Have you ever wondered "What is the difference between cache keys and cache tags?" One of our Drupalize.Me members wrote in asking about it, and the answer provides insight into how Drupal's Cache API works.
joe Fri, 12/06/2024 - 11:16Drupal Commerce is an open source eCommerce platform that natively extends Drupal to sell any type of product to anyone in the world. This includes sales of products that are customized at the point of sale, like an engraved piece of jewelry or an event registration. It also includes sales to B2B customers and others who require a configure, price, quote (CPQ) workflow to review and authorize a purchase.
This post explains the feature set at a high level with an example configuration.
Supporting this feature set is Drupal's data architecture, which lets the Commerce modules define new data types for entities like products, orders, order items, and more. These are defined with sets of base fields, and they can be extended further with custom fields as needed. (Read more about this subject at Drupalize.Me.)
For example, one of our merchants sells scuba equipment. While product variations include price and SKU base fields by default, this merchant added custom fields for the specifications of different models. This structured product information is then rendered to PDPs, displayed in product comparison charts, and exposed as facets in search interfaces to help customers find the right product.
When you add custom fields to an entity, you don't just get to determine where and how they are displayed but also the form interface(s) used to input field data. You can control the number of values a field supports and the type of form element used to set those values (e.g., checkboxes, select list, free tagging textfield, etc.). For data types that support multiple form modes, like order items, you can also determine the context in which a particular field will be editable by a user.
Read more
Creating a website for a manufacturing company requires thoughtful planning and customization of functionality to meet the needs of different user groups. Drupal, as a flexible CMS, offers tools to quickly and efficiently build web pages tailored to market requirements. In this article, we’ll discuss step-by-step how to create a modern and functional website for a manufacturing company using Drupal and its Droopler distribution.
We’ve got an important scheduling update for all our MidCamp 2025 organizers! Starting in December 2024, our bi-weekly planning meetings will be moving from Mondays to Wednesdays.
We’re shifting to Wednesdays to better accommodate everyone’s schedules and keep our planning momentum strong. These meetings are crucial for getting everything in place for MidCamp 2025, and we want as many voices as possible in the conversation.
We appreciate everyone’s flexibility and can’t wait to keep the MidCamp 2025 planning energy high! If you have any questions or can’t make the new time, reach out in Slack or email us. We’re here to make sure you’re involved!
All planning details will continue to be shared in our MidCamp Slack, so keep an eye on the #midcamp-organizers channel for updates and links. Not yet in Slack? Join the MidCamp Slack here!
If you have some data in a Drupal site, say a list of contact form submissions, or a list of content, you might want to provide a way for visitors to download that list as a CSV or Excel file: there's a module for that.
This module has its roots firmly in the Drupal 6 glory days where basically every list in Drupal was a view. Had some blog posts: view; list of comments: view; images needing copyright review: view.
That made a simple extension module that could export that content to CSV or Excel really appealing, and the Views Bonus Pack module provided this functionality however, there were a number of issues. Top of our list of problems with it was that it tried to do the entire export in one big go, if you had a lot of data, then you were out of luck, you simply couldn't export it all. You'd have to do it page by page or something like that.
In our old office, we dreamed up a way to have Drupal's batch API iterate over the result pages and collect them all up into a single file for download.
Additionally, at the time we had a client who wanted to export data that was coming in pretty rapidly: they were getting submissions at the rate of several a second and needed to be able to accurately export all the submissions in one go, not getting any duplicates, etc.
We really wanted to be able to get this working nicely with the SQL backend for Views and found a way in MySQL to query and populate a table with the resultset in a single transaction. In this way, we would make an initial point-in-time copy of the data required to render the view, and then we could take our time to process through that data. As long as MySQL could query and write the data fast enough we could then use Drupal's Batch API to loop through the data at our leisure.
This approach worked nicely but needed to fork the Views Bonus module and so the Views Data Export module was born. In the years that followed: the module gained popularity, a Drupal 7 port, and something like 75,000 active sites using it.
