How a handcrafted side project grew a harness, a town on foot, and a small software factory where Claude Code, Codex, Blender and Herdr work between my decisions.

A software factory to build the world of Pocket Switzerland

Four small open-source extensions that bring the CI checks, the Lagoon builds, the state of the session and the owners of local ports next to the chat.

Four Claude Code mods: GitHub CI, Lagoon builds, local ports and the session at a glance

How a map to find my way between the valleys became a low-poly paper country that you fly over in a hot-air balloon, in a plain web browser.

Pocket Switzerland: a paper country in 3D, explored by hot-air balloon

Semantic search with Drupal and Typesense

Speed of the light search using Algolia InstantSearch with a Typesense backend and Drupal Search API

Drupal faceted search with Typesense and InstantSearch

Aaaand... liftoff! The 2023 edition is in orbit. Clearer, fully reviewed for Drupal 10, new documentation system, translated in French, and a dark theme.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Planet Drupal - 2023 edition

Add a reusable attribute to extend core or custom Gutenberg Blocks, based on inclusion and exclusion lists.

Gutenberg with Drupal part 1: Blocks attribute decorator

Working for 5 years with a Swiss company can have side effects... like literally falling in love with a culture and a country.

Moving from Brussels to Lausanne and other Drupal stories

Use Playwright visual regression testing on a large sample of content to test a migration between two editorial solutions.

Visual regression testing for Drupal migrations with Playwright

In this fist part, we will compare the key differences between the Drupal GraphQL module versions 3 and 4, where to start and various ways to write a schema with version 4.

The state of GraphQL with Drupal 10 (part 1)

Running Drupal on the PHP built-in server can be used for quick evaluation / testing, but also for day-to-day development. Let's see why, what it takes, and how to solve common pitfalls or requirements like a mail catcher, Solr, ...

A minimal and fast Drupal environment (part 2)

Add a patch with Composer for a core or contributed Drupal project.

Patch a Drupal project

Gatsby and Next are both based on React and become more and more adopted, far beyond the Drupal sphere. Choosing a decoupled solution comes with a resource cost though (budget, team-wise), and might not be the right fit for every project. Working with these solutions is still time well invested.

Drupal, Gatsby, Next and friends

We will see how to get a minimal and fast Drupal 9 setup in 3 commands. It just relies on a PHP built-in server, so no Docker here, the only requirements are Composer and PHP. Then, we will do a recap of the available tools for developers.

A minimal Drupal 9 local development environment (part 1)

Here is a really simple way to handle synonyms (or extra keywords) using Search API out of the box with a database server and no custom code involved. Use case: we want to do a full text search based on synonyms that does not appear on the frontend. These ones should be set from the Tags vocabulary. The method should be flexible regarding translations, available for content editors and easily generalizable.

Synonyms with Search API

The planet Drupal has now some data visualization based on Three.js an D3.js for the following questions: where are the Drupal peeps, how are they contributing, which languages are they talking, what are they working on? Get the answers on https://drupalearth.org

Drupal Earth, lift-off 🚀

While working on migrations from Drupal 7 to 8 it could be necessary to convert tokens from formatted text fields + get an idea of how many of them are in the database for estimation, e.g. to see if it is possible to rely on Token Filter or if there are custom tokens/filters.

Extract tokens from a Drupal database dump

Get local Instagram api credentials with ngrok

This article will explain how to use migration templates with a CSV that contains the Paragraphs data on several lines.

Migrate from a CSV to content entities with Paragraphs

Here is a pretty simple way to maintain the hook_help() of a Drupal project, straight from the readme file. Markdown is preferred here to .txt so it can be reused on a GitHub, GitLab, ... repository as well.

Reuse readme.md in hook_help() with Parsedown

Gathering here a few topics that were shared about PHP and JS in the devrooms: forms UX, profiling, webhooks, async PHP, JS data structures, Cypress.io, GraphQL testing and OpenStreetMap with VR.

FOSDEM 2019, PHP and JS random picks

Depending on how many containers and projects you may have with Lando / Docker, things can go wrong at some time on your local environment, so here is a basic troubleshooting.

