Majority of our projects are still done in Drupal 7, simply because of stability and the number of available modules. Even though everyone in Drupal community is talking only about Drupal 8, it will definitely need even more time to catch up.

Meanwhile, it's finally time for me to seriously start picking up Drupal 8. This will be the fourth time: I started working with D5, shortly after moved to D6 and finally D7, with which I spent the most time. So far, the biggest change was D6 -> D7, but that is still nowhere near the number of changes D8 brings.

Feeds module gives you a very flexible and open-ended way of importing content from various sources. It belongs in the group of big and abstract modules, among with Rules and Views for example, that allow you to achieve very much, without any coding.

Sometimes the core Contextual Links module can get in your way, or be unnecessary on certain elements. Depending on your theme and workflows, you might want to disable them for certain entities. Unfortunately, the core Contextual Links module does not provide a way to disable them without custom code.

There are thousands of apps, websites, scripts, extensions and whatnots that help you deal with personal TODOs, and I've tried a fair number of them. Major ones, unknown ones, ugly, fancy, functional, paid and free. Which one I find the best? Single text file. I'll explain why.

Comments are something we expect on any website that publishes articles or blog posts. Because of increasing number of sites we visit every day, certain projects are trying to change the way discussions are lead on the Internet. Disqus is one of the biggest attempts to consolidate and standardize communication on websites.

Whenever you use a general purpose CMS and compare it to the systems built for one particular purpose, you will always miss a lot of details. This stands true when you are building an ecommerce website, a blog, a forum, and so on. However, the great thing about Drupal is that you can usually find a contrib module that provides such functionality, you can build it yourself using something like Rules or Views, or ultimately, write that in your custom module.

Views is probably one of the most useful Drupal modules for both developers and website builders. Chances are that you will rely on using Views even when you store the data in your custom tables, because of the additional features you get - from user interface, to caching and filtering.

This article will be a short example showing how to create a custom field handler that can be used for generating content for views header.

I reinstalled MAMP recently, in order to get PHP7 and latest updates in MAMP. At first, everything worked out of the box and even the previous databases were recognized without any issues. However, after I started working, I realized that there was a lag before my code would be recognized.

Conventions save your time and make it easier to work with more people and more projects. I find that conventions for naming files outside of any computer-related system are rarely standardized, and can cause confusion and delays.

Backups should be automated whenever possible, but even then it's a good practice to do this manually from time to time. Scheduled backups might include only the most important parts and sometimes cannot include additional data, such as software configuration files.

Having a launch checklist is always a good idea, especially if you develop it over time. It will narrow down the chances of having issues before the launch and make sure that everything is in order.

This is an extensive list of settings and other details that should be checked before a Drupal website goes live. Most of the items are applicable for Drupal 6, 7 and 8.