An introduction to Drupal 8 development tools

Posted on 7 July 2015 in Web development • Tagged with Drupal 8, Drupal

This Drupal 8 article is obsolete.

The use of third party components in Drupal 8 has inspired two new tools for Drupal 8 developers: the Drupal Console and the Drupal Web Profiler. Based on the Symfony Console component, the Drupal Console is a scaffolding generator which allows developers to reduce development time by automating the generation of boilerplate code. The Drupal Web Profiler is a port of the Symfony 2 Web Profiler Bundle as a Drupal 8 module providing a toolbar with convenient access to performance and profile information.


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Symfony 2 PDF service using LaTeX

Posted on 19 April 2015 in Web development • Tagged with Symfony 2, LaTeX

This Symfony 2 article is obsolete.

Portable Document Format (PDF) has become a universally accepted format for sharing documentation. As a result, the dynamic generation of PDF documents is an expected feature of many web applications. After reviewing a number of libraries for generating PDF documents it was decided to write a service wrapping the LaTeX typesetting system . LaTeX is ideally suited to the production of scientific and technical documentation.


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Optimising page speed: a case study

Posted on 27 March 2015 in Web development • Tagged with Client side, Pelican

As an exercise in optimising page speed the Pelican theme pelican-bootstrap3 by Daan Debie was customised according to the specific requirements of seth.fischer.nz. The customisations reduced the total number of requests on the index page by 66% and the page size was reduced by 62%.


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A Drupal 8 workflow using the Git subtree merge strategy

Posted on 23 January 2015 in Web development • Tagged with Drupal 8, Drupal, Git

This Drupal 8 article is obsolete.

Often there are components of a Drupal website that should not be located in the document root such as configuration files. It is convenient to keep these files in version control but outside of the Drupal root. By utilising Git subtrees, a Drupal installation root may be below the root of the main repository, and upstream changes to Drupal core conveniently merged with git read-tree.


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Getting started with Drupal 8

Posted on 28 November 2014 in Web development • Tagged with Drupal 8, Drupal

This Drupal 8 article is obsolete.

Now that Drupal 8 is in beta phase it is a great time for site developers to start exploring the API. This article serves as an introduction to installing and configuring Drupal 8 using Git and Drush.


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