Cleaning up Lando containers

CiviCRM is an old Drupal 7 friend and its relationships with Drupal 8 are in a pretty good way. Let's make them meet the Composer template for Drupal projects, a widespread setup that stores the vendor directory outside of the docroot. Lando will host the party by spinning up a local environment, however this method should be generalizable with any other development environment.

Install CiviCRM 5 with Drupal 8 using Lando

A few inspiring links related to the Decoupled Drupal Days.

Decoupled Days 2018 documentation

Progressive decoupling and ES6 support on Drupal 8 are definitely gaining some momentum. After having tested several methods to make use of React within Drupal, I had a look a the React Comments module, that provides a self-contained, standard and developer friendly way to get started with React. It has been derived in a repository to have a kind of boilerplate to run tests on and a demo that loads article nodes from a JSON:API endpoint.

Drupal 8 progressive decoupling with React

The migrate system is stable since Drupal 8.5.0, so this is a great time to review the migration tools provided by the community. This post does not cover migration from the UI, it focuses on partially customized migration that are runned with Drush. In most cases, you will probably want to review the content model a bit (you know, that content type or field machine name that does not actually reflect the truth since its creation, ...).  The idea behind is to delegate the heavy lifting to Migrate Upgrade for migration template generation, then apply content model changes if needed.

Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration with configuration entities

The Production Checklist module inherits from the Checklist API and is based on the active configuration of a Drupal 8 site. Its purpose is for site launch and maintenance.

First dev release of the Production Checklist module

A walkthrough to join the dots between two posts about setting up Lando for Drupal and Solr for Drupal with Search API, and also a good opportunity to cover all the steps to spin up an evaluation or development environment for this setup. Lando comes with the great benefit for a team to share the server configuration alongside the project, so we have a predictable environment to deploy in production and do not add configuration maintenance overhead on the team, especially in the case of more advanced setup like Solr, Varnish, decoupled setup, ... 

Lando configuration for Search API Solr with the Umami profile

Ever thought about spinning up a Drupal 7 or 8 dev environment that is close to your production setup in minutes (Apache or Nginx, PHP 5.6 or 7.1, MySQL or Postgres, or ...)? Even better, you will be able to share the configuration with your team straight on your Git repository as a YAML file. Lando provides development environments (LAMP, LEMP, MEAN, ...) and other recipes for Drupal 6 to 8, Laravel, Backdrop, ... .

Drupal and Docker the easy way with Lando

A brief introduction to Search API Solr, an update on the ecosystem and how to get Search API 2.x working on a dev environment with multiple collections.

Install Solr 7 for Drupal 8 Search API on Ubuntu 16.04

This post focuses on translation issues and various pitfalls that you might encounter while building with React and Drupal: internationalization with and without language fallback, include images with images styles, taxonomy filter, fetch data on the route or the component, sort by weight, deploy in production.

React and Drupal 8 with JSON API 3/3

On this part we will continue with backups, monitoring and templates.

Migrate a Drupal site with CiviCRM from a custom LAMP environment to Virtualmin (2/2)

This post goes a bit against the mainstream, with one purpose in mind: for a low budget, leave a custom LAMP server provisioning for a well maintained LAMP stack that comes with a smart GUI and helpers for common sysadmin tasks like: several versions of PHP, a php.ini for each virtual host, backup system, internal monitoring, Let's Encrypt ready. We will use a Drupal 7.x website with CiviCRM 4.6.x LTS as an example.

Migrate a Drupal site with CiviCRM from a custom LAMP environment to Virtualmin (1/2)

Taking care, software craftsmanship

Drupal 8, React, Vue, JSON API and ES6 learning resources

We will cover here two options to get started with Docker for Drupal: the Docker Community Edition, then a more straightforward way with Docksal. Let's have a look at the underlying stack by starting with the bare minimum Docker setup to have a Drupal 8 site running before switching to Docksal.

Drupal 8 with Docker CE and Docksal on macOS

In this newcomer guide, you will find: How to accelerate the onboarding process and how to get a fresh Drupal 8 install, for testing. The documentation reduced to the essential for the following topics: tools, projects, Drupal concepts and drupalisms, main events, contribution and service providers. A brief comparison of other solutions, and when to use Drupal.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Planet Drupal

Today, building a website in Drupal 8 is faster than ever, even for a beginner. Or let’s rephrase this: it can be fast when you have the right information at your fingertips. The seed of this idea was sown during the session of Dave Hall given in the DrupalCamp Antwerp on September 2017. Just have a look at what follows, it describes the adoption process of Drupal compared to other solutions like Contentful.

