Development Aids in Drupal with Coffee and Admin Toolbar

Sometimes, when developing a site with many content types, it can happen that your Drupal system may slow down “a little bit”. In most cases, that has nothing to do with Drupal itself, but it lies in the lack of resources of your local environment.

In those cases, it helps to save time by avoiding one or two clicks (that implies one or two page-loads) on the backend of your Drupal site.

The Drupal Coffee module provides a floating text box, which filters the results of the backend menus, according to the user’s input, whereas the Admin Toolbar module turns the default Drupal Toolbar into a dropdown menu.

Keep reading, to learn how to use these modules!

Step #1. - Install the Required Modules

• Open the terminal application of your PC
• Type:
  • composer require drupal/coffee   
  • composer require drupal/admin_toolbar

Once the modules are installed, you have to enable them.

• Click Install Now.
• Click Activate. 

 Step #2. - The Coffee Module

The Coffee module provides a search box when pressing the shortcut alt+d.

• Press alt+d
• Type cache

You will be presented with all available options in the backend of your site, that are related to the cache. For instance, if you were working with theme templates, it will not be necessary to flush all caches, but only the twig caché.

Furthermore, you save time, since you do not have to click your way to the Performance screen (that is, Configuration > Performance > Clear all caches - 3 clicks).

Another feature of the Coffee module is the ability to add nodes directly from the search box.

• Type alt+d
• Type :add

A dropdown will be displayed with a list of all possible content types that can be added.

 Step #3. - The Admin Toolbar Module

As you might notice, the default toolbar now has a different look. Since we enabled the Admin Toolbar Module, there is an extra (drop) icon in the upper, left corner. If you hover over it, you will be presented with pure development options.

The link called Index leads you to a list of all administrative tasks available on your system.

These links are provided by the Admin Toolbar Extra Tools module.

Another thing to notice is that the toolbar has turned itself into a dropdown menu. You get access to the different locations of your backend, by hovering over the menu items.

This helps you save valuable development time.

Summary

As you already noticed, the Drupal modules Coffee and Admin Toolbar help you spare time during development and on production as well.

Use either of them or a combination of both to speed up your Drupal development.

Thanks for reading!

About the author

Jorge lived in Ecuador and Germany. Now he is back to his homeland Colombia. He spends his time translating from English and German to Spanish. He enjoys playing with Drupal and other Open Source Content Management Systems and technologies.