Development

The international meeting of the Drupal community returned to Europe after many years and the first conference took place in Prague. Over 1200 attendees heard where Drupal is going next and discussed interesting facts about the platform.

It's been over a year since I converted several sites from legacy Drupal to Backdrop. Since then, I've implemented a number of sites with Backdrop for my clients as well. So it's time to take a look at the real-world experience with this content management system based on Drupal 7.

The fact Drupal 8 ends this November has been generally known for some time now. I have upgraded some of my projects in time but some of them I have left to the last minute. The reason is quite plain. I assumed the upgrading process will be smoother if I do it later. But was it a right assumption?

I have come to a conclusion that this is a better solution for some older projects than a transition to WordPress or a migration to Drupal 8/9. And I have to say I was pleasantly surprised how smooth the transition to Backdrop is.

I like to use my smaller web projects as simple sandboxes where I can try out various new web technologies. Hugo, Tailwind and Swup aren’t anything new but still I am a Tailwind beginner. I have several observations about using the mentioned combination on a small website. Maybe they could come in handy.

Two years ago I was rebuilding a web running on the old Drupal 6 at that time. After I considered the strenuousness of a migration and a large quantity of content updates, I reached a decision that it is not necessary to use a content management system. So I decided to try out one of those popular static site generators. And I ended up with Hugo.

Regarding image optimization in WordPress there often are being mentioned various cloud services and their price and data saving are being compared. If you have a suitable hosting, use tools that are available right on the server for your image optimization. You don’t have to pay for any third-party services and there is no limit.

Recently I have been playing around with WordPress a lot and also have been trying to make the most of its basic options without the necessity to install third-part plug-ins. Of course, I use Google Analytics for traffic tracking, but I also needed a stupid incremental counter of post views. Using it I am then also able to create a list of the most read posts in a form of a widget.

A web should be running on a single one address. You pick an option with or without www and you redirect the opposite one to it. Similarly all webs nowadays should be redirected to a secure https variant. Do you still deal with this by editing .htaccess? You don’t have to.

Links that are added to menu items in Drupal, eventually to other fields controlling a link syntax, have in the default status only a few basic protocols allowed. Which is a problem if you want to add a menu containing e.g. Skype contacts to the foot. How can you alter allowed protocols?

Modern CSS has a lot of techniques which helps you achieve the results easier way than a few years before. Most of them are supported by majority of web browsers already. So why not start using them on you daily CSS practice?

I use Fail2ban to improve the security of my development server. From time to time it happens I set up some misconfiguration with new git users and got into problems when Fail2ban blocks my whole IP. Fortunately, there is an easy way to unban the IP. You don't need to wait for the Fail2ban period.

Gitea is my favorite open source Git service written in Go language. It is lightweight and installable as binary package for various platforms or as a Docker container.