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Component based design with Paragraphs and Field formatters

A common problem that I’ve faced, particularly in the last few years, is how to deliver the complex, component driven design that clients want while also giving content authors full flexibility with those components without creating an un-maintainable, or brittle product.

Introduction to Drupal Patch Files

I recently joined PreviousNext and was soon getting acquainted with contributing to Drupal core and contrib projects. A big part of the contribution workflow is working with patch files in the issue queue, so I wrote this post to help anyone who wants to know about patching in Drupal.

Migrating Drupal 7 File Entities to Drupal 8 Media Entities

The Drupal 8.3.x branch is getting ready to introduce a new experimental media module. This will bring enhanced media handling in Drupal 8. The closest solution in Drupal 7 to handle media is the file entity module. Now is the time to discuss migrations from file entity in Drupal 7 to media entities in Drupal 8. For core, there is already an issue for this, but for contrib... there is no migration. So, I wrote one.

Skipper: Tooling for DevOps

Over the years we’ve embraced the idea of DevOps within our organisation. That is, bringing the developers closer to operations, and visa versa, to be more collaborative, embrace our agile processes, and become more efficient. When we designed Skipper, our Kubernetes-based container hosting platform, this was the focus of our attention.

PreviousNext speakers at DrupalGov Canberra 2017

The PreviousNext team are gearing up for our annual pilgrimage to DrupalGov Canberra, being held on Monday March 27 at the QT Hotel. With more than 200 tickets already sold, the conference is set to be one of the largest Drupal events in the Southern Hemisphere and a testament to how significant Drupal is now within the Australian Government.

Faster Hierarchies with Nested Sets and the Entity Reference Hierarchy module.

In Drupal 7 we used Node Hierarchy module to keep track of a hierarchy of pages. Node hierarchy ties directly to the menu system. When getting a list of all ancestors or descendents, it is a O(n) operation, and at least one site we use it on has a lot of nodes in the tree. Performance was terrible. Add to that it has no notion of revisions or forward revisions, so changing the parent and saving a draft can cause all sorts of issues with your menu. When the time came to update the site to Drupal 8, we took a different approach.

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