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This blog post was inspired by my time at DrupalCon Portland and the Driesnote, announcing Starshot.

At MidCamp a few weeks ago, Martin Anderson-Clutz tapped me on the shoulder to check out a Smart Date issue for compatibility with Drupal 10.2. As of Drupal 10.2, ListItemBase::extractAllowedValues takes an array as its first argument versus a string. The method used to explode a newline separated string into an array for its...

I finally took a look at writing a custom live template with PhpStorm. I've used them several times to automate scaffolding a foreach statement or other random suggestions that a Tab keypress leads to automated scaffolded code. But I never really dove in to see how they work or could be customized. Then, I had to fix some of my...

I was listening to the Whiskey Web and Whatnot episode TypeScript, React, and API Issues with Matt Pocock. It made me think about the parallels between PHP and JavaScript/TypeScript typing. If you aren't familiar with TypeScript, it is JavaScript with added types. PHP is loosely typed, just like JavaScript. But PHP also allows...

Things have been pretty quiet on the Simplytest front. But I want to bring a fresh round of changes that will make it an easier project to maintain. The Simplytest development workflowIn 2021, I spent time helping Adam Bergstein complete the project's modernization off of Drupal 7. We migrated the code from a self-managed...

One of my favorite development tasks is performance engineering. I love taking an application and analyzing it to increase performance. Application performance monitoring (APM) tools like New Relic and Blackfire.io are tools every developer should have in their toolkit. New Relic is for passive performance monitoring of your...

Drupal has a key-value database table that stores information about the current environment. The values stored are serialized PHP objects or arrays. That makes inspecting them nearly impossible by just querying the database. Luckily, Drush provides a state:get command for retrieving those values. This command unserializes the...

Drupal's service container for dependency injection allows modules to register services and parameters to the service container or alter and modify the service container.

Whenever I have done an audit for a Drupal codebase, one of the first things I manually review and profile is dependency injection anti-patterns in custom code and any contributed modules used. The anti-pattern isn't for accessing services statically through \Drupal: service. These anti-patterns live within the class's...

The TalkingDrupal podcast had Alexey Korepov on to talk about Test Driven Development. Alexey has written the Test Helpers module, a development package that provides many useful utility tools for writing unit tests for your Drupal code.

Wanting to follow up on our work at MidCamp 2023 with the Development Settings form, Mike Herchel wanted to jam on another issue to improve the life of frontend developers. Drupal provides a way to generate themes from starterkit themes. Drupal core provides the Starterkit theme, and contributed themes can also mark themselves...

In Drupal, with themes, you can override default template output by copying, pasting, and customizing those templates. It works, but how? I thought I always knew how this worked. But I realized I didn't when I dove into supporting Drupal 7 themes with Retrofit.

The final countdown to the Drupal 7 end-of-life has begun ticking after receiving its final extension. Why is upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 so daunting? Three problems must be faced when upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10:

It has been a little over a month since I announced Retrofit. The project provides a compatibility layer to allow legacy Drupal 7 code to run within a Drupal 10 code base.

I have been reading The Pragmatic Programmer and just finished the Concurrency chapter. At the same time, I found Nick Gavalas's blog post "parallelizing" php and keeping it simple, which talks about his time at Facebook when they developed the concept BigPipe and pagelets.

My projects all use DDEV for local development. Regarding end-to-end testing, as part of my continuous integration process, I also use DDEV! This way, my scripts for running Cypress are the same locally and in my CI. Leveraging DDEV in your CI is especially useful if your project has multiple domains, which is harder to...

One of my favorite development tasks is performance engineering. I love taking an application and analyzing it to increase performance. Application performance monitoring (APM) tools like New Relic and Blackfire.io are tools every developer should have in their toolkit. New Relic is for passive performance monitoring of your...

I have had an idea for a few years. It is the greatest yet worst idea I’ve had for four years. Some 400,000 Drupal 7 sites report to Drupal.org through the Update module. Drupal 7's end-of-life is coming on November 1, 2023, and has been a continual topic of discussion.

Last week I wrote about dependency injection anti-patterns in Drupal. These anti-patterns occur when your service's constructor has logic that interacts with the injected dependent services beyond assigning them to properties. These anti-patterns include creating a new object from a factory or retrieving an object from a stack....