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August 1, 2016

Slack Chat: Chatting with Visitors on a Drupal Site

Since we switched to Slack as the primary means of communication at work, Slack has grown to be my favorite chat application. Not only does it have a very pleasant interface, but it also offers great ways to integrate it with your application. As a matter of fact, their API is among the least restrictive ones in my experience. As a result of the joy of working the Slack API, Slack chat module was born to serve as a proof of concept for embedded Drupal-to-Slack chat functionality.

June 28, 2016

Extending Drupal's Node.js Integration

The Node.js integration Drupal module offers an API that allows developers to add real-time push notification functionality to their modules. Real-time communication could enable features like chat, pop-up notifications, or real-time content update. Chatroom is a great example of how a module can leverage Node.js.

February 9, 2016

Drupal 8 Cheatsheet for Developers

It has been a few months since Drupal 8 was released and sites built with it are starting to crop up. I myself have had the pleasure of working with it, and more Drupal 8 projects are certainly on the horizon. From a developer's perspective, this version is substantially different from the previous one, and we will need to learn a handful of new ways of doing things. To ease the process, I have put together this list of how-tos with tasks that I commonly encounter during development. I hope you will find it helpful.

November 23, 2015

Where is hook_page_alter in Drupal 8?

In Drupal 7, hook_page_alter was a convenient way to go when we needed to modify page elements that were added by other modules. Drupal 8 does away with this hook - hopefully for the better. To fill the void created by hook_page_alter’s dismissal, the following hooks have been introduced.

October 2, 2015

Offering Configuration Options for a Custom Views Plugin in Drupal 8 

In the previous post, we discussed how to write a style plugin for Views in Drupal 8. In this post, we will see how to allow the user to configure our style plugin.

We had previously created a class named CardsStyle for the plugin. In order to add configuration options, we will need to extend that class with two new method: buildOptionsForm and defineOptions as follows.