We've had lots of requests for changing the design of subsites in LGD. Here's how I'd do it.

This year’s IWD’s theme is #EmbraceEquity. This should remind everyone everywhere about the importance of creating a genuinely inclusive society, challenging gender stereotypes, and calling out biases. 

In the ImageX team, we are wholeheartedly aligned with these values and committed to fostering a truly equitable workplace. Even though tech is seen as a male-dominated industry, the Women of ImageX are key drivers behind the success of our organization. In celebration of this year’s day, we’re showcasing some of our team who are leaders in their areas; Mahya Golabi [design], Carol Pettirossi [development], Alla Petrovska [operations], and Kylie Aldridge-Ogden [delivery].  These four women are just a small snapshot of the awesome talent we are fortunate to work alongside everyday at ImageX, with each and every one of our women leading the way in their roles within a male dominated industry. 

Getting acquainted: roles and backgrounds

To start, the team shared their roles and how they ended up where they are today:

Carol, Software Architect: “I’m a female Drupal Architect that has been working in the Tech industry for 14 years. I started creating websites back in the day of blogs.

I studied programming in high school which gave me the opportunity to start my tech career before getting a university degree. I love working with sites and platforms, building the best experience for users so they can find information and perform tasks digitally whenever possible.”

Alla, HR & Operations Manager (Ukraine): “ I’ve been with the organization for 6 years already and being an explorer in my soul with a love to connect the right people with each other and make things work, I find ImageX the perfect match for me. It is a place with a multicultural team distributed over the globe where diversity is well represented."

Talking about the meaning of IWD

We then asked the team why International Women's Day is important to them.

Mahya: “As an immigrant, I believe, recognizing and celebrating the contributions of immigrant women to society can help promote inclusion and reduce stereotypes and prejudices. It can also provide a platform for immigrant women to share their experiences and advocate for their rights.

I think Women's Day serves as a reminder that women, regardless of their background, deserve equal rights and opportunities.”

The importance of diversity in the workplace

We were curious to know what the group thinks about diversity in the workplace, especially as it’s one of the intrinsic values of our international team.

Carol: “Women, as well as other underrepresented groups, bring diverse skill sets, viewpoints, and experiences to the workplace. Different cultures and experiences are proven to help businesses function better and also improve their processes. Each employee has their individual strengths and potential. Valuing the differences of others is what ultimately brings us all together and can be the secret to a successful, thriving workplace and a fair work culture.”

Mahya: “As a creative person, in my view, diversity brings in creativity and innovation: When people from different backgrounds and with different experiences work together, they bring different perspectives and ideas to the table. This can lead to more creative and innovative solutions to problems.”

Sharing their role models

Many women have a role model who inspires and drives them toward greatness. So who are the role models for the women of ImageX? 

Kylie: “From a professional standpoint, Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Meta is one role model. I was introduced to her through her book, Lean In, which was recommended to me by a former male boss. Sheryl has a belief that echoes mine — if you’re going to have a family, make sure there is equity in the household. Another role model of mine is Heather Reisman, the CEO of Indigo. She was the first major female CEO in Canada and as an avid reader, I always kept an eye on her work. From a personal standpoint, my role model is my mother. I’ve always had a working mother and as a daughter, that is an amazing thing to witness.”

Mahya: “My mother is a strong entrepreneur who started as a teacher and now owns and directs three schools. She has shown me how to be an independent, strong woman when you are confident, resilient, and self-sufficient.”

Carol: “It would also be my mom. She is a symbol of resilience to me. She had a difficult upbringing and had to stop studying early. However, she overcame the difficulties and after I was born she decided to restart studying and become a nurse. She does night shifts at the hospital but she always enjoyed her job and taught me how important it is to love what you do.”

Alla: “My role model is all Ukrainian women: on the front line of the battlefield, or cultural, political, and social front lines — they all are fighting now for democracy, equity, freedom, and protection of human rights.”

