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

Submitted by christophe on Mon, 09/01/2017 - 18:20
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.

Front and backend relations are getting better faster stronger and easier

Submitted by christophe on Sun, 08/01/2017 - 20:06

Here are a plain list of modules that really gives site builders front and backend super powers and make these two categories of developers closer than ever. 

Page Manager

It supports the creation of new pages, and allows placing blocks within that page.
Like Drupal 7's Page Manager, it provides a concept of "page variants", each with their own selection conditions.
Additionally, it can be used to take over an existing page, like overriding /node/% to change what is displayed when viewing a node.

Install Solr 6 for Drupal 8 on Ubuntu 16.04

Submitted by christophe on Wed, 26/10/2016 - 21:55
This setup is intended for production use on a dedicated server (VPS, ...). For development purpose it should be preferable to use Drupal VM, it comes with a default Solr configuration that can be enabled via the config.yml file. If you are using Drupal VM and want to configure Search API for Solr, you can jump to point 4.

Alter Views sort by taxonomy weight

Submitted by christophe on Mon, 03/10/2016 - 19:10

The use case is that we want 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).

I choosed to apply a custom sort function on a view, instead of a custom dynamic / entity query for two reasons :

Zero configuration Let's Encrypt under Virtualmin

Submitted by christophe on Sat, 10/09/2016 - 09:50

It has been there for a while under Virtualmin, but I was hesitating on using the GUI configuration of Let's Encrypt from Virtualmin on an existing manual configuration. Let's Encrypt does not allow you to make any change afterwards, yielding this error :

Request failed : The native Let's Encrypt client was used previously on this system, and must be used for all future certificate requests.

Kickoff a Drupal 8 development environment

Submitted by christophe on Mon, 08/02/2016 - 10:01

Drupal 8 evolves quickly, and it's easy to get lost amongst the several documentations that have been written since the beta releases, Drush and PHP version needs upgrade. Some things that I have learned.

Option 1 : No VM setup on Mac OSX, via Homebrew

Okay, VM's are easier to maintain solutions, but in some situations you just don't have enough RAM for having Virtualbox running all the time.