Welcome to day 6 of the Drupal Advent Calendar, and today’s door is another simple yet helpful module.

Have you ever had a piece of content that you needed to have someone review before going live?

Of course you could copy and paste it into an email, but that can be error prone, and may not appear exactly as it will be on the site, so errors with formatting can be missed.

It’s Monday, and time to open door 5. Behind it we find Talking Drupal, not a module but a podcast. What’s that, day 5 and I’ve already strayed from my mission statement? If you knew me, you’d say “wow, you managed to stay on point for four whole posts?” I told you there was no plan!

So, yes, a podcast.

Talking Drupal comes out every Monday, and is always worth a listen.

I really like modules that you can just install and forget about, and they just make your site better, and behind today’s door we find one of those.

Welcome to day 3 of the Drupal Advent Calendar!

Today I’m talking about Pathauto. If you’ve been using Drupal for any length of time, you’ve almost certainly come across it. I hope there is still something in this post for you.

So after posting the first Advent Calendar entry, I got into a conversation on Slack with Matthieu Scarset. Matthieu suggested using the Calendar View module, which he created and maintains, for formatting the Advent Calendar entries on the site, so that’s what I have done.

Calendar is a module for taking an output of a view and displaying on a calendar grid. It is a very lightweight module, and has no other dependencies.

Remember the bit about starting this with zero preparation?

I’m starting Day 1 with the first module I install on every site I build. I don’t think I’m alone in this regard.

By default, Drupal sites have a top level menu bar. It lists the main options, but you have to click to load a menu page to see the sub menu(s). This gets old fast.

Enter Admin Toolbar.

Last night, as I lay in bed, a thought hit me.

There are many themed Advent Calendars. They used to be aimed at children, but these days there are many aimed at adults too. As a fifty-two year old kid, I was looking forward to opening the first door of my LEGO advent calendar, while my partner had been talking about her very expensive Whiskey calendar.

So, it hit me. Drupal needs an Advent Calendar.