Perspectives from the experts at Chromatic
Migrations can be daunting. But with the right team, preparation, and guidance, you can reap massive benefits. Learn how Chromatic can help!
Making content migrations relatively painless lowers the bar immeasurably in upgrading or making the switch to a platform like Drupal 10.
Mark and Chris are joined by Klaus Purer to discuss his proposal to create an unofficial, community-driven Drupal 7 security team!
Mark and Dave discuss how Drupal 9’s end-of-life status relates to Drupal 7 as well as recap some of the Drupal 7 end-of-life discussions that have happened at GovCon.
Mark and Chris discuss the recent release of Acquia Migrate: Accelerate and how it can help folks with the content migration piece of their journey from Drupal 7 to Modern Drupal.
Change Drush command annotations with an alterer Service instead of overriding an entire command.
Matt Glaman returns, joining Mark and Chris to discuss Retrofit for Drupal’s launch and future. Previously known as Drupal Bridge, Retrofit helps ease the transition out of Drupal 7. Matt outlines the power of Retrofit and its limitations, and explains the best way to incorporate it into your workflows.
Writing a great “request for proposal” is often the first step on your journey to successfully migrate your Drupal 7 sites. Mark and Dave sit down to discuss some essential points to include in your RFP so that you can close the trust gap between you and a potential partner, and pave the way for a successful transition.
Custom modules built for Drupal 7 need your attention when you make the move to modern Drupal. This blog post provides an approach for you to follow and highlights some purpose-built projects to help you move your code from Drupal 7 to modern Drupal.
Chris is back from sabbatical! Mark and Chris outline a series of processes to help determine which modules are most at risk so that you can take action accordingly. Use our linked PDF to audit your Drupal 7 sites.
Our team at Chromatic is excited to announce the release of an open-source Drupal module and PHP Library to facilitate integrating Orange Logic’s digital asset manager Orange DAM with Drupal.
Install these modules on your Drupal 7 site to determine its readiness for the move to Modern Drupal or Backdrop.
While checking over some of our older Drupal 8 migration content for accuracy, I decided to fire up a fresh Drupal 10 instance and run through its out-of-the-box migration experience, which includes the ability to migrate from older Drupal versions.
Fresh from DrupalCon, Mark and Dave debrief Drupal 7's recent End-of-Life date announcement outlining processes to make the transition easier. Between sourcing the right advisors to pitching your transition, it’s key to take action now with End-of-Life 18 months away.
Live from DrupalCon, Mark and Dave discuss Drupal 7's new end-of-life date and its implications. While the official end-of-life date has been extended, changes in overall support come into effect as early as August 2023.
Matt Glaman joins us! Mark, Dave, and Matt examine how Drupal 7’s end-of-life challenges are symptomatic of a widespread approach to development. Matt dives deep into the drawbacks behind software maintenance, and unveils his plans to release Drupal Bridge by DrupalCon 2023.
Jen Lampton joins us! As the co-founder of Backdrop, Jen provides plenty of insight into why Drupal 7’s EOL requires a multi-pronged solution for different customer bases. Mark and Jen dive deep into Drupal alternatives and the challenges behind them, taking a closer look at where Backdrop may fill the gap for some users.
Drupal 7's end-of-life comes with more questions than answers. Chris and Mark discuss the complexities that come with retiring Drupal 7 and outline the basis of the communication gap between the Drupal Association, the Drupal 7 Soft Landing Initiative, and its users; taking a hard look at the possible steps to come.
Tim Lehnen joins us! Tim is the Drupal Association’s Chief Technology Officer and is one of the voices in the room when it comes to decisions around Drupal 7’s End-of-Life. We talk with Tim about that as well as how he thinks about sites still on Drupal 7, modern Drupal’s growth being better than the usage graphs show, and even Drupal.org still being on Drupal 7 (for now)!
Irina Zaks joins us! Irina is a web developer, open-source evangelist, and the co-founder of the Drupal 7 Soft Landing Initiative. Irina, Chris, and Mark discuss Drupal 7 end-of-life, Backdrop, and how to give Drupal 7 users a soft landing.
