Top 20 Drupal Tips

Over the years, Metal Toad has written a lot about Drupal. Cataloged across the years and in different versions, this list represents the all-time top 20 Drupal tips we have published as ranked by you - the internet. Enjoy!

Wait, is it "$node->title" or "$node->title->value"? How do I write an EntityQuery again? Yeah, I can never remember, either.
 

For a recent project, we were tasked to consume the client's internal data from a custom API. Now, this scenario was lucky for us, the API provides a total item count of about 5000, but when queried with a start date, it provides all...
 

It can take a while when you're new, but once you start to wrap your head around Views, that is when Drupal gets really fun. In this tutorial, I'll go over how to use Contextual Filters in Views to alter your content dynamically based on information in the URL. If you're a visual learner, you can skip to the video at the end of this post for a detailed walkthrough of the process.
 

In this article, we will be building a custom migration that will import users from a Drupal 7 site into a Drupal 8 site. The migration will include the standard user profile fields like username and email address, plus a few custom fields added to the user profile.
 

Sometimes during development, a chicken-and-egg situation happens when business logic intersects with Drupal's mechanisms. For instance, a custom module, client_business_logic, is built to handle some unique, abstract bit of logic that depends on a taxonomy vocabulary
 

The beauty of Drupal 8's built-in Migrate module is its flexibility. Lots of people will likely use it to migrate their Drupal 6 or 7 sites, but that's not all it can do. In fact, it's capable of migrating data from just about any data source PHP can read...
 

Data protection is one of the primary advantages of Drupal, but sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you might need to modify a field to account for some change in business needs. There are a few rule bends...
 

Drupal 8 provides a flexible, plugin-based architecture for migrating data into a site. In Part 3 of this series, we explored how to migrate taxonomies from a Drupal 7 site. We will now expand on this by migrating basic nodes from a Drupal 7 site into Drupal 8.
 

Drupal 8 provides a flexible, plugin-based architecture for migrating data into a site. In Part 2 of this series, we explored how to migrate users from a Drupal 7 site. We will now expand on this by migrating Taxonomy vocabularies and terms from a Drupal 7 site into Drupal 8
 

I love views. It makes my job easier, so I can focus on the more complex things, rather than having to hand-write queries and create forms for filtering data and it saves time debugging my typos. Every so often you will get a request that can't be accomplished out of the box.
 

Need more tips and tricks? Check out our Top 5 Git Tips & Tricks, learn more about AWS Machine Learning, AWS Lambda, or check out Metal Toad's AWS Managed Services offering.