Wizzlern blog

Voor iedere Drupal 8 cursist draagt Wizzlern €100 bij aan Drupal Accelerate. Drupal Accelerate is een initiatief van de Drupal Association om ontwikkelaars financieel in de gelegenheid te stellen om aan Drupal 8 te werken.

This Drupal 8 Frontend cheat sheet contains frequently used Twig code examples, .info.yml file syntax, all .libraries.yml file options and a list of core libraries. It does not intent to be complete, but is made to help Drupal 8 front-enders as quick reference when working on their Drupal 8 themes.

Search API and Solr out of the box do a great job. But for Dutch content it takes some tuning to get things right. Since my early days in Drupal I contribute to it's translation. That is probably why the linguistic aspect of Solr attracts me. While working on an intranet project, I started experimenting with Solr configuration for Dutch content. I discovered that stemming needs some extra attention to get good results.

Stemming

Stemming is the proces of reducing words to their stem. This causes searches for 'artikel', 'artikelen' or 'artikeltje' (article, articles, small article) to yield the same results. Each words is reduced to its stem, in this case: 'artikel'. Stemming should be added to both the index and the query.

Several stemmers are available, but only few support non-English languages: only Snowball and Hunspell. Search API Solr module uses Snowball in its default Solr configuration.
<filter class="solr.SnowballPorterFilterFactory" language="Dutch" protected="protwords_nl.txt"></filter>

My guess is that most people have found this stemmer and configure it with language "Dutch". This is the result when using solr.SnowballPorterFilterFactory" with language "Dutch":​

Today I got my feed wet with Drupal 8 Configuration Management. For those who are new to this excellent feature in Drupal 8, you should read the documentation at drupal.org (Managing configuration in Drupal 8) or watch this DrupalCon Amsterdam video. This article assumes you are familiar with Drush and Drush aliases.

I worked with a very basic workflow using a development site and an acceptance site. Both sites are under revision control, where the complete webroot (core + modules, but not settings.php) is placed in git. For gitignore I used a copy of the example.gitignore which you'll find in Drupal's root directory.

I used Drush 7 to import and export the configuration. 'Export' is to transfer a site's configuration from Drupal to file and 'Import' is to transfer in reversed direction. Using drush @dev config-export you export the configuration from the development site to the sites/default/config_*/staging directory. The staging directory now holds many *.yml files that each contain the configuration of an individual section. I've chosen to use git to transfer these files to the acceptance site. At the acceptance site drush @acc config-import is used to transfer the configuration from the file system to the acceptance site.

Make sure that the acceptance site is a copy of the development site. For example using drush @dev archive-dump you can make a copy of both the files and database. With this you can create a copy of the site using drush archive-restore.

I made these changes to the .gitignore file to allow the staging directory to be added to git:

This Drupal 8 Entity cheat sheet contains frequently uses code examples, methods, classes and interfaces. It does not intent to be complete, but is made to give Drupal 8 developers a starting point in working with Entities and Entity Queries.

When I'm totally burried in Drupal 8 code and terminology, I like to take a step back to get an overview. While studying the routing system and controllers I wanted to have an overview of the total page call process. I did some investigation and made this diagram:

Twig is Drupal's best theme engine! Tomorrow I will speak at the DrupalJam about 'Twig in Drupal 8'. I will explain the pros and cons of Twig for Drupal themers, show examples of new Twig templates, explain a summary of the Twig syntax and of course do a small demo of working with Twig templates. You'll find my slides here.