Case Study: A Folk Tale called Axe Porridge and Free Out-of-the-Box Solutions

There is an Eastern European folk tale that is called Axe Porridge1. The story begins: Once upon a time, an old soldier was returning home from the wars. He had been walking all day. He was tired and hungry. Night was drawing close. He needed a meal, and somewhere to spend the night. Soon he came to a little village. He knocked on the door of the first hut. A little old woman opened the door. ‘What do you want?’ she asked him. ‘I am looking for a place to stay the night,’ replied the soldier. ‘Come in then,’ said the old woman. She opened the door wide, and stepped Read more

Create Basic Blocks Content programmatically in Drupal 8

Currently, our Drupal team is at work on the second stage of a Drupal corporate website for a US-based energy company. The site is in production and the client’s content management team is working on content population. However, they still need some additional functionality, as well as new types of content pages and other matters. Using a case study, I will describe below how we overcame some of the challenges for this project. A set of pages on the site was built on a previous step. These pages have specific path patterns: markets/[category name]/[subcategory name] There should be four special blocks with reference materials that will be shown in the sidebar of Read more

Switching Themes Programmatically in Drupal 8

Sometimes we need to use different designs for separate pages or for separate menu items in a site. The most obvious way to perform this task is to set separate templates for each case in the current theme and customize CSS and JS for these pages. But there is another way, which is a less complex front-end solution. We can use a different theme. I used this solution for the first time in Drupal 5. My team worked on an informational resource about the state of Colorado, and each county had a different design. To resolve this discrepancy, we used the Taxonomy Theme module. Read more

Drupal for Front-End Developers

I’ll say it bluntly: Many Drupal projects look like a real mess from the front-end point of view. The reason is simple. Front-end developers know how it should look but don’t know how to change templates. Back-end developers know how to change templates but usually are not good with the front end. What do we get as a result? Read more