Hacks for Drupal developers

Learn, build and ship better Drupal: practical hacks for Drupal developers.

Browse by topics

How Drupal thinks: nodes, entities, fields, blocks, Views, users and permissions, and the request lifecycle that ties them together.

Custom module development: routes, controllers, forms, blocks, menus and permissions, written the way core writes them.

Procedural hooks, OOP #[Hook] attributes, event subscribers and alter hooks: changing what Drupal does without touching core.

The Entity API, field types, bundles, entity queries, typed data and custom entities that scale past the first thousand rows.

Twig templates, render arrays, preprocess functions, libraries, single directory components and starterkit themes.

Cache tags, contexts and max-age, the render cache, Dynamic Page Cache and BigPipe, and why the page you changed still looks old.

Services, dependency injection, the plugin system, design patterns and the Symfony components underneath it all.

Moving between major versions: deprecations, Upgrade Status, Drupal Rector and keeping a site current from 9 to 10 to 11.

The Migrate API, source and process plugins, Drupal 7 to modern Drupal, and imports from CSV, JSON and other platforms.

Configuration management, config schema, Config Split, overrides and the State API, and deploying config without surprises.

JSON:API, REST, GraphQL and decoupled front ends, plus the HTTP client for talking to everything else.

Profiling, database queries, Redis, Varnish, CDNs, queues and cron: find the slow part, then prove the fix worked.