Introduction

Finally, this article took me ~ 2 months to write-up 📅 - mostly because coming up with Nichebench, creating test-cases and running slowly the tests against many existing LLMs.

Let’s start with this - not all LLMs are created equally. The data they are trained on, the formatting of the data, the labelling, the used underlying architecture and many other parameters - heavily influence the final result. Some LLMs might be good at coding 🧑‍💻, but when prompted about Drupal 10 or Drupal 11 implementation, might creep-out some Drupal 7-flavor solutions - or plainly hallucinate some slop as a reply 😵

Most of us get around these issues, by just throwing more money at this problem - i.e. picking Claude Sonnet 4 (or Opus) - or using up Github Copilot’s paid credits.

Very few of us play wi...

Hey there, this is my Drupalcon-experience review, all the views/opinions here are mine and don’t extend to the company or partners I work with.

This was my second Drupalcon in general, and first one in North America - I used to be cautious about attending Drupalcons because the pricing can be quite prohibitive for small businesses, freelancers, and independent devs… I do enjoy DrupalCamps though - my 1st being BADCamp (US), then followed by camps in Ukraine, Romania and the ones we organized in Moldova, I think I attended ~6 camps and co-organized 3 more.

This year, thanks to Dropsolid, I had the chance to visit the US-flavored Drupalcon. This time it was in Atlanta, Georgia - in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The venue was pretty fancy, I’d say - classy. I liked it, although not sure it was ca...

Problem / Motivation:

The problem I wanted to solve was - to apply image styles (especially with the Image Effects module), on images, but dynamically & on-demand, and not use dozens of pre-configured Image Styles.

Why would anyone want something like this? I can give you a couple of examples:

• Facebook / Twitter Preview image, for every post. Let’s say you want Drupal to generate an image, by using Post Cover, Post Date, Title and potentially slap on some tags - and compile a Facebook compatible final image.
• Gift Card Generator 🎴 - where users have a set of pre-configured options they may choose, colors, fonts, texts and use some pre-defined layouts to put everything together.
• Dynamic Watermarks 🖼 - allow users to upload their own watermarks and apply those on top of their images - wi...

If you’re running Drupal + Gatsby.JS website, you’ll inevitably change the URLs of some of these articles (i.e. by changing the title) → and this will change the slug (URL) →and this will cause 404s (i.e. break all Social Media posts, etc). There’s a way to fix it.

The Reason

This depends on the case, in my case (and many other examples I’ve seen) - the slugs are generated by using Drupal's path aliases. And Drupal’s paths depend (usually) on the node’s title.

This has unforeseen consequences, once you change the title, the path is changed too and on the next build, Gatsby will stop recognizing the old paths, resulting in 404s. This happened to me - when I wanted to rename the initial article as “Part 1” (because I’ve written a “Part 2” later), all my social-media posts were broken and Goo...

If you have a decoupled Gatsby + Drupal site, then you’re probably annoyed waiting for 5-10 minutes for the build to finish - to see how your CMS changes landed on the actual website. There’s a better way - Gatsby Previews (took me a while to look into it). With Live Previews you can view your new and edited content instantly.

How to enable the Preview

There’s this neat contrib module - called “Gatsby” - https://www.drupal.org/project/gatsby

It consists of 4 different sub-modules:

• Gatsby - Improves integration with GatsbyJS including adding Live Preview and Incremental Builds;
• Gatsby Fast Builds - Enables faster Gatsby development builds by only downloading content that has changed;
• Gatsby JSON:API Extras - Adds additional enhancers when using Gatsby with JSON:API;
• Gatsby JSON:API Instan...

Welcome to 2nd part - hands-on or deep-dive into Drupal 8 + Gatsby.JS. Don’t treat this article as a tutorial - but hopefully, my experience will be useful for your journey.

Who is it for? ?

If you’re a beginner that has some experience with Drupal (or even if you’re pretty new to it) - during some 3-4 days, you can have a full-running website, secured, fast, and with zero hosting costs. If you want to experiment, learn something new, create a professional or personal blog, a product landing page, a business website, you name it - then it’s for you.

How much time? ⌚

It really depends on your knowledge and skills. It took me 5-8 days, but I mostly did around 2-3 hours per day (maybe with a weekend spike), that’s why I consider it 3-4 days (full-time). It also depends on the approach and tem...

