Blog Entries

Lately I have been working with Drupal 8 trying to get my head around what it takes to create a production application in the latest version of Drupal.  One of the very first snags I hit was theming.  Working with the theme system in Drupal 8 is quite a bit different from Drupal 7 beings how Drupal 8 utilizes Twig as the theme engine instead of PHPTemplate.

Recently Trekk was gracious enough to let me switch my workstation from Windows 7 to Ubuntu 15.04.  This decision to actually evaluate making the switch stemmed from a number of different reasons.  First and foremost I had been holding on to an outdated version on Windows for far too long and it really was time for me to either update to Windows 10 or start to evaluate different options.

Over the last month I have been tearing a lot of jQuery out of a pretty large JavaScript application and noticed that to completely removed jQuery from my application I am going to need to come up with a clever way to reproduce jQuery Validate. This decision made me pause for a moment because jQuery Validate is a pretty nice library for validating HTML forms and trying to reproduce this functionality seemed like a waste of time.

In the past couple of months I have been really noticing some of the great work on Codepen.  I feel like my eyes have been opened to the value that a site like Codepen has to offer.  Not only can you mock up concepts and share them between friends and co-workers, but Codepen is also a great outlet for creativity.

The last couple of custom Drupal themes I created called for a very simple grid system to be included in the project.  For example, lets say we needed to work off of a grid of 12 columns.  Normally we would need to go through and take the outside width of the parent container and divide each column up by this width and set each column by hand to get the exact width of each column in our grid.