Drupalship.org a starter kit for newcomers

Mollie provides a facade for several payment methods (credit card, debit card, Paypal, Sepa, Bitcoin, ...) with various languages and frameworks support. In some cases, you could decide to use the Payment module instead of the full Commerce distribution.  This tutorial describes how to create a product as a node and process payment with Mollie, only via configuration. A possible use case can be an existing Drupal 8 site that just needs to enable a few products (like membership, ...).

Payment and Mollie in Drupal 8

A quick todo list for setting up a freshly cloned project.

Install an existing Laravel project

Looks like most of my Drupal 7 clients are sharing the enthusiasm for CKEditor Media Embed and didn't want to wait for a Drupal 8 upgrade of their site, so here is a wrapper module for that. There are probably way better implementations, like the one that was done for Drupal 8, but I wanted to have something quickly ready with close to zero maintenance. Also, it had to rely on the Wysiwyg module and not the CKEditor standalone module.

CKEditor Media Embed wrapper for Drupal 7

Migrate API is awesome, and if you plan some custom migration, a few contributed modules does the heavy lifting for you. This article should be regarded as a list of steps to follow to achieve a simple migration from another SQL data source than Drupal. So we will not go in deep into the explanations of the Migrate theory, for this subject, refer to the documentation of the Migrate API. Also, we will finish with some debugging techniques and a first shot of a bash script for rerolling a migration from scratch in case of configuration change.

Migrating SQL in Drupal 8 with Migrate Tools and Migrate Plus

The first post of this series focused on setting up easily a multilingual Drupal and React environment for a museum Audioguide web app. This one describes the steps to achieve a MVP that displays a list and a detail page of Audio contents, so we have the opportunity to cover several basic concepts under React : Components (add from a package repository, inherit, compose, create), Routes (default route and wildcard), Fetch to consume Rest, Localization via React Intl.

React and Drupal 8 with JSON API 2/3

The goal of this serie of posts is to achieve quickly a simple museum Audioguide web app based on a React isomorphic boilerplate with a Drupal 8 backend that uses the latest standards. The web app will be fully decoupled by being hosted on another domain than the Drupal one. As a real world case, we want it to be fully multilingual. This is the first post of a serie of 3. This first one focuses on having a Drupal and React setup that meets our requirements. The second one will define a MVP that will just fetch the audioguides list and a detail view (GET operation), the last one will then add extra features like getting user feedback (POST operation).

React and Drupal 8 with JSON API 1/3

Just bookmarking here the amazing documentation that was produced during the Dev Days.

Drupal Dev Days Seville 2017 documentation

Many session were oriented towards coding attitude. It looks like we now have the time to let the technical specs of Drupal 8 a bit behind and focus on sharing developer experience.

Development best practices learned from the Drupal Dev Days Seville 2017

The scope of this article is to illustrate the responsibilities of several tools and techniques used in the Drupal ecosystem (Composer, Drupal Console, Drush, Configuration management) to achieve quickly a simple custom Google Maps use case: an Address field will be defined on a content type. We want the address to be geocoded automatically for each node on save to display a Google Map. The display of the map will be achieved by a custom module to allow further extension.

Drupal 8 custom Google Maps and automatic geocoding with Composer, Drupal Console and Drush

Fix The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial)

Things have evolved quickly, we have now a huge bunch of helpers since 8.2.x in core for Drupal to Drupal migration: Migrate, Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI.

Drupal 8 JSON custom migration

Summer was inspiring! A really pragmatic talk on how to apply Scrum from @dasjo at the Drupal Dev Days Milan acted as a kick-starter and we decided to apply it in our small Drupal dev team at Tilt Factory.

Scrum in a small team with multiple projects

The l() function is deprecated in Drupal 8+, here is how to implement it.

Drupal 8 links or where is my l() function?

The use case is to sort a list of users by job title, where job title is a term reference to a dedicated vocabulary. The sort is done by the job title term weight (defined via the vocabulary list).

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