly when training developers, or perusing the issue queues of Drupal modules, and I’ve personally made each of these mistakes.  Getting a handle on these concepts, and breaking these bad habits will make you a better Drupal developer. Using [‘und’]? You’re Doing It Wrong Whether it’s in your theme’s template.php file or the custom field formatter module you wrote, don’t use [‘und’] ... ever ... seriously ... don?