Blog running on Drupal 7 (or any other CMS)

Running a self-hosted blog has its challenges - and I bumped into some of those eventually. Well, rather than running out of ideas / motivation or time to come up with new articles, I eventually had some technical problems: Updates & Security - being the most important one ? ?.

If you’re using a self-hosted blog, you eventually will need to do constant updates. The more popular engine you’re using - the more risks of being hacked and the more up-to-date you have to be (especially if you’re running on Wordpress). I am kinda lazy, so eventually I skipped some big updates and my hosting got hacked. And this happened many times.

Many hacking waves are automated - they just crawl the web, identify Drupal websites and try commonly known expl...

If you haven't heard yet, we've announced earlier that Moldcamp 2015 is on it's way! Second edition of the Drupal Camp hosted by a small country in the Eastern Europe - Moldova.

Last year we've held the 1st event and we had pretty good results, 140 attendees, 33 sessions, 9 sponsors, tons of partners, 2 days worth of session and an awesome party!

We were late with the website, so now there are just 2 weeks to submit the sessions. And just 1 week before the event the schedule will be published, so don't hesitate and submit. Speakers will be rewarded with Tshirts, free passes, accommodation discounts (this applies to attendees as well) and bottles of sweet Moldovan wine!

Submit your sessions here: http://moldcamp.com/

What you should expect this year?

• Better Internet Connection - as we have...

I know, it's been a while since the event took place (17th - 18th of May), I was pretty busy and had a lot of stuff to do meanwhile, so I finally found a couple of hours to make a small review.

Here we go.

CXO Dinner

That's the night where all CXOs (Silver and Gold Sponsors) gather together for a dinner to discuss business and other interesting things. We've chosen a nice small cozy place in the heart of Chisinau - Karl Schmidt. Everyone showed up except for one of the sponsors. Everything was paid by the Drupal Moldova as a part of the Moldcamp project.

It went very well. It was just 1 night before the Moldcamp event has taken place so that was the perfect timing to ask for CXOs to bring their marketing material for the event with them.

Registration / Preparation

We've got early in the ...

Alright!

We are getting closer and closer the our long-waited event - Moldcamp. What is Moldcamp? Well, it our very first DrupalCamp held in Moldova. We've worked your butts off to make it as nice as we can.

I will tell you in details how we've organized it and what were the principles of doing that, buuuut not in this article, I'll cover all those details in an article which will be posted after the event.

Anyway I'm posting this article just to get the message out there and to get some of our stats that we've reached so far (today we've closed the sessions submissions and we'll do the schedule, which will be posted later in this article).

In a beautiful graphical form (yes, FlatUI Icons), we have:

Aaaand speaking of knowledge base and proposed sessions, check out some of the sessions:

...

It's been a while since I've organised the 1st Drupal event in Moldova (to be precise 7 of January 2011 - Drupal 7 Release Party).

Since then, we've learned a lot by working on different projects in different countries.

Since then, more and more Drupal companies opened their offices in our country.

Since then, we've visited couple of Drupal Camps and Cons, in Ukraine, Romania, US, Germany, etc.

Since then, we had tons of events, official (such as Drupal Global Training Day) and informal (such as beer-offlines). And now, we're aiming even higher: first Drupal Camp in Moldova.

After founding Drupal Moldova Association, we always had in mind that we are going to finally organize this event.

Now that we're here, we want to organize one of the best camps you'll ever visit :)

Alright, so, how d...

We (Drupal Moldova Association) have put things together last week, to creating a really awesome one-page static website for Drupal Global Training Day, here in Moldova.

And here's how we did it.

Instead of implementing a Drupal Instance or instead of simply creating an event on http://www.meetup.com/, we've decided to create an animated one page website, which will include the following:

• Mission
• Information about Drupal (videos + info badges)
• Quotes from local developers
• Info about the Training
• Info about the Speakers
• Partners (Sponsors)
• Registration form
• E-mail subscription and Contacts

Corina Ciripitca, a designer which is also a friend of Drupal Moldova Association, has helped us with the design of the website, and she did a really great job!

I thought we have to share our experienc...

This will be a very short article where I'll just share a small problem I've encountered recently and how I've solved it.

I had a small task: I needed to sort the links in a forum node. I thought it would be an easy one, but heh, you have to love Drupal :)

First idea was to go in the theme_preprocess_node() (or, in case we use Omega and we follow best practices, we create preprocess-node.inc file under the preprocess folder) and to change the '#weight' of the links as I like it.

