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From the 25th July 2025, the child protection aspect of the Online Safety Act 2023 came into force in the UK.

It's been a while since I looked at using the React library but I recently discovered some issues with some code written a while a go and recently compiled  

Drupal Code Generator Cheatsheet (3.6.1)

Now Drupal Console has been officially deprecated lets have a look at the array of available commands available to Drush users using the in built Drupal Code Generator.

A couple of months ago Drupal Console was declared end of life. 

Launched at the same time as Drupal 8  back in 2016, Drupal Console was installed via composer. e.g.

2022 was turning into a good year for work. I had just secured a working from home opportunity for a well known UK based insurance company. Turns out they had just recently offered the majority of their in house development team early retirement.

The terms Freelancing and Contracting are often used interchangeably in the workplace. Perhaps a project requires a specific skillset to help complete a project or assignment. Perhaps the Project Manager can be over heard telling the Finance Director,  "Oh, we need to get a freelancer in".

By default, when running Plesk (linux) the root user is allowed to access the control panel. It is generally best practice to disable root access on your server to help improve it's security. We already have an admin user defined in Plesk so there is no need for an additional user with the same or similar permissions.

At the time of writing we can see when looking at dev-guide.python that the oldest supported version in Python 3.9 (until Nov 2025). However Ubuntu 20.x only ships with Python 3.8. 

In Drupal there are the QueueWorker  and QueueWorkerManager classes that are helpful in managing a queue. One benefit of managing tasks is a queue is they offer a way of managing tasks or jobs in an orderly way. Think First in First Out. 

The way the QueueWorker in Drupal works is tied in with cron.

I have been running Apache Solr Cloud and Zookeeper to help improve the search performance and UX around Drupal based sites for a year or so now. Here I look at updating Java run time and how to restart your solr.

One challenge of hosting a website online 24 hours a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year, is keeping it secure. 

Using front end tools and frameworks that utilise the canvas element can offer impactful looking pages but often come with a heavy overhead, especially when running animations and effects in the web browser and this overhead often correlates to the the dpi, which on most desktops and even mobiles is usually quite high.

Just wanted to share some css created back by Janos in 2018 that I thought was exceptional and very creative.

This is pure css lava lamp implementation.

When working on Drupal it is often useful to change your local development.services.yml to enable certain development features and make debugging your application easier.

In a previous article I have looked at running Drupal's Nightwatch and PHPUnit Tests using Drupal's Quickstart development environment. Today, I will look at how to run all the the PHP Unit Tests using a headless version of chrome.

In a previous article, I looked into how to get started with Running Tests using Drupal Contributions on top of a local Lando container. I looked a little at the history of Drupal testing and in particular how to get started running PHP Unit tests. 

I recently realised that I was getting some strange behaviour when running Drupal X on Plesk Obsidian, when set to use PHP is run by and FPM application served with with nginx, such as the index.php showing on links and navigation items. Turns out I needed to add some additional configuration to get this working correctly.

I am quite a heavy user of rss feeds that use keywords to return related content. 

For a few years now, quite a lot of effort has gone into making Drupal work in a Headless or Restful state. This has led to the creation of modules such as the subrequests module that allows any set of requests to be aggregated together.

Let's have a quick look at how to set up a fresh Drupal 10 site using the Wodby Docker4Drupal boilerplate and the drupal-core-recommended install profile from Drupal's own drupal/recommended-project.

For a while now I have been struggling with space on my Mac fitted with a 500GB SSD drive. Looking at my resources I can see over 200GB is allocated to System Data. Digging a little deeper into this I can also see that a Docker Container accounts for 60GB of this space. 

Sometimes you might want to install a legacy version of node in order to circumvent some installation issues. e.g. I recently tried to install and run webgl worksop on my local machine that was developed a few years ago with an older version of node. Installing  with a more recent version I get the following error:

On a web server running on top of CentOS 7, the default version of PHP is still stuck on php 5.4.x

The Tribonacci sequence is a sequence of integers T_n defined by 

T₀=0, T₁=T₂=1, T_n=T_n−1+T_n−2+T_n−3 

Say we have an array of values that represents the stock price of duckduckgo over time.

e.g.

Sometimes it may be useful to specify a patched branch of a particular project. I recently came across an issue where it was not possible to patch a module, but I was able to create an issue branch  and  pull request.

Typically it is not uncommon to use yours hosts file to redirect network traffic on your local machine to point to your local environment where appropriate.

