How to use a version of a module from a Drupal issue fork in Composer Jay Beaton Friday, 16 Jun 2023 @ 5:24pm I've had this question several times and found it hard to find the answer. So, if only for my own reference, here it is! If you need to use the code from a Drupal issue fork (rather than a patch) in Composer, you need to... 1. Get the URL of the issue fork. You can find this on the issue page itself. For example, on this issue for Entity Group Field, you can get it here next to where it says "Issue fork": Copy that URL. In this case, it's https://git.drupalcode.org/issue/en ..read more

A programmer's approach to solving Wordle puzzles Jay Beaton Sunday, 9 Jan 2022 @ 9:06pm If you're not a "Never tell me the odds!" type of person, read on to see the most-efficient way of solving Wordle puzzles... TL;DR - Guess “trade” and “lions” for the first two words. If you want to guess a third, use “chump”. That will get you at least 3 of the 5 letters 80% of the time. The gory details… In the last week or so, I started seeing posts like this on Twitter: Wordle 204 5/6 ⬜⬜?⬜⬜ ⬜?⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜?⬜?? ????? It’s for the word game called “Wordle” where you need to guess a 5-letter word. After e ..read more

TriDUG Presentation on using Features and Drush in Drupal developmemt Jay Beaton Wednesday, 13 Nov 2013 @ 9:19am Here's a PDF of the slides of a presentation on using Features and Drush to build a professional development workflow that I gave at the November 2013 TriDUG Meetup. You can also watch a screencast of the presentation. Drupal ..read more

Planning Drupal sites with a Build Spec Jay Beaton Tuesday, 6 Aug 2013 @ 11:45pm There's an interesting article by Larry Garfield (Drupal's crell) about the planning process that Palantir uses before building a Drupal site.  A big part of that process is  a build spec in a spreadsheet:   The Build Spec is a Drupal-specific birds-eye-view of how the site will be built. It contains every content type that will be created, all fields, and all field, formatter, and widget settings (that is, the data model). It contains all Views that are going to be needed, and all of their display ..read more

An Emergency and a New Module Jay Beaton Monday, 7 Jan 2013 @ 11:50am It started with a frantic email from one of my clients.  They had accidentally deleted a taxonomy vocabulary and needed help in fixing their site.  As I looked into it, I saw just how much damage this had done.  This site used Taxonomy Access Control Lite to let contributing users edit parts of the site, and the vocabulary that they deleted was used with this access control.  This meant that the access settings were gone now for a couple thousand nodes.First, I put the site in maintenance mode so that c ..read more

How to fix "Call to undefined function phptemplate_get_ie_styles()" error when running Drupal's update.php Jay Beaton Thursday, 24 Mar 2011 @ 11:35am When running the update script on a new a new installation of Drupal version 6.20, I was getting this: Fatal error: Call to undefined function phptemplate_get_ie_styles() in htdocs/themes/garland/maintenance-page.tpl.php on line 23 The problem turned out be that the .info file was missing for the Minnelli theme, and that's the default theme for the maintenance page. I'm not sure how it went missing, but I just copied minnelli.info from a differe ..read more

How to migrate a text field into a link field in Drupal 8 Jay Beaton Friday, 28 Dec 2018 @ 10:30pm In working on a project where we were migrating a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8, I came across a case where we needed to migrate the data from what was a regular text field in the Drupal 7 site into a link field in the new Drupal 8 site.  As it was, the YAML for the migration was treating the destination field as a text field as well: field_lab_website: plugin: get source: field_lab_website This meant that the data didn't get migrated into the new site at all.  I did some Googling, b ..read more

TriDUG presentation on Drupal Installation Profiles Jay Beaton Wednesday, 24 Oct 2018 @ 10:21pm Here are the slides for a TriDUG presentation that I gave on creating Installation Profiles in Drupal. Drupal ..read more

Drupal login bookmarklet for Drupal 8 Jay Beaton Monday, 9 Jul 2018 @ 12:12pm Years ago, I saw Jeff's Handy Dandy Drupal Login Bookmarklet, a bookmarklet that made it easy to log in to any Drupal site.  You'd just click on this bookmark, it would detect that it was a Drupal site, and send you to the login page with the current page set as the "destination" so that you'd get sent back to that page after logging in.  With Drupal 8, though, this bookmarklet no longer worked due to Javascript changes. Here's an updated version that works on both Drupal 8 and 7 sites.  It shou ..read more

TriDUG presentation on Drupal 8 Module Development Jay Beaton Friday, 27 Oct 2017 @ 2:34pm Here are the slides for my TriDUG presentation on Drupal 8 Module Development.   Drupal D8 ..read more