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Feb 06 2024
Feb 06

Webform is a Drupal module that allows you to create forms directly in Drupal without using a 3rd party service.

It can be used to create basic “Contact Us” and complex application forms with custom field logic and integration.

In this getting started guide you’ll learn how to:

  1. Create a form
  2. Add elements to form
  3. Customize form with conditional logic
  4. Embed the form
  5. Send submissions to Google Sheets

This tutorial accompanies the video above.

Jan 11 2024
Jan 11

The Gutenberg Editor is a powerful page building tool for Drupal that utilizes a block building system to create and edit content.

This comprehensive guide walks you through each step of setting up and using the Gutenberg Editor.

From downloading and installing the Gutenberg module, to enabling it on your content types, and finally using it to create your content using blocks, this guide has you covered.

To get the most out of this guide, follow the video above.

Sep 24 2023
Sep 24

Radix is a Bootstrap base theme for Drupal that provides a solid foundation for building your website. It includes built-in Bootstrap 4 and 5 support, Sass, ES6, and BrowserSync. This makes it easy to create a website that looks great on all devices and is easy to maintain.

In this video, you’ll learn the following:

  • Download and install Radix.
  • Generate a Radix sub-theme.
  • Integrate a Bootswatch theme in your site.
  • Implement the Carousel component using blocks and paragraphs.
  • Implement the Accordion component using paragraphs.
  • Display articles in a Bootstrap grid using Views.
Aug 15 2023
Aug 15

The OpenAI/ChatGPT module allows you to integrate OpenAI’s artificial intelligence technology into your Drupal website. This can generate, translate, summarize content, answer questions, and more.

To use the module, you must create an OpenAI account and obtain an API key. Once you have your API key, you can install the OpenAI module on your website.

The module’s functionality is broken down into separate sub-modules. Just install the module that you plan to use.

In this tutorial, we’ll look at the following modules:

  • OpenAI CKEditor integration
  • OpenAI Content Tools
Jun 28 2023
Jun 28
Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up-to-date. The Views module is great for creating pages in Drupal and is beneficial when creating custom admin pages. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a custom views page that will allow you to manage article content types. The view will be accessible via a […]
Jun 21 2023
Jun 21
If you create an entity reference or list field, you will notice the “Check boxes/radio buttons” widget on the “Manage form display” page. How do you switch between checkboxes or radio buttons? Because the widget has no settings to choose the form element. Drupal automatically switches between the elements depending on the “Number of values” option on the “Field settings” page.
Apr 05 2023
Apr 05
When you create a list using Views there’s a good chance you’ll add a filter to it. You could filter the list by content type, published status (if it’s published or unpublished), by author and more. If you click on “Add” in the “Filter criteria” section you can see all the available filters. The one […]
Feb 06 2023
Feb 06

Views is a powerful module that allows you to create all sorts of components. It can be used to create something simple such as a list of articles, or complex such as a carousel or even an embedded map.

The Views UI can be intimidating if you’re new to Drupal, but as you use the module, you’ll find bits of functionality hidden deep in the interface.

One feature I want to discuss, which may not be evident at first, is the ability to add Twig code into view a fields.

Adding Twig code into a field allows you to change a field’s output dynamically. Which can be helpful under certain circumstances.

To add Twig code or some HTML into a field, click on the field, expand “Rewrite results”, check “Override the output of this field with custom text” and add your code into the text area.

Jan 08 2023
Jan 08

SiteGround is a popular hosting provider for Drupal, WordPress or any PHP powered website.

They offer a wide variety of hosting packages, from shared, managed, and cloud hosting.

However, in this video we focus on their shared hosting product.

They offer three plans; StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek. The StartUp plan only allows for a single website so we recommend that you go for the GrowBig or GoGeek as they offer more functionality and allow you to host unlimited websites.

All plans offer free SSL (using Let’s Encrypt) and “Out-of-the-box Caching”, where they use NGINX to cache static assets such as images and files. They also offer Memcached, which can help with speeding up your Drupal site.

The GoGeek plan allows you to host and deploy your Drupal site using Git, which could be helpful if you use Git to manage your Drupal site.

In this video, you’ll learn how to install Drupal using the GoGeek plan on SiteGround.

