Working in an open source community is mostly a fantastic experience. Folks from all over the world from all walks of life come together to build something better for that community. Ever since the Drupal community adopted Symfony (and Composer) we’ve been exposed to an even broader community of PHP developers and plugins / libraries that we consume as part of our sites and platforms. This has also introduced a whole new dependency chain for getting things done. I’d go so far as to identify this as a new(ish) challenge for the Drupal world; we certainly never ran into these problems back in ye ..read more

Tis the season for PHP updates! With Drupal 10 coming in the not so distant future (Beta comes out in just a few weeks), I’m starting to do some testing of PHP 8.1 on sites that are currently running PHP 8.0 and running Drupal 9. It’s been a mixed bag, and I wanted to share some of the experiences with you just so you can adequately plan for your own update processes. In this article we’ll have a look at the following: local environments composer modules / plugins / other tools hosting environments Local Environments TLDR: Local environments should be ready for PHP 8.1. Running PHP 8 ..read more

I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago about patching dependencies using Composer. This remains a critical part of my personal (and recommended) development AND devops workflow. However, every once in a very rare while I run into a problem where a patch doesn’t apply. And then I start scratching my head (as one does when a common practice suddenly fails them). Even more irksome is that typically this is a silent failure… meaning that I don’t get the patch I want, but I also don’t get any fatal errors that might indicate why. This post will dig into the problem and offer a couple of solution ..read more

With the release of Drupal 9.4, we’ve come across a brand new configuration problem that is likely going to bite you while you’re doing updates. In ConfigImportCommands.php line 318: The import failed due to the following reasons: Unable to uninstall the <em >MySQL</em> module because: The module 'MySQL' is providing the database driver 'mysql'.. This post will talk about the issue and how to fix it. Background Part of the 9.4 release includes moving database drivers into separate modules (see the changelog here). The database updates the run as part of 9.4 will automatically ..read more

For the first time in over two years, I’m on the road for work! I’ll be in Portland, Oregon all week for DrupalCon 2022. I’ve attended a number of virtual conferences in 2020 and 2021, and while I think it’s fair to say that digital conferences are better than no conferences, they are definitely not an even replacement for an in person experience. Having said that, I’m pretty nervous going into this week. As many of my friends and colleagues in the community have pointed out (as reasons they aren’t attending DrupalCon this year), Covid is still very much a force in our world and I’m taking ev ..read more

Overall, I’ve been really impressed with my new Macbook Pro. I was quite nervous to upgrade because I’ve heard a number of horror stories over the last year (or so) of colleagues who had done the M1 upgrade and found that critical tools (especially those surrounding virtualization, and especially Docker environments) simply didn’t work. While I have experienced some issues in those regards, nearly everything I would categorize as a minor inconvenience and I’ve largely been able to work around the issues. There’s only one critical thing that remains a blocker, and it’s a pretty significant bloc ..read more

I’ve been doing a lot of audits recently, which means I’m pulling down codebases that weren’t always built using the common tooling our PS team brings in (like BLT). This means that I’ve been moving a lot of databases manually (yuck) and I thought I’d take a moment to show how easy it is to do this with Lando and Sequel Pro. Why aren’t I using drush? Well, in fairness, I usually do try to use Drush! But, there are times (especially with larger databases) that I find that the drush sql:cli sometimes will crash / bomb out. So, it’s always good to have a backup (and for me, that backup is Sequel ..read more

It feels like the last several years have seen significant shifts in the Drupal world and this year is no different. There are some major changes coming this year that will have significant impact on your work if you have Drupal sites. The good news is that I don’t think these are difficult changes to incorporate (in all but one case) but… as always, if you wait until well after the dates at hand, it will be much harder to be responsive. So, I wanted to throw some critical things out there now so you can plan and prepare. It’s better to be prepared and jump on these things early (to keep. the ..read more

If you were watching the Drupal security feed at the end of January, you might have been a little surprised (as I was) by the bombardment by “unsupported project” notifications. One such came for the Cog base theme. This was a bit of an oh shit moment for me, because GovCon still used Cog as the base theme. And while I didn’t have to “scramble” to remove the theme (because technically, the project page had been marked unsupported for some time) I wanted to be proactive because: I really dislike having projects in my projects that show red (either for security vulnerabilities or unsupported i ..read more

If you’ve been a reader for a while (THANK YOU) then there will be a lot of similarities in this post to some of what I’ve written over the last few years. The TLDR is that Drupal 10 is coming out in a few months (currently targeted at 06/2022) and there will be, just like in Drupal 9, deprecations that must be resolved prior to you updating your codebase. Given that roughly 20% (or 200k) of the sites being reported on Drupal.org are still running Drupal 8 (even thought it went EOL in November 2021)… there’s a lot of sites that haven’t completed the LAST update. I want to help you get ahead of ..read more