Advice to women at the beginning of their career

It can be challenging to start a path in a new professional field, especially as a woman. How can women grow professionally and fight gender stereotypes in the workplace? 

Alla: “Listen to yourself and seek a role model or mentor. If you fail, learn from it - it is your opportunity to grow, don’t skip reflecting on it, as most likely you’ll fail over the same thing again in the future; have a plan…and a back-up plan.”

Kylie: “Never feel guilty to ask for what you need. While the pay gap is narrowing, more often than not, women who don’t get pay rises that mirror their male peers because they don’t ask for it. Make sure you advocate for yourself. Also, don’t internalize the labels and tropes that women are given in the workplace. For instance, “women are bossy while men are bold” or “women are emotional, men are direct”. We don’t need those, they’re not for us.”

Empowering other women in the workplace

Women can empower other women, lift them up, and help them grow. Together, they can be an invincible force. The women of ImageX have shared some useful ways they look toto empower other women in the workplace: 

Carol: “Providing mentorship and training to develop junior women into senior and leadership roles. Making sure that they are heard and have a seat at the table.  Making sure that there is an open communication mechanism for women to report on situations that they feel undervalued or not heard.”

Alla: “Be yourself, accept and respect others individuality; speak openly (everyone has their own strong and weak sides — be open about them); treat everyone fairly; be approachable, offer help and be ready to back up; don’t be afraid of speaking about the failures; celebrate wins together!”

Dinner with three inspirational women

Asking everyone to choose three inspirational women, dead or alive, that they would have dinner with was one of our favourite talking points. 

Kylie: “I couldn’t narrow it down to 3 so I have four:

1. Mary Wollstonecraft — She was the leader of the suffrage movement in England. She was fighting to make women people under the law. She was one of the pioneers that laid the groundwork for where we are today;

2 & 3. Gloria Steinem & Ruth Bader Ginsberg — Two feminist icons who have done more for gender equity and advocacy than anyone else. We wouldn’t have half the rights we have now without these two women. They worked together and were longtime allies, you can't have one without the other.

4. Michelle Obama — Who wouldn't want to have lunch with her? She built herself a platform and never took it for granted. She comes across as so humble and down to earth, and yet has this huge and beautiful platform that she uses for positive change.”

Carol: “1. Gloria Maria: She was a black Brazilian journalist that always talked about women being empowered. She represented the black community and had racism and feminism in her agenda. She also traveled around the world reporting different cultures. Can you imagine how wonderful a chat would be with her?

2. Susie Wolff: She is the Director of Formula 1 Academy and a former racing driver. She is now responsible for nurturing female talents in the sport. In such a male dominant field, it would be great to have dinner with her and learn how she deals with the challenges on a daily basis. 

3. Helena Rizzo: She is one of the best chefs in the world and the only Brazilian female chef leading a restaurant awarded with a Michelin star. Gastronomy is another field dominated by men and she excels in it. She is also involved in many charity and feminist initiatives.”

How organizations can #EmbraceEquity

The ultimate question that wrapped up our conversation was related to the IWD 2023’s #EmbraceEquity campaign theme. How do the team feel that organizations can create a culture which supports equity? 

Kylie:  “I read a 2022 study from PwC on Global Workforce Hopes and Fears. The largest workplace cultural contribution to equity that can be done is for a workplace to offer flexibility of schedule. One of the things that ImageX has done well is not only offer that but stand by it — giving their employees a flexible schedule and keep pushing equity forward. At ImageX, we do it without gender labels or bias, so that nobody is penalized.”

Mahya: "In my opinion it should be two areas:

1. Promoting transparency 

2. Identify biases in the organization and address them"

Alla: “Organizations can create a culture of equity by embracing it from the top — ensuring equal support and opportunities during the recruitment process; giving equal access to development opportunities upon employment; nurturing a strong sense of belonging to the workplace where differences are celebrated.”

Carol: “Providing an open communication culture where women in any position can admit to past failures and vulnerabilities without being judged. This culture paves the way for other women to have confidence that women in leadership are not super powerful. It helps everyone to understand that you can be yourself, you can fail, you can have feelings. An empowered woman doesn’t mean a Flawless and Perfect woman.”

