Drupalcamp London 2018

Handy modules when building and maintaining your site

Fran García-Linares

March 2018

Agenda (45min)

1

2

Intro (5 min)

Useful modules (30~35 min)

• Helper modules
• Site building modules
• Theme specific modules
• Other use cases

Wrap up / Q & A (5 min)

3

Intro

• To code or not to code? Site building vs back-end vs front-end.

• Over-simplification:

  • Back end = (mostly) coding

  • Front end = (mostly) coding

  • Site building = (mostly) clicking

    • This is really powerful

    • ​We'll focus mostly on this today.

• What do you need when you're building your new site?

  • Time savers

  • Modules, modules, modules...

  • *Environments

• What do you need when you're maintaining your site?

  • Bug fixing, (security) updates, extensions

  • Deployment?

  • *Environments

Helper modules

*Most of these modules have D7 and D8 versions.

Environment indicator

https://www.drupal.org/project/environment_indicator

• Really useful once sites are in production.
• Helps with human error (aka: changing production without wanting to!).
• Create multiple (coloured) environments and navigate through them easily.
• Multiple colouring options (more and less subtle).
• Favicon support.
• Configuration in settings.php or features*.

// Environment indicator.
$config['environment_indicator.indicator']['bg_color'] = '#02921d';
$config['environment_indicator.indicator']['fg_color'] = '#ffffff';
$config['environment_indicator.indicator']['name'] = 'Local';

Backup and Migrate

https://www.drupal.org/project/backup_migrate

• Back up and restore your Drupal:
  • MySQL database
  • Code
  • Files
• Migrate a site between environments.
• Automatic scheduled backups.
• Destinations:
  • Folder in server
  • Another DB
  • FTP
  • S3
  • Email

Stage file proxy

https://www.drupal.org/project/stage_file_proxy

• Copy files folder to development / local environment
  • Not in version control
    • scp, rsync...
    • drush rsync...
    • SFTP (Filezilla)
  • What if +10GB files
• Important to have a writable sites/default/files folder
• Will download files from the specified server
• One line in settings.php

$conf['stage_file_proxy_origin'] = "http://www.exped.com";

Mask user data (GDPR!)

https://www.drupal.org/project/mask_user_data

• Anonymize the data of all (or selected) users.
• Uses PHP Faker library. 
• Batch API.
• UI + drush commands
  • drush mud
• JSON configuration array
  • Via UI
  • Via settings.php

Other services / modules?:

• Acquia Cloud: not all fields can be masked
• https://www.drupal.org/project/gdpr

• drush sql-sanitize

Devel

https://www.drupal.org/project/devel

• Helper functions for Drupal developers
• Multiple submodules
• UI features to help debug, run code...
  • Execute PHP code
  • Generate dummy content
  • Debug theme (templates, suggestions, variables...)
  • Switch users
  • Variable editor
  • Useful blocks to trigger common dev operations
• drush commands available

Emails!

https://www.drupal.org/project/devel (not a typo)

DevelMailLog

Make sure that emails are not sent when testing*:

• Webform
• Rules
• Cron

Other:

• https://www.drupal.org/project/reroute_email
• Docker / VM - Set up https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog
• Third party: mandrill, sendgrid... 
• Custom

$config['system.mail']['interface']['default'] = 'devel_mail_log';
$config['devel.settings']['debug_mail_directory'] = 'temporary://mail_log';
$config['devel.settings']['debug_mail_file_format'] = 'pattern-%to-%subject-%datetime.mail.txt';

/**
 * Implements hook_mail_alter().
 *
 * Don't send any mail in development.
 */
function custom_mail_alter(&$message) {
  if (getenv('ENVIRONMENT') !== 'production') {
    $message['send'] = FALSE;
  }
}

* I learnt this the hard way... nearly 1K emails went out!

Webprofiler

https://www.drupal.org/project/devel (not a typo)

• See info in old separate project: https://www.drupal.org/project/webprofiler
• Symfony component
• Contextual info:
  • PHP config
  • Request info
  • Timeline
  • Database
  • Views
  • Forms
  • Extensions
  • Routing
  • Cache
  • Assets
  • Config
  • Events
  • State
  • ...

Features

https://www.drupal.org/project/features

• Export configuration, functionality into code as a module
• Wrap up functionality (content type, views, etc)
  • Easy to apply on other sites
  • Base distributions for your company
  • Easy to deploy code
• Specially useful in D7, but also for D8
  • One of the biggest problems in D7- is site config in DB
• UI + drush commands
• Related Modules
  • Drupal 8
    • Configuration Development, Config Menu Link, Configuration Tools, Configuration Update Manager, Configuration Synchronizer
  • Drupal 7
    • Features Override, Strongarm, Features Extra

Configuration read only mode

https://www.drupal.org/project/config_readonly

• Lock any configuration changes done via the Drupal admin UI
• In settings.php: $settings['config_readonly'] = TRUE;
• Exceptions: https://www.drupal.org/project/config_readonly_filter

Not to be confused with:

• https://www.drupal.org/project/readonlymode - alternative to put the site in maintenance mode.

