Unicode characters encoded using UTF8 can technically use 1 to 4 bytes to represent a single character. However, older versions of MySQL only provided support for storing UTF8 encoded characters that used 1 to 3 bytes. This was enough to cover the most commonly used characters, but is not suitable for applications that accept user input where any character can be submitted (like emojis, which use 4 bytes). Newer versions of MySQL provide a character encoding called utf8mb4 to fix this issue.
Tags: Drupal Planet
I'm working in creating a Drupal 8 installation profile and learning how they can override default configuration that its modules provide at install time.
Tags: Drupal Planet
Yes, a blog post about Drupal 7!
I recently worked on an enhancement for a large multi-site Drupal 7 platform to allow its users to import news articles from RSS feeds. Pretty simple request, and given the maturity of the Drupal 7 contrib module ecosystem, it wasn't too difficult to implement.
Tags: Drupal Planet, Drupal 7
Imagine you have a view that lists upcoming events on your Drupal 8 site. There's a date filter that filters out any event who's start date is less than the current date. This works great until you realize that the output of the view will be cached in one or many places (dynamic page cache, internal page cache, varnish, etc). Once it's cached, views doesn't execute the query and can't compare the date to the current time, so you may get older events sticking around.
Tags: Drupal Planet
I'm working on a site where the editorial staff may occasionally produce animated GIFs and place them in an article. Image styles and animated GIFs in Drupal don't play nice out of the box. Drupal's standard image processing library, GD, does not preserve GIF animation when it processes them, so any image styles applied to the image will remove the animation.
Tags: Drupal 8, Drupal Planet