ComputerMinds had never put in place any sort of proper amount of time to do maintenance for Views Data Export and so after many years and unattended bug reports, Drupal 8 rolled around and we didn't invest time in doing a Drupal 8 port either.
However, Drupal has a great community and someone else stepped up and offered to port and maintain Views Data Export.
However, the bugs and feature requests continued to pile up, and the port was more of a re-imagining than a direct port of the code. This was completely understandable since the underlying systems of Drupal and Views had massively changed in those years. And basically, we weren't involved in explaining what the Drupal 7 version was doing and why.
The module entered a period of very minimal maintenance and essentially only got further updates for critical bug fixes and new Drupal core versions.
Let me be clear that this is no slight against anyone who has done brilliant work on the Drupal 8, 9 or 10 versions of Views Data Export, but proper amounts of time and resources were never put into the module...until now.
Recently we've changed some internal priorities around so that we can spend more time giving back to the Drupal community, and this coincided with someone asking me to be a co-maintainer for Views Data Export so that they could add Drupal 11 support.
I thought about it a lot and waited for the other maintainers to weigh in, but ultimately decided that I wanted to get back involved in the maintainership of Views Data Export and thus declined the generous offer of help. I did then work to get a Drupal 11 version out.
I aim to maintain Views Data Export.
I'm working on exactly how this works, but it starts by regularly spending time working on the project.
Now...the project pages and issue tracker on Drupal.org are in a bit of a dire state:
The code...well I've not read every line of code in the latest version of Views Data Export, I'm going to be doing that today to break up some of the issue queue management I'm going to be doing.
According to the stats on Drupal.org there are still around 41,000 active Drupal 7 installs, and while those will be community EOLd in a month, I don't want to prematurely cut them off, so while I plan to close almost all of the Drupal 7 issues that I find, I won't mark the module unsupported as such. But that will happen in January 2025 anyway, when Drupal.org does that automatically.
I intend to write an article like this one every 2 weeks detailing what has been done and what the plans for the future are. Mostly to keep me honest and focused! It's easy when starting on a bit of a big project like this to get lost and despondent about the size of the problem, so by trying to write about it, I'm hoping that I'll be able to look back and see progress even if won't always feel like any progress has been made!
Hey nonprofit Drupal users, do you want a free ticket to DrupalCon Atlanta? Submit to be a breakout discussion leader at the Nonprofit Summit!
The DA is interested in supporting community-driven content that is specifically relevant to nonprofit organization staff and related agencies at DrupalCon North America in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Nonprofit Summit on March 24, 2025.
We are looking for volunteers who would be interested in giving back to the community by contributing some subject matter expertise via a day of informal breakout sessions or other group activities. We are open to ideas!
Do you have some Drupal expertise or a recent experience with a Drupal project that you would like to share with others? Is there something about Drupal that you think is really cool that you would love to share with the nonprofit Drupal community?
You will not be required to make slides! You don’t need to have lots of (or any) speaking experience! All you need is a willingness to facilitate a discussion group or engaging activity around a particular topic, and some expertise or enthusiasm for that topic that you wish to share.
Please fill out this form by January 31st. https://forms.gle/HBv1Za55MXr2sriPA
Discussion leaders will be selected by the Nonprofit Summit Planning Committee and will be notified by the middle of February.
Anonymous (not verified)
Fri, 12/06/2024 - 07:00
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One of our clients is a yacht club that has their own moorage, which they lease out to members. With several hundred slips, their insurance requires them to maintain proof of insurance, up-to-date vessel registrations, and regular electrical inspections for all boats moored at their facility.
In Washington all vessel registrations renew in June, but insurance and inspections can expire any time of year. The office needs to keep copies of these documents on file.
Losing access to your Drupal admin account can be a stressful experience. Your admin password is the key to maintaining and managing your website and being locked out can halt your ability to make critical updates or manage content. Fortunately, there are several methods to regain access, whether you're using Drupal 7 or the latest version of the system. This guide will walk you through the possible options to reset your password and return to your web page.