The past 10 years and the future

The past 10 years and the future

Sunday, Jan 12, 2020
The end of the year is a great time for evaluation and retrospection; and the end of the decade is the same. It often seems that time passes slowly and changes pass quickly but it is probably the opposite. Personally, I have seen a lot of changes over the past 10 years both personally and within work and this post is an effort to evaluate and understand them. Marriage and Children How could I start without mentioning that within the past 10 years I have gotten married and had 2 children. ...

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Experiments in Reducing Global Page Loads on Hugo and Drupal 7 with Cloudflare

Experiments in Reducing Global Page Loads on Hugo and Drupal 7 with Cloudflare

Wednesday, May 8, 2019
I am very keen on pushing the limits of performance, especially as a way of teaching myself ways to be able to improve application performance (albeit this is a static HTML page load with some JavaScript). My aim was to be able to load pages from https://www.willhallonline.co.uk and https://www.motnearme.co.uk in less that a second (on a reasonable connection), globally. Background I rebuilt this site between 1 year and 4 months ago using Hugo. ...

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Automatically creating patches for Drupal Modules using CI

Automatically creating patches for Drupal Modules using CI

Wednesday, Apr 3, 2019
Anyone who has maintained open-source software has probably felt the burnout or challenge of maintaining software around their day job. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use CI to get some merge/pull requests against your projects when the coding standards that you are following are updated? If the answer is yes then look no further. Drupal Coding Standard Patch Generation phpcs-drupal: image: willhallonline/drupal-phpcs:alpine allow_failure: yes script: - phpcs ./ phpcbf-drupal: image: willhallonline/drupal-phpcs:alpine allow_failure: yes script: - set +e - phpcbf . ...

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What I Learnt Building and Selling My First Application

What I Learnt Building and Selling My First Application

Tuesday, Feb 13, 2018
There is a lot of discussion around the amount of money that is inside the tech industry. Although there is money to be made it is not without the trials and tribulations of selling software. This is my story of selling my first application and some of the lessons learnt. Although this was not my first built application, it was the first application that I built without request from clients. ...

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Please never abandon this module

Please never abandon this module

Thursday, Dec 24, 2015
At Will Hall Online we always try to commit some time to developing open source projects. As I am sure that you are aware, we have been using Drupal since 2008 and absolutely love both the software and the community, however, much of our time is already committed and we do more in deed than in code to contribute to the community (providing assistance, presentations and helping the local Drupal group). ...

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Webform Node Title Select List

Webform Node Title Select List

Friday, Nov 27, 2015
A quick note this week on a potentially useful contrib module that’s got me out of a jam. I’ve been trying to find a way to populate a select box on a Drupal webform with a list of node titles. Basically what I wanted was something like an entity reference field for webforms. One approach to get round this is to use the entity form module, which basically allows you to use entity edit forms in the front end. ...

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Drupal 8: All Systems Go!

Drupal 8: All Systems Go!

Friday, Nov 20, 2015
After over four years of hard work, the Drupal community was proud to announce the release of the first stable version of Drupal 8 at over two hundred release parties around the world. It’s a really exciting time for everyone involved with the project, and followers of our blog will know how much we love the new features. We had a great time at the London release party last night (19th November 2015) meeting Drupal users old and new. ...

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Drupal Commerce and Changing the Price Components

Drupal Commerce and Changing the Price Components

Thursday, Nov 19, 2015
We all know that Drupal Commerce is really flexible. If you want variable pricing dependant upon location, csutomer type or basket size, no problem. However, some areas of Drupal Commerce do require not only relatively specialist knowledge, but also coding to give the required outcome. We recently had an interesting problem through Cambridge Digital Academy, wherein they were looking at displaying discounts at the checkout form. By default the order of display is: ...

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Auto-applying Patches with Drush Patch File

Auto-applying Patches with Drush Patch File

Friday, Nov 13, 2015
This week I’ve been playing about with a neat tool by Dave Reid, called Drush Patch File, for tracking and applying patches to contrib modules on Drupal projects. We’ve found ourselves patching a few modules recently on several projects, including the Drupal 7 backport of Navbar so that the drop-downs work better on desktop. The problem faced when patching contributed modules is that, if the module is updated but the patch isn’t included in the new release, then the module is effectively un-patched. ...

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Drupal 8: Great for users out of the box

Drupal 8: Great for users out of the box

Friday, Oct 30, 2015
We confidently believe that Drupal 8 is going to be great for users out of the box. There are a number of significant user experience and user interface elements that are in Drupal core that are going to make substantial improvements to new and existing users alongside Drupal 8 being even quicker out of the box. In this post I am going to focus on the user or content editor experience and focus on more developer focussed parts in a subsequent blog post. ...

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