Nov 16 2022
Nov 16

Menu Block gives you additional functionality around managing the display of menus in block regions. Drupal core allows you to add any menu such as main navigation, footer, etc… into any region and you can control how many menu levels should be displayed. Menu Block gives you additional options such as setting a fixed parent item, changing the block title, and more.

But the one feature of Menu Block I want to show you in this tutorial is the ability to add a custom theme hook suggestion to menus.

Oct 12 2022
Oct 12

In this video, you’ll learn how to build a Drupal site from start to finish. We start by setting up hosting for the site on Cloudways and pointing to a custom domain name.

Once hosting has been set up, we start building out the site. We create a custom content type, configure layout builder, add media functionality, create a bunch of custom view pages and much more.

I’ve broken out the video into sections below with timecodes and extra resources. For the content below to make any sense, you should follow along by watching the video.

Aug 16 2022
Aug 16

Often on a website, you want to control what pages are displayed in search results. You can do this by adding the noindex meta tag to pages. I’m not going to cover why you would want some pages not to appear in the search results; however, I want to show you how to implement it in Drupal.

This tutorial will teach you how to use the Metatag module to control the noindex meta tag.

If you want to learn more about Metatag, read our tutorial “Getting Started with Metatag in Drupal”.

Feb 11 2021
Feb 11

Last week one of our clients was asking me about how they should think about the myriad of options for website hosting, and it inspired me to share a few thoughts. 

The different kinds of hosting

I think about hosting for WordPress and Drupal websites as falling into one of three groups. We’re going to compare the options using an example of a fairly common size of website — one with traffic (as reported by Google Analytics) in the range of 50,000–100,000 visitors per month. Adjust accordingly for your situation. 

  • “Low cost/low frills” hosting — Inexpensive website hosting would cost in the range of $50–$1,000/yr for a site with our example amount of traffic. Examples of lower cost hosts include GoDaddyBluehost, etc.  Though inexpensive, these kinds of hosts have none of the infrastructure that’s needed to do ongoing web development in a safe/controlled way such as the ability to spin up a copy of the website at the click of a button, make a change, get approval from stakeholders, then deploy to the live site. Also, if you get a traffic spike, you will likely see much slower page loads. 
  • “Unmanaged”, “Bare metal”, or “DIY” hosting — Our example website will likely cost in the range of $500–$2,500/yr. Examples of this type of hosting include: AWSRackspaceLinode, etc. or just a computer in your closet. Here you get a server, but that’s it. You have to set up all the software, put security measures in place, and set up the workflow so that you can get stuff done. Then it’s your responsibility to keep that all maintained year over year, perhaps even to install and maintain firewalls for security purposes. 
  • “Serverless” hosting¹ — It’s not that there aren’t servers, they’re just transparent to you. Our example website would likely cost in the range of $2500–5000/yr. Examples of this kind of hosting: PantheonWP EngineAcquiaPlatform.sh. These hosts are very specialized for WordPress and/or Drupal websites. You just plug in your code and database, and you’re off. Because they’re highly specialized, they have all the security/performance/workflow/operations in place that 90% of Drupal/WordPress websites need.

How to decide?

I recommend two guiding principles when it comes to these kinds of decisions:

  1. The cost of services (like hosting) are much cheaper than the cost of people. Whether that’s the time that your staff is spending maintaining a server, or if you’re working with an agency like Four Kitchens, then your monthly subscription with us. Maybe even 10x.  So saving $1,000/yr on hosting is only worth it if it costs less than a handful of hours per year of someone’s time. 
  2. Prioritize putting as much of your budget towards advancing your organization’s mission as possible. If two options have a similar cost, we should go with the option that will burn fewer brain cells doing “maintenance” and other manual tasks, and instead choose the option where we can spend more of our time thinking strategically and advancing the mission.

This means that you should probably disregard the “unmanaged/bare/DIY” group. Whoever manages the site will spend too much time running security updates, and doing other maintenance and monitoring tasks. 

We also encourage you to disregard the “low cost” group. Your team will waste too much time tripping over the limitations, and cleaning up mistakes that could be prevented on a more robust platform.

