Back to PHP

Posted on 11 August 2018 in Asides

A few months back I started a new job with a much greater focus on development work over IT systems management. Unfortunately this has led to a pretty big drop off in amount of time spent on personal side projects, but happily my new employer is fully supportive of open source and I am able to release much of what I work on to the wider community.

I have recently pushed three projects out:

  1. Views Contextual Range Validator: A very simple Drupal 8 module adding a Views contextual filter for range validation, descriptively named.
  2. PBS Passport: An OAuth2-based authorization system for Drupal 7 and PBS.org accounts.
  3. Lightbox Campaigns: A Drupal 7 and 8 module for running custom, targeted "campaigns" using full screen "lightbox" displays.

It has been interesting returning to the world of PHP after focusing so heavily on free time personal projects in Python. I am saddened to find myself away from the (much) less verbose syntax of Python, but happy to be back in the language that I grew up hacking on.

This has also given me the opportunity to work more with custom module development in Drupal 8 and I'm excited to do more of that work in the future as the community behind Drupal has really improved the APIs. The Lightbox Campaigns module was a particularly interesting adventure because I initially developed in Drupal 8 and it seemed almost too easy to get the initial groundwork in place. Porting to Drupal 7 proved much more difficult because the same functionality had to rely on multiple other dependencies and hooks that seemed determine to enforce a particular hierarchy for entity management.

There are more projects in the pipe and planned down the road. I will continue to add things to my Projects page and Drupal stuff can always be found on my Drupal.org profile.