Developers

Georgia Tech’s primary supported content management system (CMS) is Drupal. The majority of websites at the Institute using Drupal are currently on Drupal 7.

Since Drupal 8’s release, there has been increased interest in transitioning to Drupal 8 across the Institute. Georgia Tech Information Technology and Institute Communications (IC) would like to share additional information and recommendations on this for campus.

Satisfies a comment on drupal.org:

Someday I would like to spend the time to make a list of the various field types and the best way to check whether they are empty so I can stop Googling this thread every few months.

Basic field

Expensive (render) check

{% if content.field|render is not empty %}
     {{ content.field }}
{% endif %}

Note that this can be an expensive (resource-wise) check to make.

Use this page to store Twig stubs and code-samples to aid your Twig development.

Per Kevin Pittman's insight posted on the GTDUG Team:

With Drupal 7.61, be aware that you're now likely to see a bunch of "SimpleXMLElement" errors on the Modules Update screen. This is caused whenever a module's project status data can't be retrieved. 

Causes

There are two cases that will have to be addressed:

The following table, initially provided by the College of Computing (many thanks!) attempts to summarize the details of a large number of commonly used Drupal 7 modules and any known issues with their latest full (not development) version under PHP 7. In addition, Kevin Pittman of the College of Liberal Arts has added Drupal 8 compatibility details and removal recommendations, to help site administrators decide what to do as they review the modules installed their Drupal 7 sites.

PHP 5.6 (the last version in the PHP 5 line) reached its end-of-life on December 31, 2018. In addition, PHP 7.0 also reached its end of life in December, 2018.  As a result all OIT Web Hosting accounts are now on PHP 7.1 or later.  Units who have their own web servers are strongly urged to get them updated to PHP 7.1 if they haven't done so already.

To use the CAS PEM certificate installed on websites hosted on OIT webhosting, please use the following path:

 /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt

Per Georgia Tech's accessibility requirements, certain fields likely need additional explanatory text accompanying them:

Video Fields (e.g. YouTube)

Any publicly available video must be captioned for end-users. YouTube's automatic captions are not enough to meet full guidance: any automatic captions must be manually reviewed and corrected.

Issue

After updating to the 2.9 version of the GT Theme, the formatting is broken for custom content types (such as Super Blocks and Slideshow Carousels), usually those created via the Features module. Often the types show CSS classes as text instead of as visual styling.

Example of broken Super Blocks

Kevin Pittman has written a blog post called "So, You Blew Up Your Drupal 8 Site - Now What?" that covers multiple methods for recovering a dead Drupal 8 website (on the assumption you hadn't made a backup right before it died).