And That’s a Wrap!

We are very grateful to Kylie, Mahya, Alla, and Carol for this wonderful conversation. Hopefully, their insights and answers resonate and shed light on gender equity, diversity, and the need to empower talented women in male dominated industries.

Wishing everyone a Happy International Women's Day! 

Working in the front end of Drupal can be difficult and, at times, confusing. Template files, stylesheets, scripts, assets, and business logic are often scattered throughout big code bases. On top of that, Drupal requires you to know about several drupalisms, like attaching libraries to put CSS and JS on a page. For front-end developers to succeed in a system like this, they need to understand many of Drupal's internals and its render pipeline.

It was high time we said goodbye to Bartik. Having been Drupal’s default front-end theme for over a decade (from Drupal 7 to 9.4,) Bartik was quite the veteran. And although it served users well for many years, the theme didn’t get any major updates after 2011. Its age began to show: aside from an increasingly dated look, Bartik didn’t evolve to work well with new functionality such as Layout Builder.

Bartik got its figurative cannon salute in 2022. It was retired and replaced with Olivero: a modern and accessible theme for the future. 

The idea for Olivero was conceived in a hotel lobby at DrupalCon Seattle, 2019. It grew into the Drupal 9 theme initiative, with considerable support from Dries and key contributors. Over several years, the Olivero Team worked to build a cutting-edge theme based on five design principles:

• Simple: a clutter-free environment that’s easy to navigate and use
• Modern: support for the latest browser features and interaction modes
• Flexible: gives multiple options to Drupal front-end developers
• Focused: includes eye-catching, meaningful design elements
• Accessible: WCAG Level AA compliant from the ground up

Olivero was initially introduced as an experiment in Drupal 9.1. It’s now the default front-end theme in Drupal 9 and Drupal 10. (Bartik is deprecated in Drupal 9.5 and unavailable in Drupal 10.)

[Quote]

"It looks amazing, and it’s also by far the most accessible theme that we’ve ever shipped in the history of Drupal."

– Dries Buytaert, DrupalCon Portland 2022’s Driesnote

Drupal 10’s default theme is clean, modern, and accessible. 

Rachel Olivero’s Legacy of Championing Accessibility 

The Olivero theme was named in memory of Rachel Olivero, who passed away in 2019. Rachel was an accessibility advocate and a valued member of the Drupal community. As a person who was blind, transgender, and a lesbian, Rachel had a deep understanding of the importance of inclusivity and a passion for making technology better for everyone. 

"We chose the name Olivero not just because we have made accessibility a top priority, but also because we aspire to develop this new theme in our community in a manner that is consistent with the qualities that Rachel Olivero embodied, including patience, generosity, and inclusivity."

– The Olivero Team

A Rundown of the Olivero Theme’s Best Features

Modern Colour Palette 

Olivero uses a vivid blue as its base colour for a bright, professional look that gives a subtle nod to Drupal’s branding. Neutral grays provide visual balance. The palette provides both dark and light shades, as well as secondary colours, to enable an accessible, high-contrast design. 

A clean, accessible colour palette gives Drupal 10’s default theme a modern look and feel. 

Simple Forms and Buttons

Content editors will be delighted with the simple elegance of text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, and submit buttons in Drupal 10’s default theme. 

Web accessibility is clearly at the forefront of the design. Forms are simple for users to fill out thanks to their uniform look and clear labels. Buttons are high-contrast and have easily-perceivable focus modes that work well for keyboard users. 

Forms are clear and clutter-free in Olivero. 

Accessible Typography

Olivero makes content more readable and scannable thanks to a base font-size of 18px for body copy. Other text elements are scaled accordingly and typography is adjusted for mobile devices. The Olivero team gave particular focus to maintaining consistency throughout line-height and spacing. 

