There's no magical set of right tools to use to monitor a Drupal site's performance and health. While thinking about performance monitoring, you need to optimize your approach depending on the number of applications you manage, their complexity, business needs, and the skill-set of your team. Based on these factors, you may choose to use one of the core or contributed modules, go with third-party solutions and services, or some combination of both.
Drupal core comes with a couple of modules that allow you to monitor the health and performance of the site including Syslog, Database Logging, and the status reports provided by the System module. There are also numerous community-contributed modules, a sampling of which we'll cover here.
In this tutorial, we'll:
- List some contributed modules that are commonly used for monitoring a Drupal site
- Provide an overview of what each module does
By the end of this tutorial you should be able to list a few contributed modules that might be useful for monitoring your Drupal application and define what each one does.
No one likes to wait for a slow site to load. Not me, not you, and definitely not search engines. And the effect of site load times on things like SEO, user bounce rates, purchase intent, and overall satisfaction are only going to become more pronounced over time.
Drupal is a modern web framework that is capable of serving millions of users. But every site is unique, and while Drupal tries hard to be fast out of the box, you'll need to develop a performance profile, caching strategy, and scaling plan that are specific to your use case in order to be truly blazing fast.
Drupal site performance depends on multiple components, from hardware setup and caching system configuration to contributed modules, front-end page weight, and CDNs. Experienced Drupal developers looking to optimize their applications know where to start looking for potential savings. They can manipulate settings and combinations of these components to achieve the desired results. Our goal with this set of tutorials is to help explain the process and provide you with the insight that comes with experience.
In this tutorial we'll:
- Introduce high-level performance concepts for Drupal that we'll then cover in more detail elsewhere
- Provide an overview of the main Drupal performance components.
By the end of this tutorial, you should understand what components around your Drupal application are responsible for site performance.
In this tutorial, we'll walk through the process of adding and configuring filters and adding a filter group.
In this tutorial, we'll walk through the process of adding and configuring sort criteria to a view.
In this tutorial, we'll add and configure a contextual filter for a view. Our Baseball Awards content type has a field Year. We'll make it possible for a page to be dynamically created on our site that contains the year and lists the awards for that specific year. To do this, we'll add a contextual filter to the Baseball Awards view that will allow visitors to filter the list of awards by the award year. We'll also add a block using the summary view contextual filter configuration, which visitors can use to view results for specific years.
One of the ways you can create a REST endpoint in Drupal is by using Views. In this tutorial, we'll add a REST endpoint display to a view of baseball players. We'll examine and configure settings that are unique to the REST endpoint display.
By the end of this tutorial you should be able to:
- Add a REST endpoint display to a view
- Understand how to configure settings for an endpoint
Instead of providing multiple views with different filter criteria, consider empowering your users by exposing filter criteria as an interactive form. You can even configure the forms to use AJAX to refresh results. In this tutorial, we'll walk through the process of adding and configuring exposed filter or sort criteria in a view.
Like exposed filters, we can expose sort criteria to the site visitor. Exposing sort criteria gives the visitor more control over the list of content they are viewing. In this tutorial, we'll configure our view of baseball players to allow visitors to sort the list in different ways by adding several exposed sort criteria.
Contextual filters are a Views mechanism for dynamically refining the contents of a view. It might be helpful to think of them as "dynamic filters". In this tutorial, we'll discuss the concept of context, look at how to add contextual filters in the Views UI, and review the Taxonomy term view that comes with Drupal and how it uses a contextual filter.
Exposing filter criteria allows the users of your site to choose how to filter a content list created in Views. When rendered on the page, the exposed filters will be displayed to the user as interactive form components.
By the end of this tutorial you will:
- Understand what it means to expose filter criteria and when it might be useful.
- Be able to identify when a view has exposed filters and which filters are exposed.
Exposing sort criteria allows the users of your site to sort a view using an interactive form.
By the end of this tutorial you will:
- Understand what it means to expose sort criteria and when it might be useful.
- Be able to identify a view's exposed sort criteria.
With filters, we can define query conditions and refine the results of a view. But what is a filter and how do filters work in Views? In this tutorial, you'll learn:
- How to add and configure filter criteria to a view to refine results
- What configuration options are available for filter criteria operators
- How filter groups allow you to group and order filter criteria to achieve desired results
By the end of this lesson, you should understand how to use and configure filter criteria in Views to refine the results of your view. (Note: We'll cover exposed filters in Overview: Exposed Filter Criteria in Views)
In order to display values for referenced entities in views, you need to add a relationship. What is a relationship, how do they work, and what does it mean to require this relationship? What are some common use cases for adding a relationship to a view? By the end of this tutorial you should be able to:
- Explain some common use cases for adding a relationship to a view.
- Understand the concept of entity references and how those field values can be displayed in a view.
With sort criteria, we can specify how to order our list. We can specify sort criteria using any field on or related to our view's base entity, and then specify in which order to sort, e.g. ascending or descending. If you are familiar with MySQL, it may be helpful to know that sort criteria are the ORDER BY
clause of the query that Views builds. In this tutorial, you'll learn:
- How to add and configure sort criteria to a view to sort the list in various ways
- What configuration options are available
By the end of this lesson, you should understand how to use and configure sort criteria in Views. (Note: We'll cover exposed sort criteria in Overview: Exposed Sort Criteria in Views)
Like most output in Drupal, Views relies on Twig templates for a significant amount of its rendering. In this tutorial we'll identify where you can find the default Views templates within your file system, what the common templates are for, and how to name your templates so that they are applied to specific views.
By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to:
- Identify where to find default views templates
- Understand which templates apply to what part of a view
- Get a sense of the template suggestions and how to use them to limit where your custom templates are applied
- Identify a view's machine name
- Identify a display's machine name
- Identify a field's machine name
Now that you understand the purpose of relationships in Views, let's add a relationship to a view so that we can access and display a field value from a related entity.
In this tutorial, we'll modify the Player Awards view to add a relationship to the player that received the award. Then we will add a field that belongs to the player content that would normally not be available to the view without our new relationship.
Now that we understand what templates are and how we can use them, let's override some templates! In this tutorial we'll copy the views wrapper template to our theme and override it so that we can customize the markup for the Baseball Players view. Then we'll modify the template so that our view's pager appears both above and below our table of players.
To follow along with our Drupal Views tutorials, set up a Drupal site loaded with our 4 custom views and baseball stats content that will make querying in Views a bit more interesting and meaningful.
By the end of this tutorial, you should choose a solution and follow the instructions for creating a Drupal site loaded with our starting point content and views.
This guide was written, and is maintained, by Drupalize.Me. For more high quality written and video Drupal tutorials created by our team of experts, check out the collection of Drupalize.Me Guides.
Layout Builder is one of many different approaches to handling editorial layouts in Drupal. Now that it's stable, and part of Drupal core, we expect to see it become the dominant approach over time. However, as with most things in Drupal, there are multiple ways to solve the problem of creating component based flexible layouts that can be administered via the user interface.
It's a good idea to understand the different approaches and know what's available.
When it comes to component based design and ability to construct flexible layouts, it is important to understand the benefits and risks of the most popular techniques: Paragraphs, Bricks, entities and view modes, and Layout Builder. Understanding which approach fits the needs of your project best can be critical for its success in the future.
In this tutorial we'll look at some common approaches to administering layouts in a way that gives content editors controls including:
- Drupal core's Layout Builder
- Using core's entity reference fields and view modes
- The contributed Paragraphs module
- The contributed Bricks module
By the end of this tutorial you should have a broad overview of the different popular approaches to creating editor-controlled layouts.