Author name: Ivan Zugec

Ivan is the founder of WebWash and spends most of his time consulting and writing about Drupal. He's been working with Drupal for 12 years and has successfully completed several large Drupal projects in Australia.

How to Host Drupal Sites using SiteGround

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SiteGround is a popular hosting provider for Drupal, WordPress or any PHP powered website.

They offer a wide variety of hosting packages, from shared, managed, and cloud hosting.

However, in this video we focus on their shared hosting product.

They offer three plans; StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek. The StartUp plan only allows for a single website so we recommend that you go for the GrowBig or GoGeek as they offer more functionality and allow you to host unlimited websites.

All plans offer free SSL (using Let’s Encrypt) and “Out-of-the-box Caching”, where they use NGINX to cache static assets such as images and files. They also offer Memcached, which can help with speeding up your Drupal site.

The GoGeek plan allows you to host and deploy your Drupal site using Git, which could be helpful if you use Git to manage your Drupal site.

In this video, you’ll learn how to install Drupal using the GoGeek plan on SiteGround.

Add Theme Suggestion to Menus using Menu Block in Drupal

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Menu Block gives you additional functionality around managing the display of menus in block regions. Drupal core allows you to add any menu such as main navigation, footer, etc… into any region and you can control how many menu levels should be displayed. Menu Block gives you additional options such as setting a fixed parent item, changing the block title, and more.

But the one feature of Menu Block I want to show you in this tutorial is the ability to add a custom theme hook suggestion to menus.

Host and Build a Blog using Drupal and Cloudways

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In this video, you’ll learn how to build a Drupal site from start to finish. We start by setting up hosting for the site on Cloudways and pointing to a custom domain name.

Once hosting has been set up, we start building out the site. We create a custom content type, configure layout builder, add media functionality, create a bunch of custom view pages and much more.

I’ve broken out the video into sections below with timecodes and extra resources. For the content below to make any sense, you should follow along by watching the video.

How to Add Noindex to Pages using Metatag in Drupal

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Often on a website, you want to control what pages are displayed in search results. You can do this by adding the noindex meta tag to pages. I’m not going to cover why you would want some pages not to appear in the search results; however, I want to show you how to implement it in Drupal.

This tutorial will teach you how to use the Metatag module to control the noindex meta tag.

If you want to learn more about Metatag, read our tutorial “Getting Started with Metatag in Drupal”.

Add Widgets to Sidebar using Field Group in Drupal

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The Field Group module allows you to organize field widgets and formatters. You can group them into tabs, fieldsets and so on. It’s a great way to organize your content form, especially if you have a lot of widgets.

Want to learn more about Field Group: How to Customize Content Forms and Pages Using Field Group in Drupal

This tutorial will teach you how to add field widgets to the right sidebar on the content edit form.

If you create an article, you’ll notice that custom field widgets appear on the left. But on the right-hand side, you can control things such as menus, comments, URL alias and more.

We’ll use Field Group to add Tags and Image field on the Article content type into its own section on the right-hand side.

Customize Entity Reference Autocomplete Results using Views in Drupal

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An entity reference field allows you to create relationships between other entities such as pages and articles. The field comes with an autocomplete widget that will enable you to search and select other entities.

When you search for items to reference, just the titles are returned and in most cases, this is enough. But when you have lots of content with similar titles using the autocomplete widget becomes problematic because it’ll return similar results.

We can customize what is returned in the autocomplete widget using the Views module. No extra modules are required.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Views to change the autocomplete results.

Add Preview Page to Forms using Webform in Drupal

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When you create a form using the Webform module, you may need a “preview” step. This is a page or step which allows the user who’s submitting the form to preview what’s being submitted.

If they see a mistake, they can go back to the form and fix the error. Once the form has been filled out and previewed then, it can be submitted.

Webform allows you to quickly create a preview step in any form, and in this tutorial, you’ll learn how to implement it.

How to Host and Deploy Drupal Sites using Cloudways

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Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting provider which allows you to host and deploy Drupal sites on popular cloud platforms. They don’t host your site, instead you choose a cloud provider, i.e., DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS and so on.

The benefit of using Cloudways is that you can start on a cheap server and upgrade as needed. You get the same features if you spend $20 or $100 per month. As your site gets more traffic you can scale up to a faster server.

The server provisioning and application management is all done via the Cloudways platform. For example, if you use DigitalOcean, you won’t have to create a separate account to manage the server. You can do everything via Cloudways platform.

The servers come configured with PHP, Apache, MariaDB, Varnish, Redis (uninstalled by default) and so on.

Once provisioned you’ll be able to host an unlimited number of Drupal sites on a single server. You’ll need to make sure your server has enough resources, i.e., RAM and CPU.

Other hosting platforms charge per site and traffic. Cloudways only charger per server and you can install as many websites as the server and bandwidth can handle.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to install and deploy a Drupal site on Cloudways.

We’ll cover how to install and run Drupal in two ways:

  • How to manually install Drupal via SSH
  • How to Deploy Drupal using GitHub

Cloudways doesn’t have a one-click install for Drupal. You will need to be comfortable with Composer and using SSH to get into a server. If you want to deploy your Drupal site via Git then you’ll need to be comfortable using GitHub.

Control which Roles can be Assigned in Drupal using Role Delegation

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The roles and permissions system in Drupal is powerful, but it can be tricky to configure correctly. Some permissions give a role too much privileged access where others aren’t granular enough.

An excellent example of this is if you need to create a role to manage user accounts.

Drupal comes with the permission “Administer users” which lets you create user accounts, only give this permission to trusted users.

The above mention permission allows you to create user accounts but you can’t assign them roles without “Administer roles and permissions”. But this permission (“Administer roles and permissions”), will enable you to assign any roles, including the default Administrator role.

Drupal Live Site Build (Part 3) – Create Bootstrap Grid using Views and Display Related Content

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In the show notes below, I outline what we implement in part 3 of the Drupal live site build. We’ll create a new content type called Portfolio which will have three fields, Body, Featured (media field) and a Portfolio category field.

Then we create a “Related project” block which will display other portfolio items which are related through the category field.

We use the Views module to create the block.

And then we create a listing page which displays the portfolio items as Bootstrap Card components in a grid layout.

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