Chris and Mark discuss the wide spectrum of sites still running on Drupal 7 and which characteristics make staying on Drupal 7 more (or less) risky. They then unpack the pros and cons of some Drupal 7 alternatives.
Drupal 7's end-of-life has been extended multiple times but is now set for November 1, 2023. Should it be extended further? Mark and Chris break it down and maaaybe change Chris’ mind.
There’s been quite a bit of talk about what it takes to upgrade to 'modern Drupal,' but less on what it will actually be like to still be responsible for a Drupal 7 site after that date. Chris and Mark discuss that and more on this episode.
There has been quite a bit of talk about what it takes to upgrade to “modern Drupal,” but less ink has been spilled painting a picture of what it will actually be like to still be responsible for a Drupal 7 site after that date.
It is now dead simple to add Tugboat to Drupal contributed modules.
The ease with which Drupal 10 migrated an old Drupal 7 site's content types, taxonomy terms, menu items and content was impressive.
As we wrap up the fourth quarter of 2022 and hurtle headlong into 2023, we have compiled a round-up of our team’s open-source efforts in Q4 2022. Happy New Year!
PHP 7.4 will no longer receive updates from the PHP development team. Let's take a look at what this means, how to know if your site is affected and what to do about it.
Given there are so many sites still running on Drupal 7 and the upgrade process is more rebuild than upgrade, with Drupal 7's end-of-life past due, it's hard to know the path forward.
What if your site is already decoupled, and you are beginning to wonder if it was the right choice? The question becomes, does the higher effort required to maintain and iterate on a decoupled site still match your product or business goals?
Running build commands in parallel with Robo is a great way to reduce build times.
Configuring a Drupal library's version may seem mysterious, but it is important for caching.
Hundreds of menu items can bring cache clears to a grinding halt if not managed correctly.
Evaluating existing content is critical prior to website migration. Use this checklist to perform a content audit that sets your new site up for success.
Migration can be an opportunity to improve website SEO performance, editorial experience for your team, and user experience on the front end. Learn how.
The missing illustrated manual to the Drupal configuration system and the processes around it.
A decoupled website architecture gives your clients access to a high-performance machine to serve their business. But will that machine wind up being more trouble than it's worth? Learn the deciding factors that play a big role in securing an organization’s digital future.
Learn how to develop a website migration strategy to overcome common replatforming challenges and reap the benefits of improved site performance.
Comparing Drupal template overrides with their counterparts in the base theme doesn’t have to be hard.
Managing Drupal configuration and keeping it in sync requires attention to detail and process. Automation can add to the problem, but also solve it.
Learn how Ansible can be used to standardize and automated Drupal deployments.
Learn some high-level techniques and troubleshooting for handling complicated migration use cases in Drupal 8 and ways to troubleshoot migrations.
Many of the common website speed problems in Drupal 7 are now a distant memory. Features like Drupal’s built-in Dynamic Page Cache help bring great performance benefits to Drupal's most recent versions. This article will highlight other tactics to assist with getting the best performance out of your Drupal site.
Join us for DrupalCon Global
A new, open source way to see your organization's rank in the Drupal.org Marketplace.
Understanding Composer's preferred install settings can be essential when applying module info file patches.
Composer already manages our PHP dependencies, so why not let it manage our utility scripts too?
Serving dynamic content, while maintaining the cacheability of a Drupal 8 site, used to be a tedious task. Drupal 8 did introduce a Lazy Builder way back when, but using it requires a fair amount of coding. Instead, we’ll take advantage of the BigPipe module which was included as a stable module since Drupal 8.3.
Deploying the latest changes to your site can take many forms. Understanding the steps involved and why each one matters will help prevent deployment surprises.
Another DrupalCon is in the books and our team had a fantastic time gathering with so many members of the worldwide Drupal community in Seattle. Getting together in person with a large portion of our team is always a treat, but it makes it all the sweeter when our team has the chance to share their expertise by presenting at DrupalCon.
With Migrate modules in Drupal 8 core, it’s easier than ever to migrate legacy apps. Let's demystify the process by taking a closer look at how to get started!
Migrations are fraught with unexpected discoveries and issues. Fighting memory issues with particularly long or processing heavy migrations should not be another obstacle to overcome.
