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We recently Open Sourced our temporary environment builder, M8s. In this blog post we will be demoing everything you need to get started!

In my recent talk at DrupalSouth Auckland 2017 I took a hard look at the hyperbole of Drupal supposedly powering over a million websites. Where does Drupal really sit in relation to other CMS platforms, both open source and proprietary? What trends are emerging that will impact Drupal's market share? The talk looked outside the Drupal bubble and took a high level view of its market potential and approaches independent firms can take to capitalise on Drupal's strengths and buffer against its potential weaknesses.

At PNX, style guide driven development is our bag. It’s what we love: building a living document that provides awesome reference for all our front end components. And Drupal 8, with its use of Twig, complements this methodology perfectly. The ability to create a single component, and then embed that component and its markup throughout a Drupal site in a variety of different ways without having to use any tricks or hacks is a thing of beauty.

Today we are open sourcing m8s (Pronounced just like the thoroughly Australian "Mates"), our tool for building temporary environments as part of our pull request build process.

Its extremely important to have default values that you can rely on for local Drupal development, one of those is "localhost". In this blog post we will explore what is required to make our local development environment appear as "localhost".

From time to time you may find you need to extend another module's plugins to add new functionality.

You may also find you need to alter the signature of the constructor in order to inject additional dependencies.

However plugin constructors are considered internal in Drupal's BC policy.

So how do you safely do this without introducing the risk of breakage if things change.

In this article we'll show you a quick trick learned from Search API module to avoid this issue.

Services like dialogflow (formerly api.ai) do a much better job of natural language parsing (NLP) if they're aware of your entity names in advance.

For example, it can recognize that show me the weather in Bundaberg is a request for weather in Bundaberg, if you've told it ahead of time that Bundaberg is a valid value for the City entity.

Having the entity values automatically update in your service of choice when they're created and changed in Drupal makes this much more efficient.

This article will show you how to achieve that.

In this week's Lightning talk, I go through a case study on an investigation into Deadlocks and Render caching and why cache contexts are so important to get right. Check out the video below to find out how we were able to withstand 10x the throughput with smarter caching.

In a recent project we were outputting CSV and wanted to test that the file contents were valid.

Read on for a quick tip on how to achieve this with Drupal 8's BrowserTestBase

Drupal 8.4 is stable! With 8.3 coming to end of life, it's important to update your projects to the latest and greatest. This blog will guide you through upgrading from Drupal core 8.3 to 8.4 while avoiding those nasty and confusing composer dependency errors.