Chatbots, always available customer support or know nothings?
October 12, 2018
This post also appears on the Headscape site.
Ian Luckraft - Software Engineer
Blogging, Completed It Mate
September 8, 2018
Oddly enough I’d had this post in mind over the summer and then some gentle encouragement from Paul Boag on an episode of The Boagworld Podcast convinced me to finish writing it. Towards the end of last year I had several ideas for blog posts rattling round my head. I made a conscious decision I should actually finish the blog posts instead of leaving them as “Draft” and thinking “I’ll finish that soon”. ...
Today I am Not Working From Home
March 27, 2018
I’m a full time remote worker and have a room at home set up as an office I can shut myself away in. As I’ve talked about before I love working from home but this week for the first time I decided to try remote working from a public space. I choose a local Wetherspoons as it seemed to tick all the boxes and was a short walk from home. ...
Fractal – A Backend Developers Perspective
March 20, 2018
One of the great thing about attending conferences is attending a talk and learning about something you didn’t even realise you wanted to know about. During DrupalCon Vienna I saw a talk by Anton Staroverov and Tassilo Groeper from Wondrous titled Decouple your Twig from PHP and make Frontenders happy! In the talk they showed a tool called Fractal which has been developed by Clearleft. After seeing the presentation I felt this would be a very useful tool so set about looking into it further. ...
The Importance of Real Data
March 13, 2018
At the start of a project there are many different objectives and everyone involved has their own sense of priorities or tasks they wish to a tackle first. For me that is generally sorting the backend into a nicely organised structure that will allow flexibility in the output both now and in the future. A big part of this is getting real data in so the front end output is as close to final content as possible. ...
Drupal 8 Workflow Notifications with Rules Part 3
March 6, 2018
In previous posts I’ve covered enabling and editing a Workflow and then sending an email when a new content moderation state has been saved. In this post we will complete the loop by sending emails when a content moderation state has been updated. In this example an editor will publish the node and the rule will email the node creator to tell them it has been published. Head to the Rules admin page /admin/config/workflow/rules and click Add reaction rule ...
Changing the Default Content Moderation State in Drupal 8
February 27, 2018
I have been working with the Content Moderation module in Drupal 8 and one slight niggle we came across was the default option for the Moderation state. If the current state was In Review we would like the Change to option to also be In Review rather than Draft. This means the default is to keep the entity in it’s current state rather than switching to a new state. ...
Drupal 8 Workflow Notifications with Rules Part 2
February 20, 2018
In my previous post I talked through setting up Content Moderation with a review state. In this post we will complete the process by sending email notifications via the Rules module when the moderation state is changed. Install Rules # To enable the Rules module we first need to require it via Composer. Run the following from the command line in the root of your project composer require drupal/rules ...
Drupal 8 Workflow Notifications with Rules Part 1
February 13, 2018
For Drupal projects I’ve always used the comprehensive suite of tools provided by Workbench. But when I started a new project and saw that Workflow is hopefully making it’s way into core it felt like a good time to try it out. One part of the project was the addition of notifications when Workflow states were changed. With the Rules module also receiving lots of attention I decided combining the two modules was the best approach. ...
Coding With Pen and Paper
February 6, 2018
Producing a rough sketch on a piece of paper may seem more like the realms of a designer desperately trying to get an idea out of their head into a physical form to share with others but I find it can also help me develop backend code. Planning # When starting a new bit of work I normally have the rough idea in my head of how I’m going to modularise the code and what functionality each piece will need. ...