So that leaves the “serverless” group. With these, you’ll get the tools that will help streamline every change made to your website. Many of the rote tasks are also taken care of as part of the package. 

Doing vs. Thinking

It’s easy to get caught up in doing stuff. And it’s easy to make little decisions over time that mean you spend all your days just trying to keep up with the doing. The decision you make about hosting is one way that you can get things back on track to be more focused on the strategy of how to make your website better.

¹ The more technical members of the audience will know that “serverless” is technically a bit different.  You’d instead call this “platform-as-a-service” or “infrastructure-as-a-service”. But we said we’d avoid buzzwords.

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Dec 02 2011
Dec 02
For a lot of my recent projects I have used the Omega theme as the base theme, I love the whole responsive design support and grid system. But when you create a Panels page and choose a layout you don’t get the same grid support as you do with Omega. Panels outputs its own grid … Continue reading "Custom grid panels layout with Omega theme"
Sep 22 2011
Sep 22
Update: I have written an updated version of this series over athttp://webwash.net. The updated version covers Display Suite 7.x-2.x. Configuring Layouts with Display Suite in Drupal 7 Handling View Modes and Regions with Display Suite in Drupal 7 This post is part of a Display suite series, Display suite part 1: Layouts and Styles andDisplay … Continue reading "Display suite part 2: View modes and fields"
Sep 11 2011
Sep 11
Update: I have written an updated version of this series over athttp://webwash.net. The updated version covers Display Suite 7.x-2.x. Configuring Layouts with Display Suite in Drupal 7 Handling View Modes and Regions with Display Suite in Drupal 7 The Display suite is a powerful module which allows you to customise the node view page without … Continue reading "Display suite part 1: Layouts and Styles"
Jul 01 2011
Jul 01
The Field Slideshow makes it easy to create a slideshow from just an image field. With Fields in core for Drupal 7 we also got a more powerful display formatters for fields. Fields now ship with their own formatter settings forms and make it really easy to change the display of a field, and Field … Continue reading "Create a slideshow using the Field Slideshow module"
May 25 2011
May 25
Using the GeoIP module with Context GeoIP module, it makes it really easy to create a context which has a specific condition to only display a block if your IP location is from a particular country. Furthermore GeoIP has a powerful API to pull out location information. In this article I’ll show you how to … Continue reading "How to use GeoIP & Context GeoIP module"
Apr 29 2011
Apr 29
Update: This tutorial is out-of-date. Please go to Search API’s getting started page for up-to-date documentation. The Search API is a Drupal 7 search framework module. It allows you to create custom search pages on any URL and integrates with a few search backends. In this article I’ll show you how to setup Search API … Continue reading "How to setup Search API with Apache Solr"
Mar 30 2011
Mar 30
The backup and migrate module is an awesome module that you can use to create a MySQL dump file. You can use it to schedule database backups to the server filesystem, remote FTP server or even an amazon s3 bucket. In this post I’ll demonstrate how to setup a scheduled backup to a remote FTP … Continue reading "Backup to a remote FTP using the Backup and Migrate module"
Mar 21 2011
Mar 21
When I upgraded zugec.com to Drupal 7 I had to find another syntax highlighter because the previous one that I used in Drupal 6 was GeSHi but this module hadn’t been upgraded to Drupal 7 at the time. I searched around and found Syntax Highlighter module which uses the SyntaxHighlighter library. In this post I’ll … Continue reading "How to use the Syntax Highlighter module in Drupal 7"
Aug 18 2010
Aug 18
When you get an editor asking how they can manage content on a Drupal site, sometimes you just can’t send them to admin/content/node page to manage the site. Maybe you only want certain editors to manage only certain content types. With the Views 2 module it’s easy to create custom administration pages. When I say … Continue reading "Create administration pages with Views 2"
Jul 10 2010
Jul 10
On some Drupal sites having the taxonomy links point to the “taxonomy/term/tid” can really break the design of a site. Sometimes you want to redirect the user to a custom views page instead of the standard taxonomy page. Using the Taxonomy Redirect module it’s relatively easy to change the taxonomy URL. To install Taxonomy Redirect … Continue reading "Redirect taxonomy term links to a views page"

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web