php

AKA "Supercharged Windows-based Drupal development"

tl;dr: Use either PhpStorm or a Samba share in the VM mounted on the host instead of using a (slow) Vagrant synced folder, and use Drupal VM 4.4's new drupal_deploy features. See the video embedded below for all the details!

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I've often mentioned that Windows users who want to build modern Drupal sites and apps are going to have a bit of a difficult time, and even wrote a long post about why this is the case (Developing with VirtualBox and Vagrant on Windows).

After migrating an older Drupal 6 site with 20,000 media items to Drupal 8, I found a strange problem with image uploads. On the Drupal site, using Image FUpload and Adobe Flash, I could upload up to 99 images in one go. On the new Drupal 8 site, I was only able to upload 20 images, even though I didn't see an error message or any other indication that the rest of the images I had selected through the Media Image upload form were not successfully added.

I could choose 21, 40, or 500 images, but only 20 were ever added to an album at any time.

There were no apparent warnings on the screen, so I just assumed there was some random bug in the Media Image Entity or Media module suite that limited uploads to 20 files at a time.

But due to an unrelated error, I glanced at the PHP logs one day, and noticed the following error message:

From time to time, I've needed to have a default set of Taxonomy terms created at the same time as a content type, as in the case of a field with a required Taxonomy term reference, using a Taxonomy that is not 'free tag' style.

Instead of requiring someone to go in and manually add all the terms after code is deployed, you can add terms in a custom module's update hook, like so:

Update 2017-02-14: BLT now includes a much simpler method of upgrading the VM (provided you only override VM settings in files separate from the box/config.yml file):

# Delete the entire VM and remove config.
blt vm:nuke

# Rebuild the VM with the latest recommended version and config.
blt vm

Limiting the amount of surprises you get when developing a large-scale Drupal project is always a good thing. And to that end, Acquia's BLT (Build and Launch Tools) wisely chooses to leave Drupal VM alone when updating BLT itself. Updates to Drupal VM can and should be done independently of install profile and development and deployment tooling.

Seven months after Drupal VM 3 introduced PHP 7.0 and Ubuntu 16.04 as the default, as well as more stable team-based development environment tooling, Drupal VM 4 is here!

Thanks especially to the efforts of Oskar Schöldström and Thom Toogood, who helped push through some of the more tricky fixes for this release!

A few months ago, when I spoke at php[tek] in St. Louis, I had the honor of being interviewed by Cal Evans on the Voices of the elePHPant podcast! In the interview, we discussed Drupal 8, Acquia, the Raspberry Pi Dramble, and the PHP community.

Check out the interview: Interview with Jeff Geerling - Voices of the elePHPant.

There's also a video recording of the podcast, embedded below:

Recovering from surgery finally gave me time to update my last D6 site—a 7 year old private photo and media sharing site with nearly 10,000 nodes and 20+ GB of content—to Drupal 8. Drupal 8 has become a lot more mature lately, to the point where I'm comfortable building a site and not having the foundation rot out from beneath as large ecosystem shifts have mostly settled down.

One thing that I thought would have the simplest implementation actually took a little while to figure out. I needed to have users' full name display instead of their usernames throughout the site. For D6 (and for similar D7 use cases), the easiest way to do this was to enable the Realname module, configure it a tiny bit, and be done with it.

In Drupal 8, however, Realname doesn't yet have a full release (see this issue for progress), and the way usernames are generated has changed slightly (see change record hook_username_alter() changed to hook_user_format_name_alter()).

This is a reposting of what I wrote on the Acquia Dev Center blog in 2016, Should I disable PHP warnings and notices?.

Many developers who work on Drupal (or other web/PHP) projects have error reporting disabled in their local or shared dev environments, for a variety of reasons—some don't know how to enable it, some are annoyed by the frequency of notices, warnings, and errors, and some don't like to be reminded of how many errors are logged!

There are a few important reasons you should make sure to show all errors when developing, though:

Since a quick Google search didn't bring up how to do this in Drupal 8 (there are dozens of posts on how to do it in Drupal 7), I thought I'd post a quick blog post on how you can modify a user's roles in Drupal 8. Hint: It's a lot easier than you'd think!

In Drupal 7, $user was an object... but it was more like an object that acted like a dumb storage container. You couldn't really do anything with it directly—instead, you had to stick it in functions (like user_multiple_role_edit()) to do things like add or remove roles or modify account information.

In Drupal 8, $user is a real, useful object. Want to modify the account name and save the change?

For the past few days, I've been diving deep into testing Drupal 8's experimental new BigPipe feature, which allows Drupal page requests for authenticated users to be streamed and loaded in stages—cached elements (usually the majority of a page) are loaded almost immediately, meaning the end user can interact with the main elements on the page very quickly, then other uncacheable elements are loaded in as Drupal is able to render them.

Here's a very quick demo of an extreme case, where a particular bit of content takes five seconds to load; BigPipe hugely improves the usability and perceived performance of the page by streaming the majority of the page content from cache immediately, then streaming the harder-to-generate parts as they become available (click to replay):