Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers

A few days ago Dries posted To PESOS or to POSSE. I have been working on trying to blog more. And so far I have been successful. I have read his plans to implement POSSE. My goal is to follow some of the same patterns. In fact, that's the purpose of the trial-run post!

DrupalCamp London is coming around the corner! If you have the chance to go, I highly recommend it. The organizers put on a top-notch event. Last year I had the privilege of giving my first keynote at the conference.

Five years ago I went to my second Drupal Camp and first Drupal Camp that I presented at. It has been four years, but I am finally going back to Florida Drupal Camp. I am pretty excited, as a lot has changed since then.

Drupal 8 has a robust routing system built on top of Symfony components. Robust can be taken in many ways. It's powerful and yet magical, making it confusing at times. There is a lot of great documentation on Drupal.org which covers the routing system, route parameters, and highlights of the underlying functionality. But the magic isn't fully covered. So, let's explore.

In client projects, I push for as much testing as possible. In Drupal 8 we finally have PHPUnit, which makes life grand and simpler. We use Kernel tests to run through some basic integration tests using a minimally bootstrapped database. However, we need Behat to cover behavior and functional testing on an existing site for speed and sanity reasons.

SOONISH highlights ten emerging technologies that can make our life awesome, or appear awesome and ruin everything. The book ranges from wrangling asteroids to mine like space cowboys all the way to being able to plug your brain into The Cloud™ so we can share emotional feels and stuff. 

This year I joined a coffee exchange for some members of the Drupal community. I had known there was one floating around, but finally got signed up. Over the past two years, I have gotten more and more into coffee - being a coffee snob about roasts and learning brewing techniques. Last week we were paired up. And sent out some roasts.

It seems like RSS is not quite as a buzz as it once was, years ago. There are reasons for that, but I partly believe it is because more services mask direct RSS feed subscriptions in larger aggregate tools. This change also makes it more interesting to get analytics about where that traffic is coming from, and what feed. When I migrated my site to Drupal 8, I decided to take an adventure on adding UTM parameters to my RSS feeds.

On New Years Day I sat down over ReactJS and decided to see what all the commotion was about. I primarily work on the backend and have dabbled lightly with AngularJS. Generally, my JavaScript work just falls to basic DOM manipulation using vanilla JS or jQuery. Nothing fancy, no components. ReactJS is fun.

On a client project, we wanted to prevent search engines from accessing pages on the site. It needed to be directly linked to from some various sources, public, but not queryable. So we did the reasonable thing. We modified our robots.txt and added our metatags. Unfortunately, this didn't seem to work as we would expect and pages still showed up in Google searches.