Entity storage methods are an often used, yet easily overlooked tool for improving data retrieval and code architecture.
Entities and their methods are no longer limited to use within PHP, they are now available in Twig as well.
This coming weekend is the Drupal Global Contribution Weekend where small local contribution groups volunteer their Drupal development at the same time throughout the world. This year there are local groups gathering in Canada, England, Germany, India, Russia, Spain, and the United States.
Spammers are always evolving and that means spam management is, too. Here are some of the best current spam management tools and tactics for Drupal.
Presented at Decoupled Drupal Days 2018 in New York City, this session analyzes how Chromatic and Meredith Corporation evaluated the benefits of decoupled architecture for Meredith’s brand portfolio.
Keeping your Drupal site secure requires diligence - here's what can happen if your site isn't up to date.
In this presentation we introduce Drupal 8's Cache API, review its metadata settings and demonstrate D8's caching flexibility using a fun, real-life example.
Making content migrations relatively painless lowers the bar immeasurably in making the switch to a platform like Drupal.
Learn how to update your Drupal content model to use media entities without the overhead of a traditional migration.
Managing Drupal sites with composer brings a number of benefits. However, when installing Drupal dependencies from source (an option offered by composer), you also lose the functionality provided by Drupal core’s “Available Updates” page. Thankfully Composer will allow you to keep tabs on the available updates for all of your project’s dependencies, including Drupal core/contrib.
“Decoupled Drupal” sounds cool and just about everyone else seems to be either doing it or talking about it, so it must be the best solution for you, right? Well, maybe. As with most things, the answer is more nuanced than one might think.
FamilyCircle.com provides expert advice about teens, family, food, style and home life, from the editors of Family Circle Magazine. When the time came to design and deploy a headless Drupal/Node.js platform, Meredith Corporation called on Chromatic’s expertise to help lead the way.
Some well-deserved recognition for the Chromatic team.
A brief rundown of how to configure Drupal to display multiple content authors.
The folks at Drupalize.me provide the best Drupal training materials on the web, so we were more than happy to oblige them when they asked if they could release our Coding Standards guide as a free series on their platform.
Properly linking to pages with dynamic routes can be tricky. Here's how to do it right.
Top reseach firm Clutch recently rated us as a top Drupal shop!
After a few weeks of work and testing, the JSON Feed module now has an official release. Version 1.0 allows Drupal users to add a JSON Feed display to any view and map Drupal fields to the attributes defined by the JSON Feed specification.
We are excited to announce the first official release of the Recurly module for Drupal 8 (8.x-1.0).
We're happy to announce the 7.x-3.0 release of the Recurly module.
Adam uncovers methods of firing code on every page in Drupal 8, the right way.
How to install and configure Redis caching for Drupal 8.
Dependency Injection in Drupal 8 Plugins can trip you up if you focus on the Dependency Injection part and forget about the Plugin part. This blog post shows key differences to keep in mind when you're working with D8 Plugins.
Drupal 7's Features module was a complicated way to export configuration - Drupal 8's Configuration Management makes everything much simpler. Let's break it down.
See how a custom module in Drupal 8 leverages data visualization with D3.
Explaining Drupal 8's cache metadata with the help of tacos.
Configuration management (CM) in Drupal 8 is great. However, when more complex configuration scenarios arise, we must find solutions to problems that core CM functionality doesn’t address (yet).
This is the seventh post in a series about coding standards. In this post we’ll talk about how to adhere to standards while implementing Twig templating in Drupal 8.
This is the sixth post in a series about coding standards. In this post we’ll talk about how to adhere to standards when writing object-oriented code in Drupal.
We find that there's still uncertainty out there around upgrading to Drupal 8. The natural answer in the Drupal community is, "Yes, of course go with Drupal 8!", but in the world of tight deadlines and tighter budgets, the answer isn't so clear. Enter ShouldIUpgradetoDrupal8.com, an interactive tool we built to help the community answer that very question.
There are a handful of tutorials out there that explain how to implement responsive images in Drupal, but none seem to address how to do so using srcset over the <picture> element. That is, until now.
This is the fifth post in a series about coding standards. In this post we’ll talk about how to use translation functions in both Drupal 7 and 8. This is so essential that it deserves its own post!
