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Drupal Site Building

Building a layout system for Paragraphs

A recent Drupal 8 project of ours had some great requirements around it’s landing pages, aimed at reusing existing components in a range of layouts and combinations. Paragraphs quickly established itself as the site-building tool of choice and Flexbox always wins for me as the CSS grid/layout approach, so we looked at how the two could be combined to give the client the flexibility they needed, without over-complicating the editor experience.

aGov for Drupal 8: First Alpha Release

Since 2012, PreviousNext has been developing and maintaining the aGov distribution for Drupal 7. aGov provides a means for Australian Government organisations to meet their accessibility and security obligations with free and open-source software hosted on the platform of their choice.

In the last few weeks we have been working on the Drupal 8 version, and are happy to announce today the first Alpha release!

In this post we share some of our experiences developing a Drupal 8 distribution.

Lead Drupal Developer

Automated style guides with KSS-node

During PreviousNext’s weekly developers meeting I recently gave a lightning talk about how to use kss-node to auto-generate a website style guide. If you’ve even tangentially followed front-end development, you’ll find that this is yet-another blog post describing “project A implementing technology B with hip, new language/framework C.”

But kss-node is really cool and useful, especially if you understand how it fits into the larger picture of the new web development process. Fortunately, my previous post provides that big picture, so if you’d like to understand how Agile is turning web development inside-out and how style-guide-driven development is the new website development workflow, please go read that first. Then head back here for the screencast to get you started with kss-node.

Senior Front-end Developer

Updating Panelizer content programmatically

Panelizer is a great module for being able to modify the layout of a page on a per-node basis. However, its greatest strength can sometimes be its greatest weakness. We found this out the hard way when a client asked us to help them add a block on every single page of their site directly beneath the h1 page title. Read on for how we approached this issue.

Senior Developer

Style-Guide-Driven Development: the new web development

If you’ve looked at front-end development at any time during the past four years, you know that there has been an explosion of new technologies. We are inundated with new projects like bower and cucumber and behat and KSS. It is a lot to take in. At the past two Drupalcons there have been sessions about this overload, My Brain is Full: The state of Front-end developement. Essentially those sessions are asking “What the hell is going on?”

“Everyone is describing the one little piece they’ve created, but don’t explain (or even reference!) the larger concepts of how all of these elements link together.”

— Frank Chimero, July 2014 Designer News AMA

This is my attempt to explain.

Senior Front-end Developer

Linking to revisionable files in Drupal 7

Our client had some very specific requirements for their project. They needed to be able to insert links to files and they needed to keep the same URL for those files even if the file changed. Those familiar with Drupal will know that by default, Drupal will suffix the newer version of the filename with _0, _1 etc which obviously breaks the URL. Here's how we worked around the issue...

Senior Developer

Pagination