Olivero also perfectly displays right-to-left languages including Urdu, Arabic, and Hebrew. This is critical for supporting Drupal’s multilingual capabilities. 

Typography is scaled to provide a responsive, accessible, and consistent experience for users. 

Intuitive Headers and Menus

The header in Olivero can collapse into a hamburger menu as the user scrolls down the page. This means users have easy access to the navigation links regardless of where they are on the page. Olivero also supports secondary dropdown menus in Drupal – something that wasn’t possible with Bartik.

There are multiple versions of the header to choose from. All of them are designed to seamlessly incorporate any type of logo. 

An animated, sticky hamburger menu makes navigation easier for users. 

Eye-Catching Messages 

Olivero uses brightly coloured icons to convey the purpose of different types of messages. Error, alert, and success messages are displayed in boxes with plenty of padding to ensure they’re noticeable and easily readable. 

Olivero has an eye-catching design for messages.

Useful Sidebar 

Olivero features a sidebar that floats next to the primary content. This is a great place to display things like related content and social buttons. 

Improvements for Developers

Taking a lead from Claro, the new default admin UI, Olivero has implemented PostCSS to reduce maintenance overhead. It uses CSS Grid to help developers build complex layouts more easily. And for added flexibility, Olivero uses CSS custom properties to enable front-end developers to customize the theme on a block-by-block basis.

Planning to migrate to Drupal 10?

We are so interested in who you are. Are you a designer? We can suppose it as you are interested in this topic. However, it can be assumed that you are not. Basically, you may not even be related to design, and the last time you drew was in school. Did we guess? Whoever you are, we've written this blog for you!

Migrating at scale is daunting, but the right tools can make it easier. In this blog we draw on our experience from migrating 50 sites in one go.
 

Fetching Drupal entities and fields in custom modules is a critical part of building complex Drupal applications that require custom functionality. By understanding how to access and manipulate entities and fields programmatically, developers can create powerful and flexible modules that can handle a wide range of data-driven tasks. 

In this article, we will share tips and easy methods on fetching reference entity fields using entity API that will help you simplify your custom module development process.

Getting Back to Basics

What are Entities?

Entities are the most core part of Drupal and it is important to understand what they are and how they work. They are objects that represent anything from users and nodes to taxonomy terms. Each entity has their own properties and can be customized or extended to fit the needs of a website.

What are Fields?

Fields make it easy to manage complex content structures. They are used to collect and display a variety of data like text, images, date and more which can be associated with an entity. For example, a content node can have multiple fields like a title, summary, body, image etc.

What are Nodes?

A node is a basic unit of content in Drupal. It can be a blog post, a product, a news article or an event. Each node has its own properties and can be organized into different types (or content types). A node can be used to create, edit, delete or categorize content.

Drupal Entity Reference Fields

Entity reference fields provide relationships between entities in Drupal. It stores references to another entity (a node, user, taxonomy, etc.). An example of a relationship would be:

• A taxonomy term associated with a content type or user account.
• A parent content that references a child content element.

It is commonly used in views and adding view relationships makes it quite easy to use reference fields. But the problem arises when fetching values of the reference fields in your custom module and custom theme.

The common method used to get a referenced entity is very long, so I will take you through a shorter solution.

For example, let's say we have a node object with a reference taxonomy field named field_specbee_term.

How it is usually done:

Method 1:

Here, $referenced_entity is the referenced entity object.

Now alternatively, instead of using the above tedious method 1, here is an easier way of doing it.

Method 2:

However, if you want to fetch all the values from the multivalue field, Method 2 will not work.

For loading the entire list of reference entities as objects will use the below method which is a type of array.

This method can be used for image reference as well. 

Let’s see an example of how we can get an image URL from a node with a specific image style.

Now let’s understand how to retrieve any field values and which method is preferred for different scenarios.

1. value :

This will return the actual value of the field but it will not work for any referenced field. 

2. getValue() :

When you need to get values of a field, whether it is a single-value or multi-value field, you can use this method. It will return an array of field values. 