This is the fourth post in a series about coding standards. In this post we’ll talk about why good, standardized documentation is crucial to your project, and review Drupal coding standards regarding documentation and comments.
Tap into the power of Views with a custom sort plugin in Drupal 8. Code samples included.
This is the third post in a series about coding standards. In our previous post, we talked about code standards and why they are so important, as well as how to start implementing them. In this post, we’ll go into the details of formatting and syntax in Drupal.
Earlier this year I was fortunate to speak at DrupalCon New Orleans. I'd been working towards speaking at DrupalCon for a few years and it wasn’t until after I spoke that I reflected on just how much effort went into it. I had underestimated the process. Because I’m likely not alone in doing so, I’d like to share what I have learned along the way.
This is the second post in a series about coding standards. In our first post, we talked about code standards and why they are so important. In this post, we’ll talk about how to implement Drupal coding standards in your projects.
The transition to Drupal 8 can be tough for those new to OOP. Finding the correct "Drupal 8 way" can be difficult. Here's our list of Drupal 8 snippets with explanations along the way.
This post is the first in a series about Drupal coding standards - we’ll cover what they are, why they’re important, and go in-depth into a variety of topics in subsequent posts.
We're happy to announce two new releases for the YouTube Field module.
Civil Comments brings real-world social cues to comments sections via crowd-sourced moderation, and Chromatic has brought Civil Comments integration to Drupal with a new contrib module.
Spin up a fully-functional, disposable instance of Drupal in about a minute. Try out an unfamiliar contrib module without sullying your main dev environment or give back to the community by testing patches with minimal fuss.
See how Chris leveraged Jenkins, Drush and s3cmd to create nightly database backups.
Learn how to automatically deploy your Drupal 8 code and configuration with Jenkins, GitHub and Slack.
In the process of redesigning our site, we decided to axe jQuery early on. Analytics informed us that cross-browser compatibility wouldn’t be an issue, so we took the easy performance gain and stuck it out with vanilla JavaScript.
We are excited to announce that after a great deal of team effort, we have pushed a dev branch of the Recurly module for Drupal 8 to Drupal.org.
Some real world examples of generating URLs from within your Twig templates in Drupal 8.
Whether you are a Drupal newcomer or a seasoned Drupal developer, you're bound to run into one, some, or all of the issues outlined below. Some are obvious, some not so obvious, but we'll show you how to troubleshoot them all regardless.
A few weekends ago I was fortunate enough to attend my first Drupal Camp ever. What was even more fortunate for me was that it was located near where I grew up in Chattanooga, TN.
We're happy to announce the dev release of Recurly 7.x-2.x.
Add PHP_CodeSniffer to your workflow to help you and your colleagues master the Drupal coding standard, and produce better code.
I was fortunate to attend and speak at BADCamp for the first time this year. This post highlights the video and key takeaways from my BADCamp session.
A step-by-step introduction to Drupal 8's configuration system.
Migrations are never glamorous, but doing them right and verifying their integrity is essential to their success. The WordPress Migrate module gives you an easy turnkey solution to migrating content into Drupal from WordPress.
Chromatic has been attending DrupalCon in North America for many years and we have found it to be a valuable time to interact with the community. We're thrilled to finally be attending our first European DrupalCon!
Parents.com provides expert advice about pregnancy and parenthood from the editors of Parents Magazine. A lot of expert advice. While already familiar with Drupal, Meredith Corporation called on Chromatic's expertise for additional help.
Last weekend I enjoyed the awesomeness of DrupalCamp Asheville. It was a great camp filled with positive people and smart sessions. This time around I was lucky enough to deliver my own presentation, SVG: How To Have Fun Making Your Site Look Hot!.
Out of the box, Drupal does a good job of providing securely written code. However, Drupal doesn't enforce strong passwords by default which can lead to a scenario that is not too hard to imagine.
You find an issue on Drupal.org and if you are lucky, there is a viable patch. Hopefully this patch will one day make it into a release, but this won't slow you down. You apply the patch, it fixes the bug and all is well with the world ... for now.
It is always an exciting day when we finally get to see our hard work shared with the world and today is one of those days. We have the pleasure of partnering with Outside Magazine on a newly redesigned and re-architected Gear channel.