In a previous article I touched on the oEmbed standard and a little about the use of remote media including remote images.

Drupal 8.6.0 has an out-of-box adds support for embedding remote YouTube and Vimeo videos by means of the oEmbed format. You may notice these are often encapsulated in an iframe. You can see this evident in a new media type being defined called 'Remote Video' available form /admin/structure/media.

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission will be the first crew rotation flight of a U.S. commercial spacecraft with astronauts to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi are set to launch on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket.

One of the changes introduced with the launch of Drupal 8.7.7 included support for semantic versioning. The Semantic Versioning specification was originally authored by Tom Preston-Werner, inventor of Gravatar and cofounder of GitHub.

This article was originally written in 2005 as a support forum article. This is still relevant today so I have decided to add and update it here for posterity.

There are many reasons that you might want to run your application on node js as opposed to php. One reason that stands out for me is that node js has a built in server, making it much lighter than say php that typically served on top of either Apache or Nginx 'web servers'.

Adobe Flash's swf format is set to reach end of life by the end of this year. Already Safari has dropped support from its latest browser and Microsoft has disabled it by default on its latest Edge browser.

When online servers are setup, for some reason the allocated partitions on the hard drive may need to be adjusted manually to take advantage of the the amount of space available. These instructions are specific to Centos but similar likely applies to other Linux distros.

With the launch of Drupal 9, one of the requirements is for MySQL 5.7 or later.

For  those  people  who have been contracting IR35 is nothing new. IR35 was first introduced in 2000 by then chancellor Gordon Brown in an attempt to close the tax avoidance schemes that many contractors were encouraged to sign up for.

The recent acquisition of Acquia by Vista Equity Partners for $1billion probably overshadowed the smaller acquisition of Cohesion by Acquia a few weeks earlier. The move helps Acquia enhance its portfolio by also acqu

These days some api's are restricted to access over Https. With Https being a standard requirement for most production sites these days, it is also worth enabling this on your development environment as well, to help you to check for any mixed content errors, and to test your apps with any apis that may insist on Https access.

Earlier this year I was asked to set up an email newsletter template. While not necessarily appropriate for the task in hand, someone did recommend using Mail Jet Markup Language (MJML).

I have experienced issues either directly or indirectly with organisations that use Amazon's Simple Email Service.

Yesterday, May 1st 2019, Drupal announced the latest stable iteration to their open source CMS Drupal 8.7.0. There were a number of announcements including 

As a Mac user I do not usually worry about things like drivers, but recently I took an interest after experiencing issues with my discrete graphic card. 

With the latest release from Drupal also including the latest security fixes, it was time to update again.

The digital landscape has changed much since the early inception of the web. Since the dot com boom in the early 90's we have seen organisations online strategies evolve as well.

Do you have a need for finding out what is taking up all the room on your server? Do you want to figure out what is eating up all your disk space. Of course there are different ways of doing this, for example the ls command. e.g 

I have been working as a Web Developer since 2001.

I get asked alot these days about Agile. Everyone seems to be doing it!

I was recently asked to put together a short presentation about various Agile methodologies and look at the benefits and challenges when applied to web development today. 

For those interested I thought I would share my presentation here. 

Ever seen these kind of job roles advertised after doing a search for html developer?

Thought I would share this free online tool I stumbled on that helps you generate your own word cloud. 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so heres one that I created:

If you have a website the chances are you probably have some images or photos to break up your text or help to convey a message or story etc. Well if your website has been created fairly recently, chances are that your site responds to different viewports.

I recently ended up running Windows on my Mac via bootcamp to run various titles that I had purchased from steam that did not run natively on my Mac.

I have been using Drupal since 2009 and one of things that is impressive is how modular it is. The core Drupal build is very extensible and there are literally 100's of thousand's of contributed modules out there, many of them regularly updated and maintained by the very active open source Drupal community.

One issue with retina displays that you may have come across is that the use of 72 dpi images look awfully pixelated. 

One approach is to use two images, one for retina and one for normal displays.

When starting a new project that needs to be themed it is not uncommon to use a css reset. One of the early pioneers here was Eric Meyer.

Well we all know that git is a great tool for managing your code, but what about if you want to manage git access to your various repos. Welcome to gitolite available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I am in the process of migrating a Xoops site to Drupal and wanted to migrate the 'Web Links' module feature to my new Drupal based links directory.