3. getString() :

This method will return the value of a single-value field, and if it is a multi-valued field it will return comma-separated values.

Note: Sometimes when using getString(), if there is no value present, it will throw an error. This can be tackled by using the hasvalue() function before using the getString() function.

Final Thoughts

Fetching Drupal reference entities is an essential skill for Drupal developers. With the Entity API, you can easily load and manipulate entities and their fields, making your custom module development process more efficient and streamlined. However, if you need expert assistance with Drupal development, our team of experienced developers is here to help. Contact us today to learn more about our Drupal development services and how we can help you build powerful Drupal websites and applications that meet your unique needs.

Author: Jigish Chauhan

Meet Jigish Chauhan, Technical Architect, who’s fond of photography. He dreams of traveling to the playground of Europe, Switzerland, and loves to embrace the nature around him.

Leave us a Comment

Recent Blogs

How to Efficiently Fetch Drupal Reference Entities in Custom Modules

Finding Balance - Santhosh Kumar's Parallel Worlds

Migrate to Drupal 9 (or 10) Without Losing Your Hard-Earned SEO Ranking

Featured Case Studies

Upgrading the web presence of IEEE Information Theory Society, the most trusted voice for advanced technology

Explore

A Drupal powered multi-site, multi-lingual platform to enable a unified user experience at SEMI

Explore

Great Southern Homes, one of the fastest growing home builders in the US, sees greater results with Drupal

Explore

This one is entirely on us, we wrote the custom code, which makes us responsible for maintaining it.

The upgrade status module gives us a nice report of each custom project and what changes it thinks are required to bring the code up to date to work with Drupal 10.

We really don't have a lot of custom module code, and the code that we do have is very simple, standard Drupal 8/9/10 stuff, so there are a couple of calls to taxonomy_term_load_multiple_by_name to remove, and an accessCheck to add to an entity query, but other than that our custom module code looked fine.

Our custom theme however, is a different story: we have some usages of jQuery once to remove, and we have a lot of custom Twig PHP classes that are extending deprecated classes. Nothing show-stopping, but a few things to do worth covering in more detail.

jQuery once

The jQuery once plugin has gone from core in Drupal 10, so we need to upgrade our javascript that is using it to use the vanilla javascript alternative that ships in Drupal 9: the once plugin. This is simple enough, we can rewrite code like this:

Into code like this:

And then we need to tweak the definition of our library in the corresponding .libraries.yml file to remove the dependency on core/jquery.once and add one on core/once.

Twig changes

As mentioned previously the site was originally built in Drupal 8, which meant using Twig version 1, so there are plenty of deprecations to take care of to get the codebase ready for Drupal 10.

This is largely because we have a slightly strange setup in that we're using an early version of Emulsify to build our theme. Most importantly for this article it means that our theme contains quite a few twig functions like this:

This can trivially become (changing the base class that is extended):

The codebase has around 20 usages of deprecated Twig classes, however the task looks simple enough and there's nothing particularly tricky to do here, simply tweak the classes used per the deprecation messages in the older classes. There are automated tools that'll make these changes for you, but to be honest, there aren't that many changes to make and I'm keen to get eyes on the codebase more generally and get a feel for what we have in it!

All done

So that's it for Custom code and theme. We had actually been pretty good at:

• Not writing custom code unless we had to.
• If we did write custom code, not using already deprecated code.
• Going back periodically and remediating new deprecations.

Which then makes these changes pretty straightforward. 

Aside: I'll just note that we have a lot jQuery style JavaScript in our codebase....mostly because we've been around for a while and learned JavaScript with jQuery, so it's just too easy for us to still write with jQuery everywhere. However, we know that we need to get to a place where we don't need jQuery and we'll get there, but we'll need to do some internal training on that and then go back through our code and re-write it without jQuery. Maybe I'll write an article about that too one day!

Migrating at scale isn't for the faint of heart. Senior developer Erik Erskine reveals some neat tips that will ensure that your next migration is easier than you expect.