Google recently decided to deprecate the YouTube Data API v2, which caused a nasty bug to appear in the YouTube Field module. I was too busy enjoying the Los Angeles sun at DrupalCon to spot the bug myself. The community came to my rescue.
In our last post about Recurly, we gave you a primer on setting up the Recurly module in Drupal. However, if you need to thoroughly test your Recurly integration on a local environment, you’ll want to test the webhooks as well.
If you’re working on a site that needs subscriptions, take a look at Recurly. Recurly’s biggest strength is its simple handling of subscriptions, billing, invoices, and all that goes along with it. But how do you get that integrated into your Drupal site?
This last weekend I was fortunate to attend MADCamp (formerly known as MidCamp) in Chicago. For those who weren't able to, I'll recap the keynotes and common themes from the sessions I attended.
We have two team members slated to speak at two different Drupal Camps in March!
If you use the Workbench Moderation module, you have undoubtedly created drafts for new or updated content. These drafts can often get stuck in the editorial workflow as they await approval from editors and other stakeholders.
Many designers are praising the benefits of Atomic Design. Rather than designing pages, Atomic Design focuses on designing systems of individual, reusable components.
This module allows users to enable automatic placeholders to textfields, textareas, select lists, and email fields within a webform created by the Webform module.
What if you could create hi-res versions of images without a ton of added filesize overhead? What if you could do this all within Drupal? No special coding, no uploading of multiple versions, no special field templates or unnecessary javascript.
Switching the default text format of a field is easy. Manually converting existing content to a different input format is not. What about migrating thousands of nodes to use a different input format? That isn't anyone's idea of fun!
Drupal is awesome, but it is also infamous for having a steep learning curve. From beginners to seasoned professionals, everybody has areas they could improve upon.
Features play a significant role in any major Drupal 6 or 7 project. The organization of features is often overlooked, but becomes important as a project grows. Agreeing on an effective organization strategy avoids headaches and reduces merge conflicts.
Here's a list of some common gotchas to look out for when inheriting a Drupal site from another developer or Drupal shop.
Every Drupal site contains the spinning circle of progress - the "throbber". Seeing the default throbber on an otherwise beautiful site takes away from the magic a bit, doesn't it? Go the extra step and create a custom throbber!
Sublime Text is the best text editor on the market right now. If you do work on the web, you should consider using it. The interface is clean, intuitive and out of the way. The back end is fast. But most of all, Sublime is highly pluggable and configurable.
There comes a time where you sit back and look at your Drupal site and realize that you've created a monster.
I've been using TextExpander for a while and I absolutely love it. If you aren't familiar, TextExpander allows you to create shortcuts to frequently used pieces of text. Its a tool that everyone can use, but programmers like me find it especially useful.
Drupal development can feel a bit like "black magic" when you're getting started. Here's a high level guide aimed at beginners to help point them in the right direction.
Over the past year or so, CHROMATIC has worked closely with Applied Motion Products. Applied Motion manufactures and sells precision motion control products, and have been doing so since 1978.
Each Drupal developer out there has their own list of their "must-have” modules. The following list is partially mine and partially that of my Twitter followers.
If you work with Drupal long enough, cron will hang and fail on you. It has failed us all. We whipped up a clever solution to alert us when there's an issue with cron.
When someone asks, "Can Drupal do that?" the answer is almost always yes. However, when a recent project required that Drupal merge CMS capabilities with Photoshop-like functionality, I began to question if Drupal really was the right solution.
Finding a responsive theme for your next Drupal project isn't difficult, but selecting the right one for the job takes a bit more thought. Surprisingly, we found very little advice when doing so for our latest project, so we decided to do some research.
A couple of weeks ago, a client of ours needed a simple way to select some or all options in a multiple select form element that contained hundreds of options. They asked if there was a an easier way. jQuery to the rescue!
Last week, I was working on some Drupal form customizations and validations for a client’s site (launching soon) and thought I’d share how you can easily alter Drupal forms. That is, if you know how and where to tap in.
In this post, I’m going to show you how you can easily leverage the power of Views 2 to create a simple block that displays “Related Posts by this Author” information.
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