Handy modules when building
and maintaining your site

Stew West
Fran García-Linares

About us

stew.west@amazeelabs.com

Stew West, Drupal web developer

https://twitter.com/stewwest

https://www.drupal.org/u/stewest

fran.garcia@amazeelabs.com

Fran García-Linares, Drupal web developer

fjgarlin@gmail.com

https://www.drupal.org/u/fjgarlin

Agenda (45min)

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)

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

Environments

Depends on:

- Size of project

- Size of company

- Level of knowledge/skills of the team

Options:

- ~~Production~~

- Development > production

- Local > development > production

- Local > development > staging > production

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";

GDPR

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

Go-to module to make sure the site is GDPR compliant
- Checklist of things to check
- Submodules
  - gdpr dump
    - Configure sanitization (tables, columns)
    - Uses Faker
    - Dump sanitized version of the database

Other services / modules?:

Acquia Cloud: not all fields can be masked
drush sql-sanitize
https://www.drupal.org/project/mask_user_data
...

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

Pretty print objects

dsm / kpr / kint

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;
...

$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... see next slide :-)

Sessions this week:

https://www.drupaleurope.org/session-by-expertise/paragraphs

CKeditor

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

CKeditor

In core for D8
Contrib for D7
- With other alternatives

CKeditor5

Update Drupal to use Ckeditor5: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2966864

Gutenberg...

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)