What to do with busy maintainers?

Or: how to improv​e the process of becoming a co-maintainer?

I’ve had more than a few projects where we used a contrib module and found a bug. We then searched the issue queue of that module to find out we were not the only one with that bug. And if we were lucky, there was also a patch that fixes the bug, so we could patch the module and carry on. But we need to make sure we document this patch to not override it when we update the module. As a Drupal developer you really want to use full released and unpatched modules.

The joy of views_embed_view()

I love Views. For those who don’t know it; it’s basically a visual query builder that you want to use in every Drupal project. You might use it to create listings of content, commens, users, and what not. Add arguments, filters, sorts, a search box… you name it. Views can do anything! Well, almost anything.

Exporting your module configuration using Ctools or with custom code - when to use which method?

When I recently joined Scott Reynen as maintainer of the @font-your-face module (blog post), one of the first tasks on my list was to enable site builders to save their font settings using Features. For those not known with Features; it’s a module that saves database settings (views, content types, variables etc) to code.

Goodbye Google Fonts, hello @font-your-face!

For years it was a struggle to implement non-default fonts in your website. And as a result, many websites still use Verdana or Arial as their default font. Designers were limited to use the 13 or so web safe fonts.

A fresh breeze in my life

Lately, a few things happened in my life. Since 2008 I work at Sogeti (part of Capgemini group) as Senior Drupal Specialist. In this role, I’ve set up a Drupal expertise team, gave trainings and presentations. I was involved in making Sogeti one of the main Drupal players in the Dutch market.