Time to upgrade the site to the latest and greatest - Drupal 10

Submitted by Simon Lindsay on

It was time to bite the bullet and upgrade this site to Drupal 10, which went pretty smoothly, but of course, never start this sort of process without a backup.

Drupal has made huge advances with upgradability since Drupal 7. Going from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 and now to Drupal 10 has been a progressively smoother process.

In the case of this site, it was simply updating composer.json and changing some lines in composer.json like this:

Before:

Drupal
Upgrade
Docker

Creating components with Drupal

Submitted by Simon Lindsay on

When you make a few Drupal sites, you will eventually find that you want to be able to take a feature that you created on one site and move it across to another site. After all, why re-invent the wheel!

My procedure for doing this has changed over time, using the features module was the way with Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, but with Drupal 8, we have better configuration management, and modules to help make things easier.

Features is again one of the modules that can be used, but I prefer a lighter approach, though its perhaps a little more work.

Drupal
Features
Development
Drush

DOMDocument, DOMXPath and invalid html

Submitted by Simon Lindsay on
I've been doing some work with DOMDocument and DOMXPath to parse webpages recently, and even though I could get the XPath directly from Firefox or Chrome, it would not match in the $xpath->query(); What I found is that the $dom->LoadHTML($page); will handle invalid HTML, but mostly just by stripping it out. This is fine, unless you depend on the structure for the XPath query. The problem was the the page contained tables (we've all built them, missing the TBODY tags).
Drupal
PHP

Speed up loading Drupal database into mysql

Submitted by Simon Lindsay on

I've developed a little script over the years that dumps production databases, and loads them locally on demand, and its been very handy.

However, it was taking ages to load a database on a Virtualbox ubuntu environment I use for debugging with Zend.

A quick look into it, and I found that i'd put 

--skip-extended-insert
on the mysqldump command sometime in the past.

I changed that to

Drupal

10+ years of Drupal

Submitted by Simon Lindsay on

Drats, I missed my drupal.org 10th birthday!

http://drupal.org/user/143

I was actually using Drupal before drupal.org existed, and my http://dirtbike.ws website - currently re-branding as http://mydirtbike.com - would be amongst the longest running Drupal based sites there is.

I've seen Drupal go through fantastic growth through the years, and the future looks brighter every day, with new Drupal companies appearing, new conferences, camps and meet-ups, the Drupal ecosystem looks to be very healthy.

Keep up the good work Dries & co.

Drupal

New CCK module to accept signatures on *Pad devices

Submitted by Simon Lindsay on

With all the new *Pad style devices coming out now, I wanted to be able to get signoff by customers on the spot using a signature for quotes, jobs etc in our drupal based ERP system.

This module facilitates that by allowing creation of a CCK field which accepts input via mouse, finger, stylus or anything that can draw on the screen.

You can grab the cck module here:

http://drupal.org/project/signhere

or try it out for yourself here:

http://singularo.com/node/add/sign-here

Drupal
CCK
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