Technical Articles

Creating a modern web application using Symfony API Platform

During this year and at several events SANDCamp, DrupalCamp LA, DrupalCon Nashville, and DrupalCamp Colorado I had a chance to talk and show how at WeKnow we approached the development of API driven applications. For all of you that use Drupal, this is something like decoupled or headless Drupal but without the Drupal part. This article outlines weKnow’s approach and provides some insight into how we develop some web applications.

November 6, 2018

Debugging SOLR results

I recently worked on a project which used SOLR and the search results were not showing as expected. The client had very specific requirements on the order of the search results, comprised by complex data types with lots of fields that affected the result score. Fortunately we had a sample result-set, such that that certain search term should return expected results. This was critical, as it provided a consistent baseline

August 13, 2018

Creating a Custom Ajax Command in Drupal 8

Drupal 8 provides the option to include an Ajax Callback within our applications using the Ajax Framework. There are some existing functions which can be used: Methods to hide/show elements in the html document, attach content to an element, redirect a page after a submit, and so on. Sometimes we need to implement something particular, or a custom JS code. In that case, those out-of-the-box functions are not enough. Fortunately,

June 28, 2018

Drupal 8 Add Cache Metadata to Render Arrays

Some operations are time consuming, really heavy memory and/or CPU intensive. By performing an operation one time, and then caching the output, the next requests could be executed faster. Drupal provides an easy cache API in order to store, retrieve and invalidate cache data. I did this tutorial because I couldn’t find a step by step tutorial in order to add cache metadata to render arrays easily! In this tutorial

May 9, 2018

How to install Drupal 8 from an existing configuration

The Configuration Management (CM) system, is probably one of the most well known and exciting features of Drupal 8. But wouldn’t it be even more awesome to be able to install a site, export configuration and then re-install site from scratch importing the previously exported configuration? For those who are not yet clear on what we are talking about, this post is related to fixing the infamous exception error message

March 7, 2018

Triggering MailChimp campaigns with Node.js

We are living in an era of interconnected systems, and there are better ways to provide a complete solution to a technical challenge than inventing everything from scratch or coming up with a mega app to control all the things. Instead, the key is to connect with other products that are really good at solving a specific problem. Today I would like to discuss a way to improve customer/user engagement

March 5, 2018