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September 14, 2015

Building a Views Style Plugin in Drupal 8

Drupal 8 is just around the corner, and it has reached an important milestone: beta-to-beta updates will be provided for each beta release going forward. That gives me some confidence that no major re-works are to be expected if I start building with Drupal 8. That said, we are still facing a sizable documentation gap regarding the changes in the API. My first encounter with this problem was when I was building a custom style plugin for Views.

August 19, 2015

Building a Configuration Form for a Custom Panels Plugin

In my previous post, we built a custom Panels plugin that shows a node status icon to indicate whether the node is published or unpublished. This time around, we will enhance that plugin by introducing a configuration form. For the sake of demonstration, we will add a setting that lets the user choose when they want the show the status icon: only when the node is unpublished, or always.

July 30, 2015

Showing a Node Status Icon Using a Custom Panels Plugin

We often use Panels to build node page layouts, because it enables a vast range of options to show content in various sections of the page. In addition, you can develop a custom plugin for Panels, which brings ultimate flexibility. I took that route when I needed to display an icon next to the node’s title to indicate whether it is published or not.

May 26, 2015

Providing Default Values for Views’ Contextual Filters

When I need to filter a view based on some elaborate condition, I often find myself using Drupal Views' contextual filters. Normally this kind of filter is supposed to pull the filter value from the URL, but it also lets you select other methods of finding a value if it’s not in the URL. For instance, if the filter is for the author, you can configure the view to use the current user’s ID. Even though this is very flexible, you may occasionally need filtering that cannot be set up with the available options.

February 6, 2015

Three Options to Rename Drupal Paths

Built-in Drupal pages and pages created by contrib modules have static paths that are hard-coded. An example of this would be /user where you can log in, or /node, which shows a list of recent nodes. Often times, we care about what the URL in the browser’s address bar looks like, and wish to change these. This post is a summary of three options to achieve this.