Administration menu

D8 - https://www.drupal.org/project/admin_toolbar

D7 - https://www.drupal.org/project/admin_menu

Module filter / permission filter

https://www.drupal.org/project/module_filter

https://www.drupal.org/project/fpa

https://www.drupal.org/project/permissions_filter

Coffee

https://www.drupal.org/project/coffee

• It helps you to navigate through the Drupal admin faster.
• Similar to MacOS spotlight search.
• Navigate the admin UI from the keyboard.
• Quick actions (:add).
• Alt + D
• Warning: you'll never ever remember where things are anymore.

Dropguard

https://www.drupal.org/project/dropguard

• Service to automate Drupal updates
• External service. Needs access to:
  • git
  • ssh
• Customisable workflow
  • You can decided whether to merge or not
  • It can create branches or commit directly
  • Broken site is safer than an unsecure site
• Integrations
  • Jira
  • Slack
  • Email

settings.php!!!

<?php
/**
 * @file
 * AmazeeIO Drupal 7 local development environment configuration file.
 *
 * This file will only be included on local development environemnts.
 */

$conf['googleanalytics_account'] = 'UA-XXXXXXXX-Y';
$conf['theme_debug'] = TRUE;

# caching and aggregation off
$conf['preprocess_css'] = FALSE;
$conf['preprocess_js'] = FALSE;
$conf['cache'] = 0;
$conf['cache_lifetime'] = 0;

# enable developer modules
$conf['devel_enable'] = TRUE;
$conf['devel_themer_enable'] = TRUE;
 
# display all error messages
$conf['error_level'] = 2;
ini_set('display_errors', TRUE);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', TRUE);
 
# intercept emails using Devel
$conf['mail_system'] = array(
    'default-system' => 'DevelMailLog',
);

# other settings
$conf['stage_file_proxy_origin'] = "...";
$conf['mandrill_api_key'] = "testKeySoNoEmailsGoOut";
...

<?php

/**
 * @file
 * Local development override configuration feature.
 */

$settings['container_yamls'][] = DRUPAL_ROOT . '/sites/development.services.yml';
$config['system.logging']['error_level'] = 'verbose';
$config['system.performance']['css']['preprocess'] = FALSE;
$config['system.performance']['js']['preprocess'] = FALSE;
$settings['cache']['bins']['render'] = 'cache.backend.null';
$settings['rebuild_access'] = TRUE;
...

D7

D8

$conf vs $settings

https://anavarre.net/from-conf-to-config-and-settings-in-drupal-8/

• Pre-configure modules
• Enable / disable options (caching, aggregation...)
• ...

Site building modules

Rules

https://www.drupal.org/project/rules

• Conditional actions based on events

• It's a replacement for the trigger module in core

• Allows functionality to be re-used via components

• Import/export feature (integrates with features)
• Integrates with token

• Use cases
  • Build flexible content publishing workflows changes
  • Send customized mails to notify your users about something important
  • Build an eCommerce store using Drupal Commerce

Help needed for D8 stable version: http://d8rules.org/

Paragraphs, bricks, field group, field collection

https://www.drupal.org/project/paragraphs

https://www.drupal.org/project/bricks

https://www.drupal.org/project/field_group

https://www.drupal.org/project/field_collection

• Paragraphs is the new way of content creation!
  It allows you — Site Builders — to make things cleaner so that you can give more editing power to your end-users.
• Bricks — is a new way of building pages on top of Entity Reference, Display Modes, Layout API, tabledrag.js and Flat Tables. Everything is in Drupal core that makes Bricks ultra-lightweight and developer-friendly.
• ...

Organise fields and create layouts instead of having everything created via CKEditor

Webform

https://www.drupal.org/project/webform

• Create forms and surveys via Drupal UI
• Stored results (analysis)
• Export results (CSV)
• After submission you can send emails
• Extensive API

Theme specific

Bootstrap

https://www.drupal.org/project/bootstrap

• Drupal meets Bootstrap Framework.

• CDN support
  • Bootswatch support
• Glyphicons support
• Template / preprocess overrides for most of the components
• Good base theme

Omega

https://www.drupal.org/project/omega

• Great base theme
• Great documentation
• Subtheme generator
• Full control of the code
• +1 million downloads

Other use cases

Multilingual

https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_translation

• In core for D8
• One node, multiple translations

https://www.drupal.org/project/tmgmt

• It does not make i18n or any other language module obsolete. It only facilitates the translation process.

• Export and import via xliff and HTML (translation services)
• Local Translator (Allows users to translate jobs)

Multiple domains

https://www.drupal.org/project/domain

• Running several sites from one installation

• Single shared database

• Share users, content, and configurations

Decoupled approach!?

API-first initiative

• https://dri.es/how-should-you-decouple-drupal
• https://github.com/drupal-graphql/drupal-decoupled-app
  • 1 backend serving 12 front-ends: here
• https://github.com/contentacms

Commerce

https://www.drupal.org/project/commerce

• Commerce Kickstart Drupal distribution

• eCommerce websites and applications

• Leveraging Views and Rule

• No hard-coded assumptions about your business model

• Create product types with custom attributes

• Dynamic product displays

• Order management, line item

• Payment method API

• Tax calculation / VAT support

• Discount pricing rules

Wrap up

• That was some list! But you're missing...

• Instead of this you could use that...

• There is a module for (almost) everything

  • ​Core vs contrib vs custom

Q & A

https://slides.com/fjgarlin