But if you just check how drupal_pre_render_links function works, we'll see that it just loops through the elements, igoring their '#weight' what so ever. So, which module had a higher weight in the system table, will have its links show up as last, as it was the last module which attached something to the node's c...

For the past two months or so, we were working hard to create a non-profit organization that will be responsible for lots of Drupal-related local things, such as: events, trainings, workshops, showcases, partnerships, local drupalcamp, etc.

We are still in the process, but we are ready to announce the launch of Drupal Moldova Association. There are a lot of things to be done, such as our website and internal organization structure, but we are working hard to make it happen.

We have an office, we have a team, we have tons of people working with Drupal and contributing to the community, we have tons of local companies working with Drupal, we have local meet-ups and a lot of people eager to learn Drupal.

We've created a small infographic about Drupal Evolution / Roadmap in Moldova (high quali...

A couple of days ago, while I was scrolling down on my Facebook wall, I've noticed a shared article about a local project "UpGreat: IT & Business" (organized by AIESEC). I contacted the coordinator of the project and after some discussions I got the full picture of the project:

This project was for high-school students that want to know more things about IT & Business, it also would include such workshops as: WordPress, Java, Android, etc.

So I thought that a Drupal workshop would fit perfectly in this context. Except for the Drupal Global Training Day that we've organized last year with Propeople, there are basically no events which target newcomers, and newcomers are very important for the existence and growth of local & international Drupal Community.

I'm actually not aware ...

Binding between developers and themers, or how backend developers have to prepare things to be themed by frondend developers.

Today I held a quick session (I know I know, it lasted for more than an hour) at Propeople regarding an important topic oh how developers should prepare things for themers (frontend developers). How you decide what theme to pick, how to create subtheme, how to keep everything clean on theme and module level, what are the string formatting and utility functions and so on.

For anyone interested enjoy the presentation beneath (or there's a public link to a Google Presentation):

Finally, I had a trip I really needed, a trip to the west: Romania. I didn't visit our neighboring country for years, and seeing that a DrupalCamp will be held in Arad really brought a smile on my face.

Our comany (Propeople, btw they also have a blog article about this trip) has sponsored our trip - so that was the 2nd part that brought a smile on my face. We were 3 guys: me, Alex and Stefan. I had to hold 2 sessions: Drupal Migration and Drupal Services & Backbone.js (the one I held at Kiev DrupalCamp) and Alex had to talk about Speeding up Drupal.

The trip

The trip was awesome, it took us 15 hours to get to Arad. Lots of streets in Romania were rebuilt and mixing that with intense fog resulted in an interesting driving experience.

Arad is a small cute city, first night we walked ar...

Most of us know that Views module has its own Ajax functionality. If we enable the ajax checkbox in the view settings, a bunch of Ajax-related JavaScript files will be loaded for us on our views' page.

One of the files which will be loaded is:

 /views/js/ajax_view.js

If we drill down this file and analyze it, we will understand some of the Views' ajax functionality. Lets take a case and see how we can reuse Views' Ajax.

Reloading a View with specific arguments via Ajax:

Lets say we have 2 views on the same page, for instance we use Panels and we have a left-side view and a content view. The content view is empty on the first page load, but when user selects something in the left-side view we want to reload dynamically the content view with specific arguments passed to it.

First idea that c...

This article will cover Field Collection module as a concept overall and we'll also look into some programming details.

Field Collection module a "field collection" field. This field is actually represented by an entity of type "field collection item". And as any entity, it's fieldable, so one can attach as many fields as he wants to a bundle of a field collection item. It can also store lots of values, just like any other field. The advantage of Field Collection is that it also embeds the editing form of the field collection item's fields.

One can view and edit field collections separately.

When you define field collections, you can go anytime to this path, and editing them: /admin/structure/field-collections

And here's an example of a Field Collection and why we would use it: lets sup...

I want to share what I consider to be the "Drupal way" of working with fields. Here we will go through such things as rendering fields, retrieving values of the field, and saving values in fields.

So, lets begin.

Most of the people work with fields this way. They usually drill down the whole entity that was loaded, whether it's a node or user entity or any other fieldable entity.

 
// load a node entity with entity id 3
$entity = entity_load_single('node', 3);
// get the value of the field by drilling down the object
$value = $entity->field_tags['und'][0]['tid'];
// now we got the value of the field (which is a taxonomy reference field, that's why we have 'tid' instead of the default 'value' key)

But that's the wrong way of doing that, as we don't know what's the language used in this field a...