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See Advanced Courses NAH, I know EnoughWebform 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:
- Create a form
- Add elements to form
- Customize form with conditional logic
- Embed the form
- Send submissions to Google Sheets
This tutorial accompanies the video above.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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 GoDaddy, Bluehost, 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: AWS, Rackspace, Linode, 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: Pantheon, WP Engine, Acquia, Platform.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:
- 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.
- 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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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