Let's say you're a Drupal website administrator. One admin vs an entire “army” of writers, who edit and publishing content on a regular basis. Wouldn't it be great if you could... somehow... trigger an action that'll notify you each time new content gets uploaded? That's when the Drupal 8 Rules comes in. To help you configure and automate all types of workflows: from automated mailing to publishing content at a specific time, to... notifying a customer that a product is back on stock. o help you create “event-condition-action” workflows and put some...

"Begin preparing now! First of all, keep Drupal core and all contributed projects up to date" (source: Acquia.com) is Acquia's advice... that we all know already. And Composer is one of the best options for updating your Drupal 8 website. But: how precisely do you update Drupal 8 core with Composer? What are the: key steps to take, best practices to apply, main issues to prepare for, special considerations to keep in mind? In this post, I'll do my best to answer some of your legitimate questions with respect to Composer and Composer as the most efficient update tool for Drupal 8...

“Only for testing” or not entirely true? Are the experimental modules in Drupal 8 some great “tools” to submit new improvements for testing to the large community of Drupal users or are they more than that? Or are they, instead, some “packages” full of cool new features that you should seize the chance and “unwrap” right now? It's certain that this new type of Drupal 8 modules have gone beyond the testing phase. But it's also true that they're not yet fully supported and that you still get “Use them at your own risk” warning messages each time you try to install a “tempting” one.

And here you are: you've just got your Drupal 8 site up and running and you've now looking, proudly, at your Drupal installation. Yet, you just feel that... something's missing! Your site needs a paint job. Meaning a representative theme! It will be your website's own “face”, the one responsible for the very first impression that you'll make to your site visitors. What do you do then? Well, you fine-tune it! How? Now here's a straightforward step-by-step guide on how to install a new theme in Drupal 8:

Craving for speed? Do you own a content-packed Drupal 8 website? Or maybe, as a    in Drupal developer in Canada, you've just developed a website running on Drupal 8 and carrying a heavy load of documents and web pages? And now you need to trigger a Google-fast search function, one that users could rely on for getting relevant search results “in the blink of an eye”. Well, if these two scenarios are (too) familiar to you, you'll want to keep reading my “plea” on the Search Api Solr for Drupal 8, more than just a module: an entire toolset of fast search functions to turbocharge your (or your client's) Drupal 8 website with.

Content modeling in Drupal 8 is a self-evident example of how an ideally streamlined web development process can result in a “boomerang effect”! Ease of use, unlimited accessibility and empowering the non-technical user can easily turn into Drupal 8's vulnerabilities instead. How come? Simple! The easier it is for Drupal developers to model their content using the web-based interface (instead of a standard database table) that Drupal 8 “spoils” them with, the easier it gets for them to create some excessively complex data models.

"The Most Common Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 Migration Issues AND THEIR FIXES" would have been the longer version of this post's title. It's a fact now: you can no longer escape Drupal 8's “influence”, your job as a Drupal developer implies regular Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration "marathons". And since everyone around you's overly excited about Drupal 8's purely innovative features, about its irresistibly cutting-edge capabilities (and where do you add that these include a Migration module in its core, as well), you suffer major “shock” discovering that, well, moving websites to Drupal 8 is not always a “boringly” smooth and event-less process.

Are you facing the challenge of developing a social networking platform? And what a challenge, indeed! Even though we're talking about Drupal, which is, after all, “built with communities in mind” and with core features geared towards enabling user content creation, it still takes a lot of time and money to pull off a successful Drupal social project! Since it depends on user-generated content, which “feeds itself on interactivity, if you don't "nail it" in terms of user experience, it will be a major fail. And this is where Drupal 8 comes in to “lure” us with its Open Social distribution, a features-packed, functionality-loaded base platform to build and to grow your future social networking website on. Let's dig into the details, shall we:

Here I am again, eager to share with you all about my recent experience using Drupal 8: the Google Analytics module! This module could easily get translated into: the temptingly flexible and rock-solid GA integration we have all been “craving” for while building/managing our Drupal sites. Or it could also get translated into: a powerful, web statistics tracking tool put right at our fingertips, easy to use and to customize right from Drupal's administrative interface. Drupal sure is all about simplicity and empowering the end-user! And where do you add that you get to set up Google Analytics on your Drupal 8 site in just 6 easy steps. Just follow my step-by-step tutorial here below:

Since I'm all about collaborating and contributing (and therefore "sharing", as well), Drupal's 2 main “philosophies”, here I am today ready to talk to you about 5 other Drupal 8 modules! Each one of them is a reflection of this newest version of Drupal's main goals: simplifying the developer's experience, empowering (even more) content creators and overall placing an even greater control into the hands of site administrators/business owners.

How have you been handling permissions in Drupal, so far? How have you been coping with all those checkbox checking “marathons", with the endless scrolling and with all those never-ending duplicates? Not to mention the security risks that you've taken, each and every time, and the bugs tracking down “nightmares”. Well, the future looks bright for us, Drupal developers, since Drupal 8 is “tempting” us with its “User Personas”! A module promising to bring more order into the whole process of managing permissions in Drupal. Let's find out what this promising module is all about:

Eager to “exploit” Drupal 8 modules in your web projects? Then why don't you? Even if this innovative version of Drupal is still work-in-progress, lots of valuable modules have already been released and are ready to be... tried out! Give them a “test drive”. In this respect, I've hand picked 11 most useful (in my opinion) ones, “useful” in various stages of building and managing a Drupal 8 website.