How to Integrate Material Design with Drupal

If you are a web designer, chances are you have heard about Material Design.

Material Design is a popular "design language" developed by Google that came out in June 2014. Since then, it has kind of become the visual identity of most of Google's mobile applications for Android. Many mobile app developers are using it and the approval rate among web designers is also rising, mostly because of its simplicity and the influence of mobile apps on responsive design.

Read more about How to Integrate Material Design with Drupal

Improve Drupal Usability with Context Active Trail

Drupal has a powerful menu system, but most of the content on a typical Drupal website doesn't end up in the menu navigation. Articles, blog posts, events, you name it. Most content is linked to from views, not directly from a menu. So how do we make it easy for users to know where they are in the hierarchy of the site if they are looking at content that isn't in a menu?

Read more about Improve Drupal Usability with Context Active Trail

Using Core Base Themes in Drupal 8

One of the first questions I get asked when teaching a Drupal theming class is which base theme to use. The answer has always starts with the unsatisfying: "It depends". Now that I'm teaching Drupal 8 theming, we have a couple new base themes in core added to the mix: classy and stable.

You can learn the difference between the two and how to use them in this previous post.

Read more about Using Core Base Themes in Drupal 8

Drush Commands for Themers and Site Builders

Updated on June 15, 2022

You might think that using the drush command-line tool is only something hardcore developers do, but it turns out it's super-helpful for site builders and theme developers too! In my experience, using drush will speed up the usual Drupal Admin tasks 3 to 10 times, compared with visiting the Drupal admin pages in the browser. 

Read more about Drush Commands for Themers and Site Builders

Looking for gems in my old gists

Inspired to do some spring cleaning today, I reviewed my archived gists to see if there's anything noteworthy. I was pleasantly surprised to find a few nuggets buried amongst random error logs and git diffs.

Some of them are interesting technical guides that took hours to write, and it's a shame that they've rotted away in obscurity. Several others were picked up by google, and turns out they even got a few comments and a bunch of stars.

Read more about Looking for gems in my old gists

Choosing Modules and Themes for Drupal

If you're a Drupal developer who's on the fence about trying Drupal 8, we hope this post will push you to go for it... or inform you that it's better to wait, if your project depends on a module that's not there yet.

NOTE: This post is based on the current status of all mentioned projects as of March 30th, 2016.

Views

The Views module is in core now, and it's stable and ready to go! This is very different than previously, when Drupal 7's adoption was blocked for many months due to unavailability of Views.

Read more about Choosing Modules and Themes for Drupal