Blog /Technology

Content creation using the Paragraphs module is a completely different approach compared to the "standard" content creation in Drupal. In short: we prepare the components (paragraph type) and then, during the creation of an entry, we select any of the available components.  The components can be simple elements containing text, contents with columns or such complex elements as sliders, videos or photo galleries.

It is obviously necessary to look for and take advantage of tools which can be used when delivering Drupal development services. It's time for another dose of information about our work at the Droptica company. Today we'll cover file versioning and application testing. Subversion Initial projects implemented with Drupal (still as OPENBIT) used the Subversion system (also known as SVN, project website) for file versioning.

Everyone who has ever worked in IT has surely stumbled upon communication issues between programmers and testers, or in other cases. Talking to programmers, you can hear many anecdotes regarding bug reports and feedback they have received. Working as a tester in a drupal agency, I see this issue from the other side, but I understand the developement team. When returning a task from tests, I often find myself wanting to write just: “It doesn’t work!”.

Over the course of recent years, websites have undergone a significant change. Many new services and social media websites have been created. Mobile applications now play a very significant role on the internet, and various on-line services exchanging data is nothing out of the ordinary anymore.

Time has already passed since the premiere of Drupal 8. New projects and modules are released all the time, and there is an ever-increasing number of projects compatible with version 8.x at drupal.org. Unfortunately, these versions are often still unstable and filled with various bugs. As of today, the number of additional modules available for Drupal 8 is around 2,250, compared to 12,400 Drupal 7 modules.

Drupal is a bit famous for the number of database queries done against a database. When there are thousands of concurrent users to be served, the database can quickly turn into a major bottleneck. This was the case with http://kwestiasmaku.com - a very popular website with recipes. The website is visited by millions of enthusiasts of cooking. When we started our cooperation with KwestiaSmaku, we initially focused on adding new features and functionalities to the website.

In the first article about the tools we use, we described our project management and communication tools. Today we will show you how we manage development environments. Local copy In Droptica each programmer works on a local copy of the website. Each task is completed and committed to a separate Git branch and pushed to a remote repository. Our standard desktop system is Ubuntu therefore for a long time we got away with just installing Apache, Mysql and PHP locally.

Entity API in Drupal 8 is now baked into core and is now so well organised that there is almost no excuse for creating database tables, which are not entities at the same time. If you are serious about Drupal development, check this article below. Entities in Drupal really rock! If you create an entity you get Views integration for free, you can allow the entity to be fieldable and this will out or the box allows you to add various fields to it.

When you use code-driven development on websites based on Drupal sometimes you have to create a menu or a menu item programmatically in hook_update_N. We use this approach to development quite often when, as part of our Drupal support services, we prepare a large batch of changes to be deployed all at ones.

Working in a Drupal agency you do a lot of drupal development and come against various problems. Recently, on a migration to Drupal I encountered a new problem with the Drupal database abstraction layer.