Configuration Synchronization

Drupal 8 has a really great configuration synchronization system, and is great for syncing up different environments.  When creating new modules and adding new fuctionality I really enjoy working with Drupal 8's configuration synchronization tool.  Not only does this tool take the guesswork out of updates that need to be made on other environments.  The configuration synchronization also allows for all changes to be documented.  

I have been working on many Drupal commerce projects both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 and I have encountered the need for multiple currencies many times.   Drupal 8 has made it very easy to have multiple currencies. 

Today I have been working through an issue with commerce tax.  I had to apply a patch that allows me to configure taxes a bit more.

The patch allows Drupal commerce to decouple the tax calculation with the store address.  That way the Drupal commerce store can have multiple tax rates instead of one tax rate for the state the store is located in.  

Drupal Issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/commerce/issues/3005440

This week I started a mini project to optimize a slow Drupal 8 website.  The issue, various parts of the website are taking 10, 20 and even 30 seconds to load.  Wow, long time.

Wow, what a great little API.  Exchange Rates API is a free API that helps with currency conversion rates.  

All that needs to be sent is the base currency and the currency that you want to convert.  Then the conversion rate is returned.  Making it simple. 

Example

GET Request: https://api.exchangeratesapi.io/latest?base=USD&symbols=GBP

Result: {"base":"EUR","rates":{"USD":1.1264,"GBP":0.86168},"date":"2019-04-11"}

Cloudflare is a great tool to add another layer of security to your Drupal website.  

When setup correctly Cloudflare will act as a firewall to block malicious traffic to your Drupal website at the application level.  Cloudflare blocks many types of attacks: cross-site scripting, cross-site forgery requests, and SQL injection attacks.  User checks can also be enabled such as GEO IP location and browser integrity checking to limit questionable or unneeded traffic.

Cloudflare also acts as a CDN and has many caching and performance features.  

Recently I have been planning ahead with a couple of clients for their Drupal 7 upgrade.  Drupal 7 will be supported by the community until the end of November 2021.

What does this mean for Drupal 7 projects?  It means that if you haven't started planning an upgrade to Drupal 8, you should now.  

The same goes for Drupal 8 and Drupal 8 will only be supported to the end of 2021 like Drupal 7, but the transition will be very easy to Drupal 9.  That means by the end of  2021 each Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 project should be updated to the latest version of Drupal 8.

I recently update my modules routing.yml file and needed to update the routes in my Drupal 8 project.

Clearing the caches won't update the routes.

To update the routes run this command with Drush: drush ev '\Drupal::service("router.builder")->rebuild();'

Every now and then I work on a project were the image styles are missing and usually not regenerating.  This usually occurs when moving a site from one hosting provider to another due to missing files and or purging image styles.

In this case, I was moving a Drupal 7 project to Pantheon.  This is when I found missing images and I was trying to regenerate them.

A couple of good modules for managing image styles are: 

Currently, I am working on a custom form that generates products on the fly for a custom purchase order implementation.  

For this Drupal 8 commerce website, the product variations have a required weight field which was needed in the custom form.  

Here is an example of the weight field.