Blog

In Part 2 of our exploration of Symfony components in Drupal, we focus on the event dispatcher.

The event dispatcher is a tool that enables the application to communicate across objects by subscribing to and listening for events. It achieves this by creating a directory for various event types, and the corresponding registered listeners for each event type. When a specific type of event occurs, the code that has registered a listener for that event is invoked. If you're familiar with the Mediator and Observer design patterns you might recognize similarities here.

We've got a lovely mix of announcements for you today: Drupal's latest minor release, 10.2.x is now available; a new major release schedule for Drupal was recently announced; ICYMI: videos added to 4 tutorials in our new Routes and Controllers in Drupal course; and our office is officially closed the week of December 25 through January 1.

James Shields (lostcarpark on Drupal.org) has once again rounded up fellow Drupal community members to write articles for a 2023 Drupal Advent Calendar, hosted on his personal site, lostcarpark.com. This year, Drupalize.Me trainers Amber Matz and Joe Shindelar contributed articles to the Advent Calendar. Amber's article on adding Help Topics to a module was published on December 17, and Joe's in-depth overview of Drupal's upcoming switch from annotations to native PHP attributes was published on December 21. Check out the Drupal Advent Calendar project (link inside) for more interesting and informative articles.

We've added 3 videos to tutorials in our recently published Routes and Controllers in Drupal course. Lead trainer, Joe Shindelar, walks through essential concepts and skills for Drupal module developers like creating a route with a controller, understanding how parameters and upcasting work in Drupal, and how to use route parameters in a practical example with a route definition and a custom page controller class.

Years ago I was involved with authoring the Drupal User Guide, and I’m still the maintainer today. Now, we want to pick up where the Drupal User Guide left off, and create a Drupal Module Developer Guide. This hands-on module developer guide will build on the site and the guiding scenario used for the User Guide. We’ll walk through the process of authoring a couple of custom modules to meet your client’s needs and in the process, learn the basics of Drupal module development through writing “real-world” code.

Drupalize.Me trainer Joe Shindelar has recorded a new video walk-through of how he goes about finding out what type of plugin you want to add, and how to find out what code is expected, and where to put that code in your module. The video is now embedded in the written version of the tutorial, Implement a Plugin of Any Type, available to our members.

On the Drupalize.Me team, we're fans of using DDEV to install Drupal locally. We use DDEV for development work on the site, tutorial demo sites, and workshops. While the Drupal community is spoiled for choice when it comes to options for local development, we've chosen DDEV for a lot of reasons (which we'll get into in this tutorial), but mostly because we use it every day and it works great.

Earlier this month I hosted a Drupal-to-Drupal Migration Workshop, and one of the attendees asked about merging two entity reference fields into a single field during the migration. I wasn't sure how to approach this but we brainstormed some pseudo code, and then came up with two solutions.

We just added a new tutorial all about starting a new theme with Starterkit. Learn how to use it, how it works, and what prompted its addition to Drupal core.

We've updated our Search API and Solr in Drupal tutorials in 2 ways:

1. Instead of providing custom Docker containers, we show you how to use DDEV to set up a local Solr and Drupal development environment.
2. We've tested and updated steps and screenshots for Drupal 10.

If you've been wanting to learn how to develop a Search API and Solr solution for your Drupal site, it's a good time to dive in to this updated course!