Drupal's Problem With Decorative Images

Decorative images are those that should not be described to assistive technology like screen readers. A simple example is a fancy image of a decorative border that you insert at the end of a news article.

Lately I've been working to improve the response time of 404 pages on some Drupal 8 sites I help maintain. Depending on the complexity of the site and the status of Drupal's various cache layers, Drupal can be quite slow to generate a full page response, even for a 404 page. These sites I maintain are occasionally subjected to aggressive security penetration scans which generate a ton of 404 responses for completely unique URLs. The scanner can send tens of requests per second like this which can quickly exhaust the resources of a web server.

The Problem

Replacing files uploaded to your Drupal site can be very frustrating. In most cases, when an editor wants to replace a document, they want to keep the exact same filename and filepath and just overwrite the contents of the file. This is important in cases where the file is linked to elsewhere throughout the website or on other websites outside of the editors control. If you use the media module to manage documents on your site, you'll quickly discover that it's not possible to upload a replacement file for a document and keep the same filename.

Content management systems like Drupal provide dynamic layout building tools. This article details the challenges associated with trying to deliver the most appropriately sized image in these dynamic layouts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I recently worked on porting over a website to Drupal that had several dynamic elements throughout the site depending on the IP address of the user. Different content could be shown depending on if the user was within a local network, a larger local network, or completely outside the network.